On June 22, Nonesuch Records will release Laurie Anderson’s first studio album in ten years, Homeland. In July, she will bring an intimate live show, Another Day in America: Songs from the Album "Homeland" and Other Stories, to New York’s Le Poisson Rouge, Philadelphia’s World Café Live and Alexandria, Virginia’s The Birchmere, in addition to performing on The Late Show with David Letterman. 

Calling Laurie Anderson “the most important multimedia artist of our time,” the Los Angeles Times recently noted the “rare, profound maturity” of her latest songs. Thirty years into her recording career—in which she has simultaneously remained busy as a visual artist, composer, poet, photographer, filmmaker and internationally touring live performer—she has applied her craft to Homeland, a collection of songs at once personal and political, equally focused on love and American identity.

Homeland is produced by Anderson with Lou Reed and Roma Baran, and engineered by Anderson, Pat Dillett, Mario McNulty, and Marc Urselli. The music is instantly recognizable as Anderson’s, though it draws on a broad scope of styles: she sings throughout and plays newly developed sounds on violin, as well as contributing keyboards and percussion. Her vocals are at times mediated by the vocal filter she long ago invented to perform her signature “audio drag,” this time voicing Fenway Bergamot, the male alter-ego who appears on the album’s cover and narrates the song “Another Day in America.” You can watch the latest in the weekly series of five Bergamot videos—"Victory," in which Bergamot reflects imagines the last sound some among us might hear—posted today, as well as the previous two videos, at nonesuch.com/media.

On Homeland, Anderson is joined by a diversity of collaborators, from the Tuvan throat singers and igil players of Chirgilchin to New York experimental jazz and rock players including Rob Burger (keyboards), Omar Hakim (drums), Kieran Hebden of Four Tet (keyboards), Shahzad Ismaily (percussion) Eyvind Kang (viola), Peter Scherer (keyboards), Skuli Sverrisson (bass), Ben Witman (percussion and drums) and John Zorn (saxophone). Antony Hegarty contributes additional vocals.

The new songs touch upon US foreign policy, torture, economic collapse, the erosion of personal freedom, medical malpractice, religion and cynicism. In this sense they echo Anderson’s early landmarks, especially her politically charged multimedia piece United States I–IV. In form as well as subject matter, there are also resonances of Anderson’s seminal album Big Science, which Nonesuch recently reissued.

Over the course of 2010, Anderson has a number of major live engagements, including the worldwide tour of her new multimedia performance, Delusion. She will perform the show 12 times during the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s 2010 Next Wave Festival, among other prestigious venues, this fall. She and Lou Reed recently curated the Vivid Live Festival, bringing two weeks of programming (May 28–June 11), featuring the much-discussed Music for Dogs, to Sydney Opera House.

Anderson is also preparing a major retrospective of her visual work that will open in São Paolo in August 2010 and a book of her stories that will be published in 2011.

Below is a list of performances of Another Day in America: Songs from the Album "Homeland" and Other Stories. For more information and links to purchase tickets, visit nonesuch.com/on-tour. To pre-order a copy of Homeland, head to the Nonesuch Store, where you can also pick up a copy of the 12" vinyl single "Only an Expert," out now.