Artist · chart history · #565 in indie & aaa artist polls
Laurie Anderson
Solo artist Glen Ellyn United States experimental/art rock musician
Laurie Anderson is an artist from Glen Ellyn. Laurie Anderson has 21 chart appearances on 15 radio countdowns from 11 stations on RockLists, spanning 1981–2024. The most successful song on radio countdowns is “O Superman”, which appears on 11 lists with a best position of #34. The station that charted Laurie Anderson most often is Fred (XM 44) (XM Satellite Radio (national)), with 7 appearances. The artist’s biggest year on year-end countdowns was 2024.
Laurie Anderson, born in 1947 and from Glen Ellyn, came to pop music sideways, and that is exactly why she sounds like nobody else on the dial. Trained first on violin and in sculpture, she spent the '70s building performance pieces in New York City about language, technology and images, and then, out of nowhere, "O Superman" climbed all the way to number two in Britain in 1981. A hypnotic, murmuring slab of deadpan dread became a hit, and the art world blinked.
Her debut album, Big Science, followed in 1982, and Mister Heartbreak in 1984 widened the frame with "Sharkey's Day", "Sharkey's Night" and "Excellent Birds", strange, rubbery art-funk narrated by a voice that could be your therapist or your answering machine. She starred in and directed the concert film Home of the Brave in 1986, and Strange Angels in 1989 brought "Babydoll".
A pioneer of electronic music, she has invented several of the devices she plays on stage and on record, and her work has spilled into theater, documentaries, installations and even a CD-ROM. The honors have come from well outside the rock world, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1982 and the Wolf Prize in Arts in 2017.
Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.
Songs by Laurie Anderson on radio countdowns
| # | Song | Strength | Lists | Best | #1s | Peak year |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | O Superman | 11 | #34 | – | – | |
| 2 | Excellent Birds | 2 | #272 | – | – | |
| 3 | Babydoll | 2 | #679 | – | – | |
| 4 | India And On Down to Australia | 1 | #43 | – | 2024 | |
| 5 | O Superman-Henry Cullen Remix | 1 | #28 | – | 2004 | |
| 6 | Sharkey's Night | 2 | #390 | – | – | |
| 7 | Sharkey's Day | 1 | #1678 | – | – |
Albums with charting songs
Where each song was first released, from MusicBrainz.
Year-end chart timeline
Combined year-end countdown points per year. Taller bars mean more songs placing higher across more stations.
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