Laurie Anderson with SexMob - Let X=X (Live) (Nonesuch Records, 2026)

By Richard Blute 

“When you meet a man who is broken, pick him up and carry him. When you meet a woman who’s broken, put her all into your arms. Cause we don’t know where we come from … we don’t know where we are.”

-Laurie Anderson

Back in college in the early 80’s, my musical tastes careened wildly between the unchecked rage of Dead Kennedys and Black Flag and the deep melancholy of The Cure and Joy Division. (There was an occasional detour to the land of the Talking Heads.) Then my friends and I discovered Laurie Anderson’s Big Science . And everything changed. I think I was the one that found it and that was only because there was a song called Let X=X, which appealed to my math brain. Our first reaction was bewilderment. “What?? She no longer loves the color of my sweaters??!!? Huh??” But we quickly realized this was something new that we needed to absorb. It showed us that we could respond to all the grotesque absurdity of the world with something other than anger or sadness, that it could be met with surrealism and a sense of humor and that we could retain our humanity.

We thought about some of the lyrics. On the title track, there’s a lyric:

“I think we should put some mountains here.

Otherwise what are the characters going to fall off of?”

The song is all about how the oligarchs and huge corporations are reshaping the world to their will. They’re building shopping malls and freeways and new sports centres and drive-in banks. They’re reshaping everything for their own self-aggrandisement to the extent that we’re no more than characters in their play, and they even get to decide how we die. We realized this was the same sentiment that Jello Biafra was expressing in so many Dead Kennedys lyrics, just from an entirely different approach.

The music was unlike anything we had ever heard before, full of violins, saxophones, marimbas and organs. And was that a wolf? It was beautiful and then jarring at a moment’s notice. Laurie’s voice could sound quite soothing or, when she uses voice processing, terrifying.

A few years later, I discovered jazz, especially free jazz and it became an obsession which has lasted to this day. It eventually led me to The Free Jazz Collective. So when I discovered that Laurie was releasing a live album with a jazz band and an excellent one at that, I was extremely excited. The band is Sexmob, consisting of Steven Bernstein and Briggan Krauss on brass, Kenny Wollesen on drums, Douglas Wieselman on winds and guitar, and Tony Scherr on bass. They have an extensive discography which is well worth checking out. They like covering pop songs, and giving them an avant-garde jazz twist. I especially love Kenny Wolleson who I’ve seen perform many times, frequently in John Zorn projects.

The album, called Let X=X (Live), is full of the classics that every Laurie Anderson fan knows note for note and lyric for lyric, From The Air, O Superman, Let X=X, It Tango, Gravity’s Angel, Only An Expert , and on and on. But there’s new music to be found here as well. Church of Panic begins with a commentary on sadness and suicide and then turns on a dime and is funky as hell. There are lovely instrumental pieces like Looking At The Mo on. There’s an extremely funny (and at the same time sad) audience participation moment on Teachers which I won’t spoil. Junior Dad , from Lou Reed’s collaboration with Metallica, features Reed’s vocals with beautiful violin from Laurie.

There is quite a bit of sadness on this album at the state of the world and at all of the personal loss so many have suffered lately, but there is also an ember of hope to be found. It’s a hope that humanity might someday soon rediscover its compassion and decency.

It’s a sky-blue sky.