Laurie Anderson Returns to Europe, Forty Years After Home of the Brave

Laurie Anderson takes a European tour this spring, four decades after Home of the Brave, her first concert film. The 1985 document captured a moment when Anderson’s art was bending toward something closer to pop. Two tracks were shaped with Nile Rodgers, and the stage set nudged her spoken word, electronics, and violin into sharper focus. The anniversary arrives as her catalogue gets a fresh look from a Guardian ranking, the timing pulling both retrospective and road dates into a single frame.

The ranking plots an unexpected path. It moves from a compilation track on John Giorno’s label — early voice manipulation and an almost country fiddle line — through a Cajun/reggae/art-rock hybrid about Chris Burden, and lands on the 2010s with “Only an Expert,” where a chorus crashes into a breakbeat critique of manufactured problems. Some stops, like the Kronos Quartet collaboration “Everything Is Floating,” are quieter. That piece, born after Hurricane Sandy flooded her archive, holds a strange calm. Anderson’s voice catalogs the loss of a lifetime’s work while the strings mirror the water’s slow retreat.

Strange Angels, the album where she took singing lessons, still divides listeners. But the ranking makes a case for its wry clarity. “Beautiful Red Dress,” a song about the gender pay gap, never threatened chart supremacy in 1989, hook or not. It remains a reminder that Anderson’s approachability is always on her own terms.

The European dates, details still unfolding, arrive at a useful moment. Forty years on, the tendency to frame Anderson as strictly experimental misses how consistently her work grips the ear.