Laurie Anderson in the air with Amelia Earhart

Performance artist, composer, and violinist Laurie Anderson once told The Music Show that she sometimes starts off thinking something is an opera, and it ends up being a potato print. Her latest album, Amelia, began life as a much longer orchestral piece that “didn’t work at all”, but at least it avoided the fate of becoming a potato print. It’s a portrait of Amelia Earhart and a sprawling, atmospheric imagining of her last flight. Laurie returns to The Music Show, with frequent contributions from her dog Willie, to talk to Andy about technology, identifying as an “artist”, and the “thrill” of her 1981 single O Superman finding a new audience with kids on TikTok. 

Finnish-Australian composer and cellist Simon Svoboda has bunkered down and used the darkest, coldest time of year in Finland to write suite of music KAAMOS. Each piece is inspired by a different element of winter (like mist, frost, smoke, light) and blends his cello with his soaring falsetto. He speaks to Andrew Ford about the healthy state of music in Scandinavia and the complexities of writing minimalist music.