Laurie Anderson and Sexmob Recast Her Catalogue on Let X=X (Live)

Laurie Anderson’s latest release is only her third live album, which is surprising for an artist whose concerts have long felt built for documentation. Let X=X (Live), drawn from her 2023 tour with Sexmob, arrives as a sprawling three-LP set with 23 tracks and gives old material a harder, more forceful shape than many listeners may expect. It is her first live record since Live in New York in 2002, and it lands as both a retrospective and a reminder of how much Anderson has spent her career making the avant-garde feel strangely hospitable.

By now, Anderson occupies a rare kind of cultural space, something close to a national treasure. Her work has always moved across albums, visual art, and film, circling themes like technology’s grip on humanity, loss, and even Amelia Earhart, without ever collapsing into theory alone. The live setting has always made room for that range. Her performances tend to fold song, spoken word, and visual effects into something closer to a multimedia argument than a conventional concert. Let X=X (Live) can’t fully recreate that, of course. Without the visuals, and without the finale in which Anderson leads the audience through a tai chi routine, the record is necessarily partial. Still, it captures enough to show how elastic her material remains.

That elasticity has a lot to do with Sexmob, whose lineup here includes Steven Bernstein on brass, Kenny Wollesen on drums and percussion, Douglas Wieselman on winds and guitar, Briggan Krauss on saxophone and guitar, and Tony Scherr on bass. Together, they give Anderson’s songs a sturdier, more muscular frame. Familiar pieces like “O Superman” are reworked with a thickness and snap that push them away from nostalgia. For anyone who caught the 2023 tour, the album functions as a keepsake. For everyone else, it is a rare chance to hear this repertoire reassembled with some bite still left in it.

What stands out most is how comfortable Anderson remains with humor, and how little she treats comedy as a detour from seriousness. Avant-garde work, this album suggests, does not have to arrive dressed in solemnity. On “It’s Not the Bullet That Kills You,” she pays tribute to artist Chris Burden, including the notorious detail of his being shot as part of an art installation, while her vocal effects throughout the record toggle between comic and unsettling. The balance is part of the point. Anderson has never been interested in making the difficult sound precious.

The album is strongest when it leans into feeling rather than concept. “Junior Dad,” reframed here from the much-criticized Lou Reed-Metallica collaboration Lulu, becomes something far more mournful, with Reed’s voice allowed to sit at the center of the track. Then there is “How to Feel Sad Without Being Sad,” the final cut, where Anderson tries to pass along her Buddhist teacher’s wisdom to an audience still living in the emotional afterimage of COVID-19. It is a quiet ending for a record that has spent so much of its time reworking older material in public.

Let X=X (Live) may not be Anderson’s defining statement, but that misses the larger value of a release like this. As a live document, it widens the view of her catalogue and shows how much perspective can change when familiar songs are played by a band with this kind of heft. For longtime listeners, it offers a fresh angle on work they may think they already know. For newer ones, it works as a concise entry point into an artist whose legacy has always been bigger than any single era could contain.