THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Laurie Anderson’s Amelia is the 2024 Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award recipient’s first new album since 2018’s Grammy-winning Landfall. The record comprises 22 tracks about renowned female aviator Amelia Earhart’s tragic last flight. Anderson wrote the music and lyrics for this subjective narrative piece. On the album, she is joined by the Czech orchestra Filharmonie Brno, conducted by Dennis Russell Davies, and Anohni, Gabriel Cabezas, Rob Moose, Ryan Kelly, Martha Mooke, Marc Ribot, Tony Scherr, Nadia Sirota and Kenny Wollesen.
Earhart was a passionate pioneer of early aviation, achieving fame as the first woman to cross the Atlantic, in 1932. Five years later, she embarked on a flight around the world. Before she could complete the voyage, her plane disappeared without a trace; it has never been found. “The words used in Amelia are inspired by her pilot diaries, the telegrams she wrote to her husband, and my idea of what a woman flying around the world might think about,” Anderson says. First premiered at Carnegie Hall in 2000, the updated piece was recently performed across Europe.
Anderson is one of America’s most renowned and daring creative pioneers. Her work, which encompasses music, visual art, poetry, film, and photography, has challenged and delighted audiences around the world for more than 40 years. A recent 60 Minutes profile described her as “a pioneer of the avant-garde, but… that doesn’t begin to describe what she creates. Her work isn’t sold in galleries. It’s experienced by audiences who come to see her perform: singing, telling stories, and playing strange violins of her own invention… she blends the beautiful and the bizarre, challenging audiences with homilies and humor. She blurs boundaries across music, theater, dance, and film.” The Washington Post has said she “doesn’t just tell stories; she draws out every word with a kind of physical pleasure, tasting its flavor as she probes the everyday mysteries of life,” and the Guardian has called Anderson “one of the great popular artists and storytellers of our time.”
Anderson released her first album with Nonesuch Records in 2001, the critically lauded Life On A String. Her subsequent releases on the label include Live in New York (2002), Homeland (2010), the soundtrack to her own acclaimed film Heart Of A Dog (2015), and her Grammy-winning collaboration with Kronos Quartet, Landfall (2018). Additionally, Anderson’s virtual-reality film La Camera Insabbiata, with Hsin-Chien Huang, won the 2017 Venice Film Festival Award for Best VR Experience, and, in 2018, she published her book All the Things I Lost in the Flood: Essays on Pictures, Language and Code, the most comprehensive collection of her artwork to date.”
