Laurie Anderson Opts for a Creative Housecleaning

Imagine you’re driving across New Mexico when out in the middle of nowhere you come across a fish hatchery. You go in to see the facility, and there working at the spawning pool is Laurie Anderson. That’s right. Laurie Anderson. The spiky-haired New York multimedia performance artist.

It’s just the kind of what’s-wrong-with-this-picture story Anderson often tells in her high-tech pop performance pieces. But this was almost a true story.

“I was out in New Mexico recently and I realized it was the only place in the world I really felt comfortable,” Anderson said by phone recently from her New York digs.

“There was this gigantic sky, this 180-degree sky. And I passed this fish hatchery, and I smelled this smell I hadn’t smelled in years--kind of Canada and little rotten docks and coffee and my grandparents.

“I headed in there and realized it was just fish. And I followed the game warden around all day and he said, ‘There’s a job opening here.’ I said, ‘What do you need?’ He said, ‘A high school diploma.’ I said, ‘ I got that! ‘ And I almost signed on.”

But not quite. Anderson is still a member of the performance crowd. Her latest piece, “Empty Places,” will be presented at the Wiltern Theatre on Sunday through Wednesday and at San Diego’s Symphony Hall on Thursday, with a special Roxy show on Saturday previewing the run.

She’s still traveling in the same gadget-laden, audiovisual territory she’s occupied from her breakthrough 1982 debut single “O Superman” to her five-hour mid-’80s “United States of America” extravaganza. But the new show, like her latest album “Strange Angels,” reflects the changes in her outlook that nearly lead her to a fishy life.

The moment of truth came several years ago while she was working on her concert movie “Home of the Brave.” Approaching 40 (she’s now 42) and having achieved the oxymoron state of being an established avant-gardist (her Warner Bros. recording contract “runs into the 21st Century,” she says), Anderson found herself in a creative and personal rut.

“I guess I learned you should never take that many pictures of yourself,” she said. “Once, in the editing, we were on a freeze frame of a close-up of me and I thought I should shoot myself if I ever had to look at me again. After that I threw a lot of things out of my house and thought I should start over. It was quite a process.”

A creative housecleaning took place at the same time, as Anderson reevaluated both her own talents and her role in the art world.

“I got shamed into taking singing lessons,” she said, explaining how on “Strange Angels” she has moved away from her trademark sing-speak delivery--often with electronically altered voice--into a more melody-based song format.

“I was working on one song I’ve never released that sounded too much like something you’d hear on the radio,” she said.

“The backup singers had done their parts and I stepped to the mike to do the lead. It was a song I’d written myself so you’d think I’d have thought about this, but I started thinking, ‘I have no idea what to sing.’ I could either just talk like usual, or else learn a few things about singing. It’s not like I now think of myself as a singer, but it’s like I have a new instrument. It’s odd performing like this. Singing is a vulnerable thing to do. You have no buttons to push.”

Part of the inspiration for opening up to this vulnerability came from a chance encounter with German film director Wim Wenders while he was writing his 1988 movie “Wings of Desire,” a fantasy about an angel wishing to be human. That influence is reflected directly in the title and recurring references on Anderson’s new album, in which angels are welcome-but-mysterious house guests (and sometimes housecleaners).

“We spent some time in Berlin talking about angels,” she said. “Once they got into this record, I couldn’t get them out. They kept flapping into the songs.”

More significant, though, was another personal revelation.

“In the last couple of years I started thinking maybe I’m not an artist at all, but a thinly disguised moralist,” she said. “The art I really like are things that help me live my own life in a better way. I know that’s not an incredibly avant-garde thing to say . . . but I guess I’m more interested in that than the next logical move of the avant garde.

“I am on the other hand terrified of being preachy,” she continued, “though there is a song on the album that is an advice song, called ‘Ramon.’ And that was hard. I can barely run my own life, so why would I tell anyone else? But there are a couple things I wanted to say, simply, that if the problem is this, just do that. I have this reputation of being all technology, but there’s more that I want to show.”

That facet, Anderson says, is a focus of “Empty Places,” which was premiered in October at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

“Like a lot of people, I napped through the Reagan years,” she said. “Coming to and looking around is an amazing experience, and this work is trying to describe that, but in a much more personal way than in the past. . . . It’s a solo performance, which with me means there are eight other people involved, dancing and stuff, and big screen projection. But no musicians other than me.”

The Roxy show will be even more personal.

“That will be much more casual, more a talk with video, not all the big screens. I’m really looking forward to that . . . mostly because I want to talk about a few things that are a little harder to do in the full show. Like I’m interested in the obscenity law, and in clubs it’s a chance for a different kind of contact with people. . . . There’s some odd audience participation to it--not sing-along, though. We’ll see how it works.”

It’s about as close as we’re likely to see Anderson doing the kind of solo acoustic show a number of rockers have ventured recently.

“I keep thinking the next thing I’m going to do is going to be acoustic,” she said. “But it doesn’t work out like that. I just love gadgets. I think, ‘I’ll keep it simple this time,’ but then, ‘Oh! This makes it more simple to use this gadget.’ Maybe I’ll go acoustic someday. I just kind of make this up as I go along anyway.”