Laurie Anderson

Biography

Laura Phillips "Laurie" Anderson (born June 5, 1947) is an American avant-garde artist, musician and filmmaker whose work encompasses performance art, pop music, and multimedia projects. Initially trained in violin and sculpting, Anderson pursued a variety of performance art projects in New York City during the 1970s, focusing particularly on language, technology, and visual imagery. She achieved unexpected commercial success when her song "O Superman×O Superman1981 · EPSpotify (search)YouTube Music (search)Tracklist · 2 tracksAO Superman8:21BWalk the Dog5:55" reached number two on the UK singles chart in 1981.
Anderson's debut studio album Big Science×Big Science19 April 1982 · Studio albumSpotify (search)YouTube Music (search)Tracklist · 8 tracksA1From the Air4:29A2Big Science6:14A3Sweaters2:18A4Walking & Falling2:10A5Born, Never Asked4:56B1O Superman (For Massenet)8:21B2Example #222:59B3Let X=X / It Tango6:52 was released in 1982 and has since been followed by a number of studio and live albums. She starred in and directed the 1986 concert film Home of the Brave. Anderson's creative output has also included theatrical and documentary works, voice acting, art installations, and a CD-ROM. She is a pioneer in electronic music and has invented several musical devices that she has used in her recordings and performance art shows.

Early life and education

Laura Phillips Anderson was born in Chicago on June 5, 1947, and grew up in the nearby suburb Glen Ellyn, Illinois, one of eight children born to Mary Louise (née Rowland) and Arthur T. Anderson. Growing up, she spent weekends studying painting at the Art Institute of Chicago and played with the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestras.
She graduated from Glenbard West High School. She attended Mills College in California, and, after moving to New York in 1966, graduated in 1969 from Barnard College with a B.A. magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, studying art history. In 1972, she obtained an M.F.A. in sculpture from Columbia University.
Her first performance-art piece — a symphony played on automobile horns — was performed in 1969. In 1970 she drew the underground comix Baloney Moccasins, which was published by George DiCaprio. In the early 1970s she worked as an art instructor and as an art critic for magazines such as Artforum, and illustrated children's books — the first of which was The Package (1971), a mystery story in pictures alone.

1970s

Anderson performed in New York during the 1970s. One of her most-cited performances, Duets on Ice, which she conducted in New York and other cities around the world, involved her playing the violin along with a recording while wearing ice skates with the blades frozen into a block of ice; the performance ended only when the ice had melted away. Two early pieces, "New York Social Life" and "Time to Go", are included in the 1977 compilation New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media, along with works by Pauline Oliveros and others. Two other pieces were included on Airwaves, a collection of audio pieces by various artists. She also recorded a lecture for Vision, a set of artist's lectures released by Crown Point Press as a set of six LPs.
Many of Anderson's earliest recordings remain unreleased or were issued only in limited quantities, such as her first single, "It's Not the Bullet that Kills You (It's the Hole)". That song, along with "New York Social Life" and about a dozen others, was originally recorded for use in an art installation that consisted of a jukebox that played the different Anderson compositions, at the Holly Solomon Gallery in New York City. Among the musicians on these early recordings are Peter Gordon on saxophone, Scott Johnson on guitar, Ken Deifik on harmonica, and Joe Kos on drums. Photographs and descriptions of many of these early performances were included in Anderson's retrospective book Stories from the Nerve Bible (1993).
During the late 1970s, Anderson made a number of additional recordings that were either released privately or included on compilations of avant-garde music, most notably releases by the Giorno Poetry Systems label run by New York poet John Giorno, an early intimate of Andy Warhol. In 1977, she was granted an artist-in-residence stay at the Cité internationale des Arts in Paris, France. In 1978, she performed at the Nova Convention, a major conference involving many counter-culture figures and rising avant-garde musical stars, including William S. Burroughs, Philip Glass, Frank Zappa, Timothy Leary, Malcolm Goldstein, John Cage, and Allen Ginsberg. She also worked with comedian Andy Kaufman in the late 1970s.

1980s

In 1980, Anderson was awarded an honorary doctorate from the San Francisco Art Institute. In 1982, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts — Film. In 1987, Anderson was awarded an honorary doctorate in the fine arts from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.
Anderson became widely known outside the art world in 1981 with the single "O Superman×O Superman1981 · EPSpotify (search)YouTube Music (search)Tracklist · 2 tracksAO Superman8:21BWalk the Dog5:55", originally released in 1980, in a limited quantity by B. George's One Ten Records, which ultimately reached number two on the UK singles chart. The sudden influx of orders from the UK (prompted partly by British station BBC Radio 1 playlisting the record) led to Anderson signing a seven-album recording contract with Warner Bros. Records, which re-released the single.
"O Superman" was part of a larger stage work, United States Live (1984), and was included on her debut studio album, Big Science×Big Science19 April 1982 · Studio albumSpotify (search)YouTube Music (search)Tracklist · 8 tracksA1From the Air4:29A2Big Science6:14A3Sweaters2:18A4Walking & Falling2:10A5Born, Never Asked4:56B1O Superman (For Massenet)8:21B2Example #222:59B3Let X=X / It Tango6:52 (1982). Before the release of Big Science, Anderson returned to Giorno Poetry Systems to record the collaboration album You're the Guy I Want to Share My Money With (1981); she recorded one side of the double-LP set, William S. Burroughs and John Giorno recorded a side each, and the fourth side featured a separate groove for each artist. This was followed by the back-to-back releases of her albums Mister Heartbreak×Mister Heartbreak1984 · Studio albumSpotify (search)YouTube Music (search)Tracklist · 7 tracks1Sharkey's Day7:482Langue d'amour6:183Gravity's Angel6:064Kokoku7:085Excellent Birds3:186Blue Lagoon7:097Sharkey's Night2:30 and United States Live×United States Live1984 · Album · LiveSpotify (search)YouTube Music (search) (both 1984), the latter of which was a five-LP (and, later, four-CD) recording of her two-evening stage show at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. She also appeared in "Good Morning, Mr. Orwell", a TV special produced by Nam June Paik broadcast on New Year's Day 1984.

Anderson next starred in and directed the 1986 concert film Home of the Brave and also composed the soundtracks for the Spalding Gray films Swimming to Cambodia (1987) and Monster in a Box (1992). During this time, she also contributed music to Robert Wilson's Alcestis at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1987, she hosted the PBS series Alive from Off Center, after having produced the short film What You Mean We? for the series the year before. What You Mean We? introduced a new character played by Anderson: "The Clone", a digitally altered masculine counterpart to Anderson who "co-hosted" with her on Alive from Off Center. Elements of the Clone were later incorporated into the titular puppet of her later work Puppet Motel. In that year, she also appeared on Peter Gabriel's fifth studio album So, co-writing and performing on the song "Excellent Birds". (The first version of "Excellent Birds" had been released on Mister Heartbreak.)
Release of Anderson's first post-Home of the Brave album, 1989's Strange Angels×Strange Angels13 October 1989 · Studio albumSpotify (search)YouTube Music (search)Tracklist · 10 tracks1Strange Angels3:512Monkey’s Paw4:333Coolsville4:344Ramon5:035Babydoll3:386Beautiful Red Dress4:437The Day the Devil4:008The Dream Before3:039My Eyes5:2910Hiawatha6:53, was delayed for more than a year in order for Anderson to take singing lessons. The album had more singing than her previous work. The single "Babydoll" was a moderate hit on the Modern Rock Tracks chart in 1989.

1990s

In 1991, Anderson was a member of the jury at the 41st Berlin International Film Festival. Also in 1991, she appeared in The Human Face, a feature arts documentary directed by artist-filmmakers Nichola Bruce and Michael Coulson for BBC Television. Anderson was the presenter in this documentary on the history of the face in art and science. Her face was transformed using latex masks and digital special effects as she introduced ideas about the relationship between physiognomy and perception. Her varied career in the early 1990s included voice-acting in the animated film The Rugrats Movie (1998). In 1994, she created a CD-ROM titled Puppet Motel, which was followed by Bright Red, co-produced by Brian Eno, and another spoken-word album, The Ugly One with the Jewels (1995). This was followed by an appearance on the 1997 charity single "Perfect Day".
In 1996, Anderson performed with Diego Frenkel (La Portuária) and Aterciopelados for the AIDS benefit album Silencio=Muerte: Red Hot + Latin produced by the Red Hot Organization.
An interval of more than half a decade followed before her next album release. During this time, she wrote a supplemental article on the cultural character of New York City for the Encyclopædia Britannica and created multimedia presentations, including one inspired by Moby-Dick (Songs and Stories from Moby Dick, 1999–2000). One of the central themes in Anderson's work is the effects of technology on human relationships and communication.
Starting in the 1990s, Anderson and Lou Reed, whom she had met in 1992, collaborated on recordings together. Reed contributed to the tracks "In Our Sleep×In Our Sleep1995 · SingleSpotify (search)YouTube Music (search)Tracklist · 1 track1In Our Sleep2:32" from Anderson's Bright Red (1994), "One Beautiful Evening" from Anderson's Life on a String (2001), and "My Right Eye" and "Only an Expert×Only an Expert17 April 2010 · SingleSpotify (search)YouTube Music (search)Tracklist · 2 tracksAOnly an Expert7:26BPictures and Things8:07" from Anderson's Homeland (2010), which Reed also co-produced. Anderson contributed to the tracks "Call on Me" from Reed's collaborative project The Raven (2003), "Rouge" and "Rock Minuet" from Reed's Ecstasy (2000), and "Hang On to Your Emotions" from Reed's Set the Twilight Reeling (1996).
In late 1998, Artist Space, New York presented an exhibit of Anderson’s work from 1970s to 1980s, along with her 1990s work Whirlwind.

2000s

Life on a String appeared in 2001, by which time she signed a new recording contract with another Warner Music Group label, Nonesuch Records. Life on a String was a mixture of new works (including one song recalling the death of her father) and works from the Moby-Dick presentation. In 2001, she recorded the audiobook version of Don DeLillo's novella The Body Artist. Anderson went on tour performing a selection of her best-known musical pieces in 2001. One of these performances was recorded in New York City a week after the September 11 attacks, and included a performance of "O Superman×O Superman1981 · EPSpotify (search)YouTube Music (search)Tracklist · 2 tracksAO Superman8:21BWalk the Dog5:55". This concert was released in early 2002 as the double CD Live in New York.
In 2003, Anderson produced albums with French musicians La Jarry and Hector Zazou and also performed with them. Zazou's album Strong Currents (2003), which brought together well-known soloists, features her alongside Jane Birkin, Lori Carson and Irene Grandi, among others. She became NASA's first artist-in-residence in the same year, which inspired her performance piece The End of the Moon. In May 2004, she received an honorary doctorate from Columbia University. She was part of the team that created the opening ceremony for the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens and collaborated with choreographer Trisha Brown and filmmaker Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo on the multimedia project O Zlozony/O Composite for the Paris Opera Ballet which premiered at the Palais Garnier in Paris in December 2004. She mounted a succession of themed shows and composed a piece for Expo 2005 in Japan. In 2005, Anderson visited Russia's space program — the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre and mission control — with the Arts Catalyst and took part in the Arts Catalyst's Space Soon event at the Roundhouse to reflect on her experiences.

In 2005, her exhibition The Waters Reglitterized opened at the Sean Kelly Gallery in New York City. According to the press release by Sean Kelly, the work is a diary of dreams and their literal recreation as works of art. This work uses the language of dreams to investigate the dream itself. The resulting pieces include drawings, prints, and high-definition video. The installation ran until October 22, 2005.
In 2006, Anderson was awarded a Residency at the American Academy in Rome. She narrated Ric Burns' Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film, which was first televised in September 2006 as part of the PBS American Masters series. She contributed a song to Plague Songs, a collection of songs related to the 10 Biblical plagues. Anderson also performed in Came So Far for Beauty, the Leonard Cohen tribute event held at the Point Theatre in Dublin, Ireland, on October 4–5, 2006. In November 2006, she published a book of drawings based on her dreams, titled Night Life.
Material from Homeland was performed at small work-in-progress shows in New York throughout May 2007 supported by a four-piece band with lighting and video visuals mixed live by Willie Williams and Mark Coniglio, respectively. A European tour of the Homeland work in progress included performances on September 28–29, 2007, at the Olympia Theatre, Dublin; on October 17–19 at the Melbourne International Arts Festival; and in Russia at the Moscow Dom Muzyky concert hall on April 26, 2008. The work was performed in Toronto, Canada, on June 14, 2008, with husband Lou Reed, making the "Lost Art of Conversation" a duet with vocals and guitar. Anderson's Homeland Tour performed at several locations across the United States as well, such as at the Ferst Center for the Arts, Atlanta, Georgia; The Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York City; and Harris Theater for Music and Dance in Millennium Park, Chicago, Illinois, co-presented by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

2010s

In February 2010, Anderson premiered a new theatrical work, Delusion, at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Canada. This piece was commissioned by the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad and the Barbican Centre, London. Anderson was honored with the Women's Project Theater Woman of Achievement Award in March 2010. In May–June 2010, she and Reed curated the Vivid Live festival in Sydney. Her new studio album Homeland×Homeland21 June 2010 · Studio albumSpotify (search)YouTube Music (search)Tracklist · 14 tracks1Transitory Life6:522My Right Eye4:583Thinking of You4:124Strange Perfumes4:455Only an Expert7:266Falling3:207Another Day in America11:248Bodies in Motion7:109Dark Time in the Revolution5:1410The Lake5:3911The Beginning of Memory2:4512Flow2:1413Lost Art of Conversation3:5014Only an Expert (Tech Support Glitch mix)3:19 was released on June 22. She performed "Only an Expert×Only an Expert17 April 2010 · SingleSpotify (search)YouTube Music (search)Tracklist · 2 tracksAOnly an Expert7:26BPictures and Things8:07" on July 15, 2010, on the Late Show with David Letterman, and her song "Gravity's Angel" was featured on the Fox reality television dance competition show So You Think You Can Dance the same day. She appears as a guest musician on several tracks from experimental jazz musician Colin Stetson's studio album New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges (2011).
Anderson developed a theatrical work, "Another Day in America". The first public showings of this work-in-progress took place in Calgary in January 2012 as part of Theatre Junction Grand's 2011–12 season and One Yellow Rabbit's annual arts festival, the High Performance Rodeo. Anderson was named the Inaugural Distinguished Artist-In-Residence at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, in May 2012. In March 2013, an exhibition of Anderson's work entitled Laurie Anderson: Language of the Future, selected works 1971–2013 at the Samstag Museum was part of the Adelaide Festival of the Arts in Adelaide, South Australia. Anderson performed her Duets on Ice outside the Samstag on opening night.
Anderson received the Honorary Doctor of Arts from the Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture in 2013. In June/July 2013, Anderson performed "The Language of the Future" and guest curated at the River to River Festival in New York City. In November 2013, she was the featured Guest of Honor at the B3 Biennale of the Moving Image in Frankfurt, Germany. In 2018, Anderson contributed vocals to a re-recording of the David Bowie song "Shining Star (Makin' My Love)", originally from Bowie's seventeenth studio album Never Let Me Down (1987). She was asked to join the production by producer Mario J. McNulty, who knew that Anderson and Bowie had been friends.
On February 10, 2019, at the 61st Annual Grammy Awards in Los Angeles, Anderson and the Kronos Quartet's Landfall won the Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance. It was Anderson's first collaboration with the Kronos Quartet and her first Grammy Award, and the second for Kronos. The piece was inspired by her experience of Hurricane Sandy. Nonesuch Records said, "Landfall juxtaposes lush electronics and traditional strings by Kronos with Anderson's powerful descriptions of loss, from water-logged pianos to disappearing animal species to Dutch karaoke bars."

Chalkroom is a virtual reality work by Anderson and Taiwanese artist Hsin-Chien Huang in which the reader flies through an enormous structure made of words, drawings, and stories. To the Moon, a collaboration with Hsin-Chien Huang, premiered at the Manchester International Festival on July 12, 2019. A 15-minute virtual reality artwork, To the Moon lets audience members explore a moon that features donkey rides and rubbish from Earth in a non-narrative structure. Alongside, a film shows the development of the new work.

2020s

Anderson was appointed the 2021 Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University and presented a series of six lectures titled Spending the War Without You: Virtual Backgrounds over two semesters.
In 2021, Anderson created a show on the second floor of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., titled "The Weather" and described by The New York Times as "a sort of nonretrospective retrospective of one of America's major, and majorly confounding, modern artists".
In mid-2023, Laurie Anderson created "Looking into a Mirror Sideways", an exhibit that highlights various different styles of her art techniques. It opened at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden. Since opening, this artwork has been Anderson's biggest solo show in Europe.
While in Europe, Anderson teamed up with Sexmob, a New York jazz band. Sexmob and Anderson toured Europe where they performed multiple versions of her songs, but adding a twist to them all. This tour was seen as "an attempt at defying gravity, resisting the pull, [and] reverting the downward fall".
In 2024, Anderson withdrew from a guest professorship at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen, Germany, after university officials objected to her support of a "Letter Against Apartheid" organised by Palestinian artists, calling for "an immediate and unconditional cessation of Israeli violence against Palestinians".
In November 2024 Anderson staged United States V, a multimedia performance envisioned as a sequel to United States. The work was commissioned by Factory International and staged at their Aviva Studios venue in Manchester, England. It featured video appearances from Ai Weiwei as God and Anohni as an angel.
She is a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music.

Inventions

Anderson has invented several experimental musical instruments that she has used in her recordings and performances. In 1977, she created a tape-bow violin that uses recorded magnetic tape on the bow instead of horsehair and a magnetic tape head in the bridge. In the late 1990s, she collaborated with Interval Research to develop an instrument she called a "talking stick", a six-foot-long (1.8 m) baton-like MIDI controller that can access and replicate sounds.

Tape-bow violin

The tape-bow violin is an instrument created by Laurie Anderson in 1977. It uses recorded magnetic tape in place of the traditional horsehair in the bow, and a magnetic tape head in the bridge. Anderson has updated and modified this device over the years. She can be seen using a later generation of this device in her film Home of the Brave during the Late Show segment in which she manipulates a sentence recorded by William S. Burroughs. This version of the violin used MIDI-based audio samples, triggered by contact with the bow.

Talking stick

The talking stick is a six-foot-long baton-like MIDI controller. It was used in the Moby-Dick tour in 1999–2000. She described it in program notes as follows:

The Talking Stick is a new instrument that I designed in collaboration with a team from Interval Research and Bob Bielecki. It is a wireless instrument that can access and replicate any sound. It works on the principle of granular synthesis. This is the technique of breaking sound into tiny segments, called grains, and then playing them back in different ways. The computer rearranges the sound fragments into continuous strings or random clusters that are played back in overlapping sequences to create new textures. The grains are very short, a few hundredths of a second. Granular synthesis can sound smooth or choppy depending on the size of the grain and the rate at which they're played. The grains are like film frames. If you slow them down enough, you begin to hear them separately.

Voice filters

A recurring motif in Anderson's work is the use of an electric pitch-shifting voice filter that deepens her voice into a masculine register, a technique that Anderson has referred to as "audio drag". Anderson has long used the resulting character in her work as a "voice of authority" or conscience, although she later decided that the voice had lost much of its authority and instead began using the voice to provide historical or sociopolitical commentary, as it is used on "Another Day in America", a piece from her seventh studio album Homeland×Homeland21 June 2010 · Studio albumSpotify (search)YouTube Music (search)Tracklist · 14 tracks1Transitory Life6:522My Right Eye4:583Thinking of You4:124Strange Perfumes4:455Only an Expert7:266Falling3:207Another Day in America11:248Bodies in Motion7:109Dark Time in the Revolution5:1410The Lake5:3911The Beginning of Memory2:4512Flow2:1413Lost Art of Conversation3:5014Only an Expert (Tech Support Glitch mix)3:19 (2010).
For much of Anderson's career, the voice was nameless or called the Voice of Authority, although as early as 2009 it was dubbed Fenway Bergamot at Lou Reed's suggestion. The cover of Homeland depicts Anderson in character as Bergamot, with streaks of black makeup to give her a moustache and thick, masculine eyebrows.
In "The Cultural Ambassador", a piece on her second live album The Ugly One with the Jewels (1995), Anderson explained some of her perspective on the character:

(Anderson:) I was carrying a lot of electronics so I had to keep unpacking everything and plugging it in and demonstrating how it all worked, and I guess I did seem a little fishy — a lot of this stuff wakes up displaying LED program readouts that have names like Atom Smasher, and so it took a while to convince them that they weren't some kind of portable espionage system. So I've done quite a few of these sort of impromptu new music concerts for small groups of detectives and customs agents and I'd have to keep setting all this stuff up and they'd listen for a while and they'd say: So um, what's this? And I'd pull out something like(Bergamot:) this filter, and say, now this is what I like to think of as the voice of authority. And it would take me a while to tell them how I used it for songs that were, you know, about various forms of control, and they would say, now why would you want to talk like that? And I'd look around at the SWAT teams, and the undercover agents, and the dogs, and the radio in the corner, tuned to the Super Bowl coverage of the war. And I'd say, take a wild guess.

Personal life

Anderson moved to New York in 1966 and later moved to Tribeca. She met musician and songwriter Lou Reed in 1992, and was married to him from April 2008 until his death in 2013.
In October 2012, Hurricane Sandy destroyed archives documenting decades of Anderson's creative work, including photographs, performance props, audiovisual equipment, musical instruments, and other materials. This loss became the impetus for her book All the Things I Lost in the Flood (2018), where she reflects on her career and the ephemeral nature of art. Anderson's album Landfall×Landfall16 February 2018 · Studio albumSpotifyYouTube Music (search)Tracklist · 30 tracks1CNN Predicts a Monster Storm3:202Wind Whistles Through the Dark City1:593The Water Rises2:434Our Street Is a Black River1:205Galaxies1:076Darkness Falls1:567Dreams4:018Dreams Translated0:509The Dark Side1:1110Built You a Mountain2:1611The Electricity Goes out and We Move to a Hotel3:0412We Learn to Speak Yet Another Language3:0113Dawn of the World2:2214The Wind Lifted the Boats and Left Them on the Highway2:4015It Twisted the Street Signs1:1316Then It Receded0:5217The Nineteen Stars of Heaven2:4418Nothing Left but Their Names9:3819All the Extinct Animals2:5020Galaxies II0:5421Never What You Think It Will Be1:1122Thunder Continues in the Aftermath1:5523We Blame Each Other for Losing the Way0:4224Another Long Evening1:5725Riding Bicycles Through the Muddy Streets2:3726Helicopters Hang Over Downtown2:1627We Head Out1:5028Everything Is Floating1:5929Gongs and Bells Sing2:3330Old Motors and Helicopters2:52 was also inspired by Hurricane Sandy and won the Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance in 2019.
Anderson is a long-time student of Buddhism and meditation. She first learned meditation on a retreat with the Insight Meditation Society in 1977. She has since become a student of Tibetan Nepali teacher Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche.

Spoken word albums

The Ugly One with the Jewels (1995)
Heart of a Dog (Soundtrack) (2015) (US Soundtracks #18)

Live albums

United States Live (boxed set) (1984) US No. 192
Live in New York (2002)
Let X=X (with Sexmob) (2026)

Compilation albums

Talk Normal: The Laurie Anderson Anthology (2000)

Collaborations

Airwaves (1977 – One Ten Records); various artists compilation including three tracks by Anderson
You're the Guy I Want to Share My Money With with William S. Burroughs and John Giorno (1981 – Giorno Poetry Systems)
"This Is the Picture (Excellent Birds)" with Peter Gabriel (1986, So – Geffen / Charisma)
"Design for Living", with Nona Hendryx (1983), Nona, also with Gina Schock of the Go-Go's, Valerie Simpson of Ashford & Simpson, Tina Weymouth of Tom Tom Club and Talking Heads, Nancy Wilson of Heart, and former bandmate Patti LaBelle
"Diva" from Zoolook by Jean-Michel Jarre (1984 – Disques Dreyfus)
"Tightrope" and "Speak My Language" (1993; Faraway, So Close! Soundtrack – SBK Records / ERG)
A Chance Operation: The John Cage Tribute with text by John Cage (1993 – Koch International Classics)
"Enquanto Isso" with Marisa Monte (1994, Verde, anil, amarelo, cor de rosa e carvão – EMI-Odeon) (1994, Rose and Charcoal – Blue Note Records)
"Una hoja, una raiz (One Leaf, One Root)" with Diego Frenkel (La Portuária) and Aterciopelados (1996, Silencio=Muerte: Red Hot + Latin – H.O.L.A)
"Je me souviens" by Jean Michel Jarre (2000, Métamorphoses – Sony Music)
"Gentle Breeze" with Lou Reed (2004, Mary Had a Little Amp – a preschool education benefit CD – Epic)
"The Fifth Plague (the Death of Livestock)" (2006, Plague Songs – 4AD)
The Stone: Issue Three with John Zorn and Lou Reed (2008 – Tzadik)
"The Electrician" (2009, Music Inspired by the Film Scott Walker: 30 Century Man – Lakeshore)
Femina by John Zorn (2009 – Tzadik)
New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges by Colin Stetson (2011 – Constellation)
"Rely on Me" with Jean Michel Jarre (2015, Electronica 1: The Time Machine – Columbia)
Landfall (2018) (with Kronos Quartet) (US Classical Albums #1, BE #146, NL #186, PT #36)
Songs from the Bardo (2019) (with Tenzin Choegyal and Jesse Paris Smith) (US New Age Albums #1; US Independent Albums #50)
The Great Lakes Suite (2025), with Rheostatics

Singles

"O Superman×O Superman1981 · EPSpotify (search)YouTube Music (search)Tracklist · 2 tracksAO Superman8:21BWalk the Dog5:55" (1981) No. 28 AUS; No. 2 UK; BE (Vl) No. 19; IRL No. 11; NL No. 10; NZ No. 21
"Big Science×Big Science19 April 1982 · Studio albumSpotify (search)YouTube Music (search)Tracklist · 8 tracksA1From the Air4:29A2Big Science6:14A3Sweaters2:18A4Walking & Falling2:10A5Born, Never Asked4:56B1O Superman (For Massenet)8:21B2Example #222:59B3Let X=X / It Tango6:52" (1981)
"Sharkey's Day" (1984)
"Language Is a Virus" (1986) No. 96 AUS;
"Strange Angels×Strange Angels13 October 1989 · Studio albumSpotify (search)YouTube Music (search)Tracklist · 10 tracks1Strange Angels3:512Monkey’s Paw4:333Coolsville4:344Ramon5:035Babydoll3:386Beautiful Red Dress4:437The Day the Devil4:008The Dream Before3:039My Eyes5:2910Hiawatha6:53" (1989)
"Babydoll" (1989) No. 7 US Modern Rock Tracks
"Beautiful Red Dress×Beautiful Red Dress1990 · SingleSpotify (search)YouTube Music (search)Tracklist · 3 tracks1Beautiful Red Dress (video version)3:202Beautiful Red Dress (extended version)5:383The Day the Devil4:00" (1990)
"In Our Sleep×In Our Sleep1995 · SingleSpotify (search)YouTube Music (search)Tracklist · 1 track1In Our Sleep2:32" (1994)
"Big Science 2" (2007)
"Mambo and Bling×Mambo and Bling22 July 2008 · SingleSpotify (search)YouTube Music (search)Tracklist · 2 tracks1Mambo and Bling2Behind the Screen" (2008)
"Only an Expert×Only an Expert17 April 2010 · SingleSpotify (search)YouTube Music (search)Tracklist · 2 tracksAOnly an Expert7:26BPictures and Things8:07" (2010)
The single "Sharkey's Day" was for many years the theme song of basic cable channel Lifetime. Anderson also recorded a number of limited-release singles in the late 1970s (many issued from the Holly Soloman Gallery), songs from which were included on a number of compilations, including Giorno Poetry Systems' The Nova Convention and You're the Guy I Want to Share My Money With. Over the years she has performed on recordings by other musicians such as Peter Gabriel, Lou Reed, and Jean-Michel Jarre. She also contributed lyrics to the Philip Glass album Songs from Liquid Days, and contributed a spoken-word piece to a tribute album in honor of John Cage.

Digital media

Puppet Motel (Macintosh CD-ROM, 1995) – collaboration with Hsin-Chien Huang.

Legacy

In 2013, Dale Eisinger of Complex ranked United States as the third greatest work of performance art ever, with the writer arguing that Anderson is "able to ascertain just exactly the climate of life in the United States, without being so punctuated that it causes a standoff. Perhaps the zenith of this configuration was her multimedia performance, 'United States I – IV.' [...] [Anderson displays] her vast, incisive range of talents on the 'United States Live×United States Live1984 · Album · LiveSpotify (search)YouTube Music (search)' recordings."

Television

Bei Bio – musical guest on German TV show, 1984
The New Show – musical guest, 1984
Saturday Night Live – musical guest, 1986
Alive from Off Center – host, 1987
Space Ghost Coast to Coast – guest 1996
Late Show with David Letterman – guest 2010
PBS Newshour —guest October 4, 2024

Audiobooks

The Path to Tranquility by His Holiness the Dalai Lama – co-narrator, 1999
The Body Artist by Don DeLillo – sole narrator, 2001
Nothing in My Pockets – two-part sound diary recorded in 2003, orig. 2006 French radio broadcast, booklet with text and photography (Dis Voir, 2009) ISBN 978-2-914563-43-7 (also published in French)