Laurie Anderson – AmeliaNonesuch
“Here come the planes,” intoned Laurie Anderson on “O Superman,” the lead single from her debut album, 1982’s Big Science. Now, 42 years after her narrator witnessed the coming of American aircraft, Anderson returns to the skies with Amelia, which pays tribute to the first woman to fly alone across the Atlantic Ocean.
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“It was the sound of the motor I remember the most,” Anderson claims at the beginning of Amelia, an interesting symmetry with “O Superman.” Over the course of 22 tracks, she relates the story of Amelia Earhart’s tragic 1937 attempt to circle the globe. The album plays like an avant-garde history lesson that begins with Earhart taking off from Oakland, charting her voyage east until she vanishes on July 2, 1937, after departing Lae, New Guinea.
Backed by the Czech orchestra Filharmonie Brno and featuring guests such as Anohni, Marc Ribot, and Rob Moose, Amelia veers from serenity to ominous chaos as the story unspools. Told in a series of imagined entries derived from Earhart’s diaries and telegrams—as well as the musician’s own imaginings—Anderson recites the story in her typical even tone, the terror and the magnificence of Earhart’s journey baked into the narration. Anderson shows us wonder as Earhart touches down in Africa, exhaustion as she reaches Indonesia, and trepidation when she departs New Guinea on her final flight.
Most heartbreaking is “Flying at Night,” an interlude that comes halfway through the record. Here, Anderson imagines Earhart as a young girl, watching daredevil pilots at the airfield and realizing it was then that she wanted to fly. Like many historical figures, Earhart is just a name in a book to many of us. On Amelia, Anderson resurrects this courageous woman and gives her breath, heart, and soul. It is impossible to hear this aerial ballet and walk away unaffected. – GRADE: B+
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