Talk about a genius dying young, but still living… How could someone who made “United States”, “Oh superman” and “Sharky’s day” wind up as she did…
do you share my frustration?
regards
FML
Did something happen to her that I don’t know about, or are you just saying that her creative output has evolved in directions that you don’t care for?
what out put? sure she had a few albulms after states, but (to be cynical) what has she done lately that matches her early brilliance? (I have all her stuff, by the way and would love to meet her)…
FML
Well, she’s a performance artist, not just a musician. I understand that she’s been doing mostly performance pieces and installations in recent years. I haven’t seen any of it, so I can’t judge whether it lives up to her “early brilliance”–by which you mean her brief career as a hit recording artist, which took place when she was in her mid-30s. She is apparently preparing a new work called Homeland for CD next year.
Or the smartass answer: What happened to her? Lou Reed happened to her.
A friend recently told me that in real life she talks just like she does on the records.
I saw her on her Strange Angels tour and then a year or so ago when she came through on tour again. I was really looking forward to her last tour, since she’d spent a year as an Artist in Residence at NASA. Her Strange Angels performance was absolutely brilliant, a masterful combination of music and spoken word and performance art. Her latest one? Enjoyable, but there really didn’t seem to be much of a point to the whole thing. I kind of got the feeling that Laurie needed some money, grabbed various pieces she’d been working on, slapped them all together and went on the road. Maybe her chewing on Lou Reed hasn’t been the good combination I was expecting (though he worked well on her Bright Red album).
I love everything she’s done and would also like to meet her. I started listening/watching (man, wonder where those VHS tapes got to? I need to find that…) around 1987… I’ve seen her in concert once, back in the mid '90s… it was just her on stage, very minimalistic… but I loved it.
Good to know she’s working on something for CD release, I can’t wait!
…wasn’t that the receptionist from WKRP in Cincinnati?