Laurie Anderson, Strange Angels

Album of the Week, July 11, 2026 Laurie Anderson might have started the 1980s as the definitive performance artist who also happened to sing, but her last album of the decade posited her as a singer who also happened to be a performance artist. Like Kate Bush’s The Sensual World, released just a week before Strange Angels, the album centered Laurie the person in an emotional space that she had never really occupied, showing her with fewer electronic tricks and more heartfelt songwriting in an album adorned by a stunningly intimate cover portrait. That cover was taken by famed photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, who near the beginning of his career had captured the great Patti Smith for her first album Horses. In the earlier photo he portrayed someone both confrontational and delicate in a way that played with gender conventions. Here, near the end of his life (Mapplethorpe died several months before the album’s release, of AIDS), he imbued Anderson, previously careful to present herself…