BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast.
Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks,
book and luxury they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island.
And for rights reasons, the music is shorter than the original broadcast.
I hope you enjoy listening.
My castaway this week is the artist and performer Laurie Anderson.
For over 50 years she's been using every medium imaginable to, as she puts it, tell stories.
She was born in Chicago in 1947 and first came to prominence in the UK with her 1981 hit, oh Superman.
Eight minutes long and inspired by an opera, its popularity was a surprise to her as much as anyone else.
Originally an anthem for the dawning technological age,
the song has found new resonance recently, going viral on TikTok technology.
Its possibilities, limitations and the questions it prompts for us have often featured in her work.
She started out modifying the violin she grew up playing.
In the end, it could play itself.
She once created an AI Bible and was NASA's first artist in residence.
She must surely be the only recipient of both a lifetime achievement Grammy
and the Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication.
But despite her creative success, she says, I've learned the most in my life by far,
at the worst times, when things really fell apart, when my life was just a total mess.
Maybe that's because you stop worrying about your ego and you become more open to things.