Nearly twenty-five years after she first premiered a version of it live, Laurie Anderson has recorded her ode to pilot Amelia Earhart’s final flight. Amelia plays out like a single, continuous piece, though it is chopped up into twenty-two brief chapters. In this whirlwind of storytelling, Anderson wrangles the joy of discovery and achievement in a balance with the foreboding of an ending we already know.
String arrangements are the primary medium of Amelia, on a spectrum from Anderson’s solo viola to a string trio to the Czech orchestra Filharmonie Brno. This continuously swelling and contracting palette is a perfect match to her descriptions of distant rolling seas and hills below. Field recordings, especially small engine plane motors and radio whines, provide accents to these pastoral images. The orchestral tracks are expansive, even when – as on the brief, plaintive track ‘The Badlands’ – they are set in sharp relief against Anderson’s deliberate speaking voice.
Much of Anderson’s vocals are spoken word and are frequently more sing-song than actual singing. While she does bring in some limited, subtle effects for her vocals, far greater dimension comes instead from Anohni, who provides backing vocals on several tracks and whose rich voice envelops Anderson’s like soft clouds. In the climatic final act, it’s Anohni’s voice that pushes against the building noise and then fades out.
Despite the inevitable ending, Amelia is an unexpectedly soothing record. This is largely down to Anderson having a calm, meditative quality to her voice that holds steady whether the arrangement is minimalist or intense. But much of the relaxing quality of the album is also related to Anderson’s ability to look at a figure frequently only cast in tragedy and mystery as a whole person.
At one point, Anderson includes a clip of Earhart speaking. The aviator reflects: “This modern world of science and invention is of a particular interest to women, for the lives of women have been more affected by its new horizons…” With that inclusion, Anderson not only reminds us of the person behind the myth but allows Earhart to literally have her own voice in the story.
Amelia Earhart has continued to be an object of fascination decades after her disappearance, but in Anderson’s version of the story, she doesn’t treat Earhart as an object at all. Though we know the narrative will end with Earhart’s disappearance, Anderson’s focus up to that point is on the woman who set off on that flight, what motivated Earhart to fly in the first place, and the wonder of what she saw around her.
