United States Live is the first live album and third overall album by avant-garde singer-songwriter Laurie Anderson. Released as a 5-record boxed set (later reissued on four CDs), the album is a recording of a performance of Anderson's piece United States at Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York City in February 1983. United States was Anderson's magnum opus performance-art piece featuring musical numbers, spoken word pieces, and animated vignettes about life in the United States. Segments ranged from humorous, such as "Yankee See," which gently chided Anderson's record label, Warner Bros. Records, for signing her in the first place, to the apocalyptic anthem "O Superman," which had been an unexpected Top 10 hit for Anderson on the UK music charts in 1981. Originally, United States was presented over the course of two nights, running some eight hours. The live album set is a truncated rendering of the performance, omitting many segments that were solely of a visual nature. Among the songs performed on the album was "Language is a Virus (from Outer Space)," a pop-like song based upon a phrase attributed to William S. Burroughs. Anderson later performed a modified arrangement of the song in her 1986 concert film Home of the Brave. Although Anderson has since created numerous other major performance pieces (i.e. Moby-Dick, Stories from the Nerve Bible, Happiness, The End of the Moon), United States Live remains, to date, the only serious attempt at producing anything approaching a full-length recording of any of these performances, although her previous album Big Science and her segment of the compilation You're the Guy I Want to Share My Money With consisted of studio-recorded excerpts from United States.

Track listing

All tracks written by Laurie Anderson except as indicated.

Part One

Side one

Side two

Side three

Part Two

Side four

Side five

Side six

Part Three

Side seven

Side-eight

Part Four

Side nine

Side ten

The four-cassette set has each part on its own cassette. The four-CD set is almost as above, except that the last three tracks of Part One are at the beginning of CD 2 due to CD playing time limitations.

Personnel

Charts

Album