“What a mistake! It just got so stiff!” she continues. “Like studio recordings can… I wanted to do the opposite and get the fun of being live. So then, because record budgets aren’t very big anymore, the budget disappeared and we were still in the studio trying to capture the live things. So they left and I was there, by myself, and I thought I would take some of the live recordings and try to put them together and make some songs. I really thought I was going to lose my mind, I really did, it was like a shattered building in a million pieces that I was trying to put back together and make it into a real building – alone.

“I had to start doing a whole lot of other projects too, I was completely out of time, it was like a hobby, a couple of days a month. I’d come back and you know what it’s like when you’re working on something like that and you can’t remember where you were. What is this? It was a very weird thing to try to do. I only finished it because of Lou [Reed] because he was so sick of hearing me complain about it and he said, ‘I’m going to come to the studio and sit there until you’re done,’ and I was like, ‘Is that a good idea? A couple… I’m not sure if that’s a good idea. It’s going to be the end of our marriage…’ but he did and I’d play something and he’d be like, ‘That’s done, move on.’ and I’d think, ‘That’s not done! I’m just in the middle of that one! That need horns!’ but without him I’m still be doing that today.”

She tells me that without Lou and Lolabelle, the album wouldn’t have ever happened. I bet Lolabelle was really helpful, I say, and Laurie looks at me seriously and tells me, “She’s always helpful because she’s always interested in hearing things for the five thousandth time. She did a duet with John Zorn on ‘Bodies in Motion’ at the end where you can hear her banging away. She was pretty proud to be the leader of that session, with everyone hovering around her with microphones and stuff,” she says, before somehow sneakily segueing back into the Concert for Dogs. “…and that’s how the dogs were at the concert, too. I was expecting that they might be afraid, that there might be a dogfight or something but not at all. They were really excited to be there, with all these other dogs. They knew somehow that this was something about them. There were some great dancers there; there was a great moshpit, and a bunch of them just like – [Laurie mimes a catatonic dog]. I love those guys. A bunch of them came in carriages and stuff, the old ones. We gave a prize to them of massages, because a local dog therapy group offered free treatments so we gave those out. It was my birthday also so it was like the best birthday party ever.”

After a lengthy discussion about Iceland’s economic crisis, concentration camps in Lublin in Poland and other things that have inspired Laurie lately, we find ourselves talking about the imaginary world people live in, all credit and online. “I think people began to live in a more and more abstract world, where many physical things began to disappear,” she says. “So now there’s this thing where you’re in the record business, and there are no more record stores. We have no more record stores in New York, none. Maybe one little one in the Village. We have no more banks, no more phone booths. Only a few bookstores. And for kids, they’ve never existed. They won’t know what it’s like to go into a record store or a bookstore, they’ll never know.

“That’s why live music is happening much more than it used to. That’s one of the pluses, and there’s always going to be a big up side for every down side. I’m a stupid optimist. But there is – and it’s live music. It’s my preference anyway. I like to be with people and play music.” And dogs, too. She also likes dogs.

Laurie Anderson’s new album ‘Homeland’ is out June 15. Pick it up on iTunes here.