The one song Laurie Anderson couldn’t live without: “A thank you for everything life gives you”
Some people strive for a hit single throughout their careers without ever achieving one. Others luck into one by complete accident. The likes of Thomas Dolby, Devo and Beck would have never guessed they’d have chart-colonising, enduring hits the way they have, but they, at the very least, were pop musicians looking to have a career playing pop music. One of the biggest, most unmistakable hits of the 1980s came from someone with barely any interest in a career in popular music and who’d only worked in performance art and avant-garde music beforehand. That artist was Laurie Anderson.
Born in Chicago, Illinois, Anderson was an artist in the truest sense of the word. She graduated from Barnard College with a degree in art history and completed a master’s degree in sculpture from Columbia, no less. This led to a very successful career in performance art upon graduation. However, while these were musical performances, they were music in a technical sense.
Put it this way, the piece that made her name was Duets On Ice, where she played the violin while wearing a pair of ice skates frozen into a block of ice, the piece only ending when that ice melted. Clearly, this was an artist who seemed set to be filed alongside the avant-garde likes of Andy Warhol, John Cage and, eventually, Marina Abramović, rather than the UK singles chart her single ‘O Superman’ would reach in 1981. Held off the top spot by Dave Stewart and Barbara Gaskin’s cover of ‘It’s My Party’, of all things.
So, what inspires an artist like that? In an interview with Lauren Laverne on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, she talks about how she learned more about life from its hardships and grief than its high points, from her upbringing spent looking after eight siblings to losing her husband, Lou Reed, in 2013. There are several songs that contribute to this feeling, including one from Reed himself titled ‘Doin’ The Things That We Want To Do’ and the Magnetic Fields’ magnificent ‘Washington DC’.
However, the song that best sums up this feeling to her is ‘Gracias a la Vida’ (Thanks To Life) by Chilean singer-songwriter Violetta Parra. In her words, the song represents “how it’s an important moment -always- to be grateful.” The song is “a thank you for everything life gives you. Not just lovely things but the difficult things and horrible things it gives you too, and how you accept those.” The track is one of the most covered pieces of Chilean music in history, having had versions of it recorded by Joan Baez, Elis Regina, Kacey Musgraves and even Michael Buble in 2014.
Not only does Anderson list this as one of her favourite songs, but at the end of the episode, she names it as her favourite of the whole list. Tellingly, after going through so much, the reason that she names it as the one song she’d save from the waves that she couldn’t live without is because, in her words, “it’s a thank you song”.
