Laurie Anderson’s First New Album in Five Years Is About Amelia Earhart

Laurie Anderson will return this summer with Amelia, her first new album in five years.

Out Aug. 30 via Nonesuch Records, Amelia was influenced by aviation legend Amelia Earhart, the first woman to cross the Atlantic who disappeared on her 1937 flight around the world. You can hear a first taste of the album, the meditative track “Road to Mandalay,” below.

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“The words used in Amelia are inspired by her pilot diaries, the telegrams she wrote to her husband, and my idea of what a woman flying around the world might think about,” Anderson said in a statement.

Amelia contains 22 tracks, and features contributions by Anohni, violinist-arranger Rob Moose, Gabriel Cabezas, Martha Mooke, Marc Ribot, and others, as well as the Czech orchestra Filharmonie Brno, conducted by Dennis Russell Davies.

Anderson’s last album was 2018’s Landfall. Earlier this year, she received a Lifetime Achievement Grammy. “I make a kind of music that doesn’t have a snappy name,” she said at the ceremony. “It’s called like ‘multimedia,’ or ‘art music,’ or the one I like the least, ‘experimental,’ which sounds like you’re making things in a lab that might explode. So it’s really an honor to be here with my honorees who really do know how to get a groove going as well as make beautiful, mind-bending music.”

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