Photography by Tim Knox

Having just returned from Australia where, among other projects, she premiered a symphony for dogs at the Sydney Opera House, Anderson talked to PLANETº from her West Village home about oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, optimism in the age of Obama, and of course her Homeland.

Parts of Homeland were first written three years ago. Why did it take so long for the album to come out?
I decided I was gonna write a record on the road. There would be a long instrumental that I would talk about Karl Marx for half an hour — and that was called “Homeland”. Along the way I would write these songs and eventually I would have three songs or something and I thought I would go into the studio and record it. Then the air went out of that whole project. The time and money ran out and I was left by myself going “Oh, no!” So what I did was use very sharp tools to cut up the live shows we had done and put them together into what I thought could be music. But it was like the whole building had exploded because there were 100,000 song files. And I was sitting there by myself staring at the computer. It really was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life by far…. [Homeland] is made up of 100,000 shattered pieces of sound. From different parts of the world, like a viola line from Sweden, a guitar line a year before from Mexico mixed together. I almost truly lost my mind doing this project. Really crazy way to make a record.