One day I picked up a CD. I did not know it then, but it was haunted. The cover is a luminous greyscale and features an enigmatic character in the centre, dressed and poised as though she has suddenly stepped through the projection screen of a 1950s science fiction B-Movie, arms outstretched in a gesture of pacification to quell the screams of a doubtless terrified audience. Or perhaps she is the interstellar flight attendant of a defective spaceship, reassuring her futuristic passengers that, though they will all shortly perish as they unavoidably plunge into a red-hot radioactive sun, that any commotion would be entirely futile and they should continue to enjoy their cocktails as the scheduled dinner service is now, regrettably, indefinitely postponed. How could you not want to listen to this album?

The CD was printed with the words: “BIG SCIENCE” “LAURIE ANDERSON” in block capitals. I was hooked by the music instantly – seemingly simple and yet utterly compelling, just like the cover. Anderson’s voice is sometimes processed with an Eventide Harmoniser, rendering it robotic and authoritative (From The Air), sometimes unbridled and expressive (Example #22). Sometimes she speaks, sometimes she sings, sometimes she does both. And the music itself is so eclectic. Influences of Celtic, Afro-cuban, and Native American folk traditions form unexpected bonds with American Minimalism and Musique Concrète in Anderson’s centrifuge.

The track that struck me most, and apparently many before me, was O Superman (For Massenet). It is the most minimal track on the album, and it holds ghostly beauty, poignancy, and threat in delicate balance. The idea of doing a version of this composition has haunted me since I first heard it in 2018, but it seemed impossible. The original is so distinctive, and so uniquely wedded to Anderson’s voice. What to do with it? It is so minimal and intimate; stripping it back didn’t seem like a viable option. To go big would destroy the intimacy. And to make a facsimile copy with my own voice seemed redundant. So I didn’t do it.

2023. The world is quite different to 2018 – in some ways better, in others coming apart at the seams. As I watched Russian forces invade Ukraine from the comfort of my TV screen, a phrase flashed across my mind: “here come the planes”. Seemingly a banal set of words but increasingly portentous with context. One day they mean nothing, the next: everything. For those of us watching horrors unfold from a distance – though we empathise with the suffering and endurance of our fellow humans – we smugly think they hold little threat. The louder those engines become, however, and they signal a call to action – to shelter, to fight. The disembodied voice in O Superman warns the mother that she’d “better get ready, ready to go”, but even if she gets to safety there is still a price to be paid: “you can come as you are, you can pay as you go”. War costs us all, and peace is precarious.

With this version I have tried to approach what I perceive as being the meaning of the song, and to reflect this in my choices. Nothing will touch the original, but I hope that I have at least done something different here. The ghost of O Superman had never left me, but continued to lurk in the recesses of my mind. I decided that I might as well attempt an exorcism.

O Superman will be released on all streaming services on Friday 1st December, 2023. PRE-SAVE by clicking HERE.