Birthday Girl: Strange Angel

Miss Laurie Anderson is 66 today, and while she might not be the cultural touchstone she was for much of the last two decades of the end of the last century, I'm sure she remains cooler than it's really possible to be.



The song is the title track from her album Strange Angels, which came out in 1989, but which for me is linked inextricably to a car trip from New York to San Francisco I took in January 1991. My companion was a friend who'd just graduated from cooking school, and we had made a vow to avoid superhighways and chain restaurants. We ate brilliantly, but moved slowly, and this song and the others from the same album instantly evoke night driving on country roads somewhere in the Midwest, the dark impenetrable and the eerie Anderson voice telling us enigmatic tales.

I remember the timing exactly, as it was during one of those night-drives that we learned of the invasion of Iraq (the first time we did it, of course); Operation Desert Storm to us was the unnerving feeling of making a wrong turn quite by accident into a National Guard center, suddenly transformed into life, lights and much bustling around, with a very definite "who goes there?" vibe toward a couple of city kids in a beat-up rental car.  We had been searching for yet another mom-and-pop diner, yet another perfect serving of local wonders - there was a  place outside Selmer, Tennessee where we spent three glorious hours one afternoon eating the house chicken and dumplings, a dish that defies description except to say that it was perfect.  In those days, children, you really had to search, pore through motel phonebooks, ask the best-fed looking person at the gas station, all kinds of subterfuge.  Today, I suppose there's a national Best Local Eats app that would plot the whole trip out for you.  But that way, we might not have found those chicken-and-biscuits, or had that Close Encounters encounter with our just-mobilized armed forces...

All these years later, it's not an album I listen to all that often, but whenever I do, it means something different, usually something more - pop music that has gone through a Shakespearean "sea change/into something rich and strange"...

Strange angels - singing just for me 
Old Stories - they're haunting me... 
Big changes are coming - Here they come
Here they come...