Big science and uncanny prescience: Laurie Anderson’s greatest songs – ranked!

20. Three Expediences (1978)

From a compilation released by William Burroughs associate John Giorno – fellow contributors included Patti Smith, Philip Glass and the Fugs – comes the fledgling sound of Laurie Anderson’s breakthrough Big Science: spoken word, electronically manipulated voices, violin. It doesn’t quite work, but it’s worth hearing, not least for the distinctly country-ish slant to her violin playing.

19. It’s Not the Bullet That Kills You, It’s the Hole (1977)

Trawling through Anderson’s pre-Big Science recordings gives you a fascinating glimpse both of New York’s downtown art scene in the late 70s and of Anderson trying on different styles. Here, an appealing, oddly poppy Cajun/reggae/art-rock hybrid with lyrics inspired by controversial performance artist Chris Burden.

18. Talk Normal (1986)

Anderson’s concert movie Home of the Brave moved her closer to conventional 80s art-pop (two tracks were collaborations with Nile Rodgers). But Talk Normal is the pick: squalls of avant guitar courtesy of Adrian Belew, and a great lyric that sees a passerby describe the singer as “another Laurie Anderson clone”.

17. The Lake (2015)

Heart of a Dog is an album perhaps only Anderson would have made: a film soundtrack that meditates on loss – not of her late husband, Lou Reed, but their pet dog Lolabelle – via spoken word and ambient music. The Lake is closer to a conventional song, being sweet, sad, fragile and fraught with terrifying childhood memories (the original version appeared on 2010’s Homeland).

16. Only an Expert (2010)

Reed’s guitar – in coruscating feedback-drenched mode – meets warp-speed, stop-start house music, topped with Anderson’s steely spoken-word observations on how big business dominates our lives by deliberately inventing problems only they can solve. Further embellished with a remarkably catchy chorus, Only an Expert is sharp, funny, smart and wildly enjoyable.

15. Beautiful Red Dress (1989)

Ironically, Anderson’s most approachable album – she even took singing lessons! – was her most divisive. Some fans thought Strange Angels a capitulation, although it’s hard to see how Beautiful Red Dress, a wry exploration of the gender pay gap, would have displaced the likes of Paula Abdul from the top of the charts, hooky chorus or not.

14. Langue d’Amour (1984)

If 1984’s Mister Heartbreak seemed poppier than Anderson’s previous work, such things are relative: she still sounded unlike anyone else. Langue d’Amour is a strange, spare but fabulously atmospheric assemblage of vocodered vocals and drifting synth tones, held together by a bassline faintly reminiscent of Suicide and a minimal rhythm.

13. Everything Is Floating (2018)

Hurricane Sandy and its aftermath haunted the song-cycle Landfall, a collaboration with Kronos Quartet. Everything Is Floating captures the immediate aftermath, the strings – ominous but oddly calm – mirroring Anderson’s thoughts on discovering her archive (“all the things I had carefully saved all my life”) has been destroyed by floodwater: “How beautiful, how magic … how catastrophic.”

12. The Puppet Motel (1994)

It was probably only a matter of time before Anderson collaborated with Brian Eno. The result, Bright Red, was a sharp left turn away from its pop-facing predecessor Strange Angels. The Puppet Motel rides a distinctly funky rhythm, but you wouldn’t necessarily dance to it; it’s too eerie and unsettling.

11. Thinking of You (2010)

The centrepiece of Anderson’s dense, complex Homeland – an exploration of post 9/11 Bush-era America – was the 11-minute monologue Another Day in America, but its most beautiful track is Thinking of You: twilit, understated, her multitracked voice set to strings that alternately drone and evoke chamber music.

10. Flying at Night (2024)

The best moments of Amelia, Anderson’s concept album about pioneering aviator Amelia Earhart, come when the songs delve into her internal world. Flying at Night is a case in point. The lyrics are ambiguous – “top speed into the darkness … I’m flying, I’m free” – and the becalmed but chilling music gets under your skin.

9. Born, Never Asked (1981)

Born, Never Asked has a deeply creepy power all of its own. Addictively melodic and decked out with marimba, there’s nevertheless something profoundly ominous about it, at odds with the ostensibly blithe lyrical conclusion: “You were born, and so you’re free, so happy birthday.” And Spiritualized’s 1995 cover is fantastic, transforming it into frazzled psychedelia.

8. Life on a String (2001)

Her first studio album in seven years, the spare, haunting Life on a String wasn’t without its out-there moments, but it most clearly underlined what a superb songwriter Anderson is. The closing title track is wonderful, a suitably meditative paean to living in the moment.

7. Language Is a Virus from Outer Space (1984)

Anderson’s live album United States is a mammoth undertaking – it’s nearly four-and-half hours long – but entirely worth it. If you want an obvious highlight, here it is. Warped synth pop meets Steve Reich’s Clapping Music, reworked in more streamlined style on Home of the Brave, but more fun here.

6. Poison (1994)

“The moon had gone out and the air was thin, it was the kind of night the cat would drag in … ” Poison is the dark heart of the Bright Red album, which twists Eno’s ambient synths into a chilly background fog, and romantic despair spills into something far more troubling, like a film noir rendered into sound.

5. Big Science (1981)

The coolly nonchalant tone of Anderson’s vocals on Big Science’s title track only serve to amplify its sense of dread regarding the future: “Every man for himself,” it keeps repeating. It sounds even more pertinent 45 years on, a song that might have been written to soundtrack the age of AI.

4. Excellent Birds (1984)

A song later reworked by collaborator Peter Gabriel as This Is the Picture (Excellent Birds) on his album So. Both versions are great and Gabriel’s is by far the better known, but the original edges it, creating a strange musical space that’s simultaneously humid and unsettling, and too wilfully disjointed to count as funky.

3. Slip Away (2001)

Anderson’s musical response to her father’s death is a masterpiece. It’s extraordinarily beautiful – waves of keyboards and violin swelling and washing – unflinching in its description of his final moments, moving in its thoughts on memory and loss and ultimately hopeful: “And after all the shocks the way the heart unlocks and we slip away.”

2. O Superman (For Massenet) (1981)

O Superman’s anomalous chart success in the UK is perhaps down to the longstanding British love of a novelty hit, but equally there’s no denying the weird hypnotic spell it casts over the listener, the extraordinary way something so minimal can shift so much in mood. It is comic, warm, mysterious and chilling.

1. Sharkey’s Day (1984)

If O Superman is the Anderson track everyone knows, Sharkey’s Day is the Anderson track everyone should know. It sounds like a beguiling, sunlit, beautiful pop song shot through a peculiar distorting lens. Hooks fly in all directions, its key changes unexpectedly, its arrangement is a set of curious fragments – ferociously distorted guitar, tablas, sweet back vocals, sampled horns, percussive voices – that keep moving, apparently at random, but somehow still work perfectly together. Curious side note: although Anderson claimed to be unaware of the Velvet Underground when she met Lou Reed, the refrain of “and the little girls sing” suggests she definitely knew Walk on the Wild Side.
Laurie Anderson’s European tour begins 26 May at Vatroslav Lisinski, Zagreb, Croatia, and continues until 13 July