Let X=X (Live) Laurie Anderson & Sexmob

• 1 From the Air (Live) 05:44
• 2 Good Evening (Live) 03:26
• 3 Cloud (Live) 00:26
• 4 Let X=X (Live) 04:16
• 5 It Tango (Live) 02:54
• 6 Drum Solo (Live) 00:41
• 7 Teachers (Live) 03:58
• 8 Story to No One (Live) 03:46
• 9 Gravity's Angel (Live) 05:52
• 10 Ramon (Live) 03:31
• 11 New Angels (Live) 02:19
• 12 Walk the Dog (Live) 08:21
• 13 Looking at the Moon (Live) 02:22
• 14 Church of Panic (Live) 03:35
• 15 Dog Show (Live) 01:28
• 16 Junior Dad (Live) 07:45
• 17 O Superman (Live) 09:09
• 18 The Lake (Live) 04:15
• 19 Swimming (Live) 03:51
• 20 It's Not the Bullet that Kills You (Live) 03:08
• 21 Only an Expert (Live) 07:25
• 22 What Are Days For? (Live) 04:50
• 23 How to Feel Sad Without Being Sad (Live) 01:18
• Total Runtime 01:34:20

Info for Let X=X (Live)

Nonesuch Records releases Let X=X, by Laurie Anderson with Sexmob, on May 8, 2026.

This triple-album set was recorded live during a 2023 tour by Anderson and the jazz band Sexmob—Steven Bernstein on brass, Kenny Wollesen on drums and percussion, Douglas Wieselman on winds and guitar, Briggan Krauss on saxophone and guitar, and Tony Scherr on bass. Its cover and interior packaging feature paintings by Anderson. The album features 23 songs, including many favorites from throughout Anderson’s career, performed in new arrangements—plus one by Lou Reed and Metallica, “Junior Dad.” Nonesuch Store orders include an exclusive print autographed by Laurie Anderson, while they last.

The New York Times said Anderson and Sexmob’s concert at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) “wasn’t a historical recreation of past recordings; Sexmob’s sound is a beefier one than on Anderson’s albums. With musicians who can double on electric guitar and bass clarinet, its members offered a rich range of textural variation throughout the evening.”

Laurie Anderson is one of America’s most renowned—and daring—creative pioneers. Her work, which encompasses music, visual art, poetry, film, and photography, has challenged and delighted audiences around the world for more than forty years. In a recent 60 Minutes profile, Anderson Cooper said she “is a pioneer of the avant-garde, but ... that doesn’t begin to describe what she creates ... It’s experienced by audiences who come to see her perform: singing, telling stories, and playing strange violins of her own invention ... she [blends] the beautiful and the bizarre, challenging audiences with homilies and humor. She blurs boundaries across music, theater, dance, and film.” The Washington Post has said she “doesn’t just tell stories; she draws out every word with a kind of physical pleasure, tasting its flavor as she probes the everyday mysteries of life.”

Anderson released her first album with Nonesuch Records, the critically lauded Life on a String, in 2001. Her subsequent releases on the label include Live in New York (2002); Homeland (2010); the soundtrack to her acclaimed film Heart of a Dog (2015); and her Grammy-winning collaboration with Kronos Quartet, Landfall (2018). Nonesuch released a re-mastered edition of Big Science in 2007 for its twenty-fifth anniversary, followed by a vinyl LP re-issue in 2021; the album includes Anderson’s beloved, surprise hit, song, “O Superman,” which also is featured on Let X=X. Her recent Nonesuch release was 2024’s Amelia, about renowned female aviator Amelia Earhart’s tragic last flight.

Anderson’s virtual-reality film La Camera Insabbiata, with Hsin-Chien Huang, won the 2017 Venice Film Festival Award for Best VR Experience, and, in 2018, Skira Rizzoli published her book All the Things I Lost in the Flood: Essays on Pictures, Language and Code, the most comprehensive collection of her artwork to date. Recent exhibitions and installations of Anderson’s work include Habeas Corpus at New York’s Park Avenue Armory; her largest exhibition to date, The Weather, at Washington, DC’s Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum of Modern Art; and Looking into a Mirror Sideways at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, which was her largest European exhibition to date.

Laurie Anderson was awarded the 2024 Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication, along with Christopher Nolan and David Attenborough, and the International Astronomical Union named a minor planet in her honor: Asteroid 270588, Laurieanderson. That same year, she was awarded a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

Laurie Anderson, vocals
Sexmob:
Steven Bernstein, slide trumpet
Briggan Krauss, saxophone
Kenny Wollesen, percussion
Douglas Wieselman, clarinet, guitar
Tony Scherr, bass

Laurie Anderson
is one of America’s most reknowned – and daring – creative pioneers. Known primarily for her multimedia presentations, she has cast herself in roles as varied as visual artist, composer, poet, photographer, filmmaker, electronics whiz, vocalist, and instrumentalist.

O Superman launched Anderson’s recording career in 1980, rising to number two on the British pop charts and subsequently appearing on Big Science, the first of her seven albums on the Warner Brothers label. Other record releases include Mister Heartbreak, United States Live, Strange Angels, Bright Red, and the soundtrack to her feature film Home of the Brave. A deluxe box set of her Warner Brothers output, Talk Normal, was released in the fall of 2000 on Rhino/Warner Archives. In 2001, Anderson released her first record for Nonesuch Records, entitled Life on a String, which was followed by Live in New York, recorded at Town Hall in New York City in September 2001, and released in May 2002.

Anderson has toured the United States and internationally numerous times with shows ranging from simple spoken word performances to elaborate multimedia events. Major works include United States I-V (1983), Empty Places (1990), The Nerve Bible (1995), and Songs and Stories for Moby Dick, a multimedia stage performance based on the novel by Herman Melville. Songs and Stories for Moby Dick toured internationally throughout 1999 and 2000. In the fall of 2001, Anderson toured the United States and Europe with a band, performing music from Life on a String. She has also presented many solo works, including Happiness, which premiered in 2001 and toured internationally through Spring 2003.

Anderson has published six books. Text from Anderson’s solo performances appears in the book Extreme Exposure, edited by Jo Bonney. Anderson has also written the entry for New York for the Encyclopedia Brittanica and in 2006, Edition 7L published Anderson’s book of dream drawings entitled “Night Life”.

Laurie Anderson’s visual work has been presented in major museums throughout the United States and Europe. In 2003, The Musée Art Contemporain of Lyon in France produced a touring retrospective of her work, entitled The Record of the Time: Sound in the Work of Laurie Anderson. This retrospective included installation, audio, instruments, video and art objects and spans Anderson’s career from the 1970’s to her most current works. It continued to tour internationally from 2003 to 2005. As a visual artist, Anderson is represented by the Sean Kelly Gallery in New York where her exhibition, The Waters Reglitterized, opened in September 2005. In 2008, the Museum of Modern Art acquired her “Self-Playing Violin” which was featured in the “Making Music” exhibition in Fall 2008.

As a composer, Anderson has contributed music to films by Wim Wenders and Jonathan Demme; dance pieces by Bill T. Jones, Trisha Brown, Molissa Fenley, and a score for Robert LePage’s theater production, Far Side of the Moon. She has created pieces for National Public Radio, The BBC, and Expo ‘92 in Seville. In 1997 she curated the two-week Meltdown Festival at Royal Festival Hall in London. Her most recent orchestra work Songs for Amelia Earhart. premiered at Carnegie Hall in February 2000 performed by the American Composers Orchestra and later toured Europe with the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra conducted by Dennis Russell Davies. The piece was performed as part of the Groningen Festival honoring Laurie Anderson in Fall 2008 with the Noord Nederlands Orkest.

Recognized worldwide as a groundbreaking leader in the use of technology in the arts, Anderson collaborated with Interval Research Corporation, a research and development laboratory founded by Paul Allen and David Liddle, in the exploration of new creative tools, including the Talking Stick. She created the introduction sequence for the first segment of the PBS special Art 21, a series about Art in the 21st century. Her awards include the 2001 Tenco Prize for Songwriting in San

Remo, Italy and the 2001 Deutsche Schallplatten prize for Life On A String as well as grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She recently collaborated with Bran Ferren of Applied Minds, Inc to create an artwork that was displayed in “The Third Mind” exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in Winter 2009.

In 2002, Anderson was appointed the first artist-in-residence of NASA which culminated in her 2004 touring solo performance “The End of the Moon”. Recent projects include a series of audio-visual installations and a high definition film, “Hidden Inside Mountains”, created for World Expo 2005 in Aichi, Japan. In 2007 she received the prestigious Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize for her outstanding contribution to the arts. In 2008 she completed a two-year worldwide tour of her performance piece, “Homeland”, which was released as an album on Nonesuch Records in June, 2010. Anderson’s solo performance “Delusion” debuted at the Vancouver Cultural Olympiad in February, 2010 and toured internationally throughout 2011. In 2010 a retrospective of her visual and installation work opened in Sao Paulo, Brazil and later traveled to Rio de Janeiro.

In 2011 her exhibition of all new work titled “Forty-Nine Days In the Bardo” opened at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia. That same year she was awarded with the Pratt Institute’s Honorary Legends Award. In January of 2012 Anderson was the artist-in-residence at the High Performance Rodeo in Calgary, Alberta where she developed her latest solo performance titled “Dirtday!” Her exhibition “Boat” curated by Vito Schnabel opened in May of 2012. She has recently finished residencies at both CAP in UCLA in Los Angeles and EMPAC in Troy New York. Her film Heart of a Dog was chosen as an official selection of the 2015 Venice and Toronto Film Festivals. In the same year, her exhibition Habeas Corpus opened at the Park Avenue Armory to wide critical acclaim and in 2016 she was the recipient of Yoko Ono’s Courage Award for the Arts for that project. Anderson lives in New York City.

This album contains no booklet.