Davies has kinder memories, and a few years later, when he was leading the Stuttgart String Orchestra, he urged Anderson to revisit the music. “He said, ‘I think there’s some really beautiful melodies in there,’” she said. “‘Let’s just do it for string orchestra.’”
Davies created a new arrangement, paring down Anderson’s overstuffed, full-orchestra score for an ensemble of 19 strings. “You find what the important lines are and make them sing,” he said. “And she was able to really then hear what she had done.”
Anderson completely reshaped the piece. She focused on Earhart’s final itinerary, drawing on the pilot’s own journals without quoting them directly. Earhart “was the original blogger,” Anderson said. Every stop she made on this last flight, she would send telegrams to G.P. Putnam, her husband and press agent. “She would call reporters. She would write in her logs, and she would write in her diaries. This was very, very documented. She had a real sense of what she was doing with history.”
Anderson was leery of simply talking over an orchestra. “That idea of ‘Peter and the Wolf’ really scares me a lot,” she said. “So I tried to sink into the music.” She developed multiple vocal strategies. There was a reportorial voice. There was a voice on the radio, and the peaky, nasal voice of someone speaking through a 1930s-era microphone. There was “a story voice, sort of a softer one.” Another voice was “just delivering hard facts.” There were “a lot of vocoder things that were trying to slide around, mostly in the viola range.” For other vocals, Anderson said, “I tried to drown myself in the swirl.”
During the pandemic, Davies and Anderson agreed to revisit the material once again. Davies recorded his string arrangement with a central European string orchestra, Filharmonie Brno, in the Czech Republic. Then, in the studio, Anderson took the music further. She brought in improvisers including the bassist Tony Scherr, the percussionist Kenny Wollesen and the guitarist Marc Ribot. They extrapolated above the string-orchestra arrangements. “I never did a record like this,” Anderson said. “It was just upside-down.”
Read More: How Laurie Anderson Conjured Amelia Earhart’s Final Flight
