2000s
Life on a String, appeared in 2001, by which time she signed a new contract with another Warner Music label, Nonesuch Records. Life on a String was a mixture of new works (including one song recalling the recent death of her father) and works from the Moby Dick presentation. In 2001, she recorded the audiobook version of Don DeLillo's novel The Body Artist. Anderson, who rarely revisits older work (though themes and lyrics occasionally reappear), went on tour performing a selection of her best-known musical pieces in 2001. One of these performances was recorded in New York City only a week after the September 11, 2001, attacks, and included a performance of "O Superman." This concert was released in early 2002 as the double CD Live in New York.
In 2003, Anderson became NASA's first artist-in-residence, which inspired her performance piece, The End of the Moon. She mounted a succession of themed shows and composed a piece for Expo 2005 in Japan. In 2005, Anderson visited Russia’s space programme – the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre and mission control – with The Arts Catalyst and took part in The Arts Catalyst’s Space Soon event at the Roundhouse to reflect on her experiences. She was part of the team that created the opening ceremony for the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens. Later that year, she collaborated with the choreographer Trisha Brown and filmmaker Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo on the acclaimed multimedia project O Zlozony/O Composite for the Paris Opera Ballet. The ballet premiered at the Opera Garnier in Paris in December 2004. Anderson has also collaborated with William S. Burroughs, Jean Dupuy, Arto Lindsay, Bill Laswell, Ian Ritchie, Peter Gabriel, Perry Hoberman, David Sylvian, Jean Michel Jarre, Brian Eno, Phillip Glass, Nona Hendryx, Bobby McFerrin, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Dave Stewart, Peter Gordon, Adrian Belew, Hector Zazou, and Lou Reed.
Since the latter part of the 1990s Anderson and Lou Reed have collaborated on a number of recordings together. Anderson contributed to "Call on Me" from Reed's collaborative project The Raven, on the tracks "Rouge" and "Rock Minuet" from Reed's Ecstasy, and "Hang on to Your Emotions" from Reed's Set the Twilight Reeling; Lou Reed contributes to the tracks "In Our Sleep" from Laurie Anderson's Bright Red and "One Beautiful Evening" from Anderson's Life on a String. They were married on April 12, 2008 in a private ceremony in Boulder, Colorado.
In 2005, her exhibition The Waters Reglitterized opened at the Sean Kelly Gallery in New York City. According to the press release by Sean Kelly, the work is a diary of dreams and their literal recreation as works of art. This work, created in the process of re-experiencing or re-working her dreams while awake, uses the language of dreams to investigate the dream itself. The resulting pieces include drawings, prints, and high-definition video. The installation ran until October 22, 2005. In 2006, she contributed a song to Plague Songs, a collection of songs related to the 10 Biblical plagues.
Laurie Anderson narrated Ric Burns's Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film, which was first televised in September 2006 as part of the PBS American Masters series. Anderson also performed in Came So Far for Beauty, the Leonard Cohen tribute event held in the Point Theatre, Dublin, Ireland, on October 4–5, 2006. Recent releases include a re-release of her first album, Big Science on Nonesuch Records, a book of drawings titled Night Life, and a brand new album released in 2010 called Homeland.
Material from Homeland was performed at small work-in-progress shows in New York throughout May 2007, most notably at the Highline Ballroom on May 17–18, supported by a 4-piece band with spontaneous lighting and video visuals mixed live throughout the performances by Willie Williams and Mark Coniglio, respectively. A European tour of the Homeland work in progress took place during the late summer and fall of 2007, including performances on September 28 and September 29, 2007, at the Olympia Theatre, Dublin; on October 17–19 at the Melbourne International Arts Festival; in Russia at the Moscow Dom Muzyky concert-hall on April 26, 2008. The work was performed across the Atlantic in Toronto, Canada, June 14, 2008, with husband Lou Reed, making the "Lost Art of Conversation" a duet with vocals and guitar, with his ambling style contrasting with Anderson's tightly wound performance. Anderson's Homeland Tour performed at several locations across the United States as well, such as at the Ferst Center for the Arts, Atlanta, Georgia; The Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York, New York; and Harris Theater for Music and Dance in Millennium Park, Chicago, Illinois, co-presented by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
Anderson was awarded the 2007 Gish Prize for her "outstanding contribution to the beauty of the world and to mankind’s enjoyment and understanding of life."
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