Laurie Anderson - "Strange Angels"

I have always admired and liked Laurie Anderson's spoken word albums, especially "Big Science", but the one in her back catalogue to which I go back with more enduring regularity happens to be the only one in which she sings - "Strange Angels" (1989). It is not her best album (Science is) and it has some weaknesses, namely it sounds a bit overproduced in places. But Angels has a few great songs which really stand-out and the lyrics are brilliant. I particularly like the song "Ramón" in which Anderson doubles her falsetto with some far-eastern phrasing on the keyboards to add to the storytelling effect. Cold and processed as the vocals sound, they carry lyrics which are simple but ressonate with wonder and humanity: "Last night I saw a host of angels/ and they were all singing different songs/ and it sounded like a lot of lawnmowers/ mowing down my lawn". Angels are a recurrent feature in the lyrics as Anderson was feeding and borrowing ideas from director Wim Wenders - she wrote a piece included in the soundtrack to "Wings of Desire", a movie about an angel becoming human. The joy of experience is celebrated in "My Eyes": "And then kerjillions of stars start to shine/ And icy comets go whizzing by/ And everything's shaky with strange delight/ And here it is: the enormous night" and the dreamy title-track: "Well it was one of those days larger than life/ When your friends came to dinner/ And they stayed the night/ And then they cleaned out the refrigerator/ They ate everyhing in sight/ And then they stayed up in the living room/ And they cried all night". The lyrics to Angels do not question our senses beyond its surface. They just tell us to make the best of them the way we can. "Babydoll" is the most immediate, less contemplative example: "Take me to the movies/ Cause I love to sit in the dark/ Take me to Tahiti/ Cause I love to be hot". This should have been a party hit. The complex arrangements work to great effect particularly in "My Eyes" which travells through different melodies and different moods as Anderson narrates the adventures of the most precious of all senses.
Towards the end of "Ramón" it goes "So when you see a man who's broken/ Pick him up and carry him/ Cause we don't know where we come from/ We don't know what we are"... There just are not that many albums which warm up the spirit better than Angels.