Laurie Anderson’s Let X=X (Live) Captures Her Sexmob Tour in Bold, Strange Detail

Laurie Anderson’s Let X=X (Live) arrives as only her third live album, and her first since 2002’s Live in New York. Drawn from her 2023 tour with Sexmob, the release stretches across three LPs and 23 tracks, folding together reworked versions of Anderson essentials like “O Superman” with newer material and a few left-field turns.

By now, Anderson sits in a rare place in American culture. She’s long been one of the clearest examples of avant-garde work that doesn’t shut the listener out, moving through albums, visual art, and films that wrestle with technology, grief, and even Amelia Earhart without losing their human center. Her concerts have always been part performance, part installation, part lecture, part dream state, with song, spoken word, and visual elements all locked together.

Laurie Anderson. (Credit: Ebru Yildiz)

The band behind her here gives these songs a thicker, more forceful shape than many listeners may know from the originals. Steven Bernstein handles brass, Kenny Wollesen plays drums and percussion, Douglas Wieselman moves between winds and guitar, Briggan Krauss is on saxophone and guitar, and Tony Scherr holds down bass. The result is more muscular than delicate, which suits Anderson’s material surprisingly well.

For anyone who caught the 2023 dates, Let X=X (Live) will likely feel like a souvenir with real weight. Of course, no live album can fully recreate the visual side of Anderson’s shows, and this one also leaves out the closing stretch where she leads the audience through a tai chi routine. Even so, there’s plenty here that lands.

What the record does especially well is remind you that Anderson has never treated humor as an afterthought. She has always understood that avant-garde art does not have to be grim to be serious. “It’s Not the Bullet That Kills You” is a good example, saluting artist Chris Burden, who famously had someone shoot him as part of an art installation. Across the album, Anderson’s vocal effects drift between eerie and funny, sometimes in the same breath.

The most affecting material, though, comes when she leans hardest into feeling. Her version of “Junior Dad,” originally part of the widely criticized Lou Reed and Metallica project Lulu, is reshaped into something mournful, with Reed’s voice pushed forward. And on the closing “How to Feel Sad Without Being Sad,” Anderson delivers her Buddhist teacher’s lesson to an audience still living in the aftershocks of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Let X=X (Live) may not be Anderson’s defining statement, but as a live retrospective it does exactly what a project like this should. It gives longtime listeners a fresh angle on familiar work, and it offers newcomers a compelling place to start with an artist whose legacy still feels unusually wide-open.