Laurie Anderson: Mister Heartbreak
[February 14, 1984]
The cool queen of postmodernism lays out a dilemma. Is it art or is it pop music? What it is is a combination of delicate narrations and seductive song fragments over lushly embellished, electronic textural landscapes. Everything here is distinct but playing off everything else, creating one picture-world after another as Laurie talks you through it. Iconic, eccentric, brilliant and essential. Very few albums let you enter a completely different world. Fewer still have such excellent birds. (Fewer still have Bill Burroughs.)
Track Listing
All songs written by Laurie Anderson except as indicated.
Side One
1. "Sharkey’s Day" - "Sun’s coming up like a big bald head." Who is Mr. Sharkey? (He’s Mister Heartbreak.) Adrian Belew goes bananas.
2. "Langue d’Amour" - "Because she was a woman in love . . . She was a hot head."
3. "Gravity’s Angel" - I promise to read your book someday, Mr. Pynchon.
Side Two
4. "Kokoku" - Liquid Japanese soup. Step lightly through. "Thank you, lucky stars."
5. "Excellent Birds" (Anderson, Peter Gabriel) - Very impressed are Laurie and Peter. "Watch them fly." "There they go." This is the picture.
6. "Blue Lagoon" - "Always used to wonder who I’d bring to a desert island." Those are pearls. Suffer a sea change. Rich and strange. Call me Ishmael. (Wonder what Lake would do with this?)
7. "Sharkey’s Night" (Anderson, William Burroughs) - "You know I can see two shiny pictures of myself and there’s one in each of your eyes. And they’re doing everything I do. Every time I light a cigarette, they light up theirs. I take a drink, and I look in and they do too. It’s driving me crazy, it’s driving me nuts." God bless you, Bill. "Paging Mr. Sharkey, white courtesy telephone please."
Laurie Anderson – vocals, synclavier; violin (on tracks 1, 7); whistle (1); vocoder, electronic conches (2); bell (3); percussion (4)
Bill Laswell – bass (except 2)
Adrian Belew – guitar (1, 3, 6, 7)
Anton Fier – drums (1, 7); toms, wood block (4)
Additional personnel
Peter Gabriel – backing vocals (2, 3); vocals, synclavier and Linn drum (5)
David Van Tieghem – plywood, singing bowls, drums, Simmons (3); steel drum, gato, bamboo (6)
Daniel Ponce – percussion (1, 7)
November (Michelle Cobbs, Dolette McDonald, Brenda Nelson) – · backing vocals (1) Sang-Won Park – kayagum (4)
Connie Harvey and Janet Wright– Japanese chorus (4)
Phoebe Snow and Atsuko Yuma– backing vocals (4)
Nile Rodgers – guitar (5)
Bill Blaber – soprano saxophone (6)
William S. Burroughs – vocals (7)
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