Laurie Anderson knows making good art takes time. Over her five-decade career, the avant-garde artist and musician has applied her talents to voice acting, poetry, film-making, and multimedia, each project coming together in its own unique life cycle.

Still, even she finds it “crazy” that her latest project, an album titled Amelia, is 24 years in the making. Begun in 2000 as a commissioned piece for the American Composers Orchestra, the album was started and stopped three times during the creative process before the multi-disciplinary artist crafted a version she was satisfied with. What started as an overwhelming 80-piece orchestral work transformed into a pared-down soundscape performed by the Czech orchestra Filharmonie Brno—helmed by con- ductor Dennis Russell Davies—and bolstered by Anderson’s own ensemble, providing additional percussion and strings. Complementing the moving composition are the wordsmith’s poetic lyrics recounting the ambitious, ill-fated final flight of renowned 20th-century aviator Amelia Earhart.

Amelia puts you in the cockpit with Earhart, immersing you in the wonder and the monotony, the triumphs and the ultimate tragedy of her attempt to become the first female pilot to circumnavigate the globe in 1937. Anderson was drawn to Earhart not only because of her trailblazing accomplishments in the male-dominated world of aviation but also because the pilot was “the original blogger,” as Anderson puts it. Long before social media, Earhart kept the world up-to-the-minute on her adventures. “Every single stop on her flight, she would either use a telegram to talk about it, or she would phone it into the press, or she would scribble it in her pilot’s log. She was very conscious of letting everybody in the world know what she was doing, [and] she was very famous at the time,” Anderson notes.

This rich archive of newspaper clippings, a recorded speech, and photographs from the Smithsonian and elsewhere provided a fruitful foundation for the album’s 22 lush tracks, which also drew inspiration from Earhart’s diary entries and telegrams to her husband (and press agent), George P. Putnam. Filling in the gaps is the song-writer’s imagination of how the aviator may have felt as she surveyed the open skies, vast deserts, and glittering waves from her unique vantage point. “Where did I get this obsession/to hurl myself against the sky?” the singer, as Earhart, muses on B-side standout “Fly Into the Sun.” The narrative is delivered in Anderson’s signature spoken-word style, mesmerizing from the first line to the last.

Music has been an integral part of the 76-year-old artist’s storied career. The Illinois native first gained renown for her innovative performance art, including the famous Duets on Ice (1974) that saw her playing violin while wearing frozen ice skates—each performance lasting as long as the blocks of ice on her feet took to melt. Anderson’s breakthrough single, 1981’s “O Superman,” catapulted her to global recognition, and was hailed as a marvel of experimental electro-pop that remains singular in its sound today. She followed up the track with seven uniquely captivating studio albums for Warner Bros. Records, as well as collaborations with the likes of Peter Gabriel, William S. Burroughs, and late husband Lou Reed. More meaningful for Anderson than “O Superman”’s commercial success is its continuing relevance, and resonance, in the decades since it debuted—a snippet even went viral on TikTok last year.

“Every few years I crack that song out and play it, and it’s weird—it’s like, ‘Oh, God, this was written yesterday!’ It thinks about power, technology, identity, and those are still very big issues,” she reflects. Whereas “O Superman” spoke on contemporary events, Amelia sees Anderson turning her gaze to a time long gone—one listeners are invited to lose themselves in as an escape from the harsher contours of the present. For the album’s runtime, the listener’s world is marvelously supplanted with Earhart’s in a whirl of 3-dimensional sound. Telegraphed by Anderson’s hypnotic vocals and the sweeping power of the orchestra, the fearless flier’s journey becomes ours—and what an incredible journey it is. “Amelia takes you into your own mind, and you get to picture all of [her adventures] for yourself,” Anderson explains. “And there’s nothing like flying. You’re free.”

This story appears in the pages of V149: now available for purchase!

Photography Sam Hellmann

Fashion Liv Vitale

Makeup Robert Reyes (Bryan Bantry)

Hair Kiyonori Sudo (L’Atelier)