Laurie Anderson/Brian Eno

LAURIE ANDERSON: I've listened to this album, Lux, many, many times now, and it's very beautiful. It's also incredible in cars. Did you ever drive around with it?

BRIAN ENO: I haven't tried it in the car. I've listened to it on a train, on headphones; it's very nice on headphones on a train. In fact, you can easily miss your station.

ANDERSON: You know, when we were working in New York, we had this thing about, "If it goes with the river, then it goes on the record." I always think of that. How would you describe your criteria for that? I could think of mine, but when you looked at the river, what would you say the music had to do or not do?

ENO: Well, for me, it was something to do with stillness and non-chaoticness—some sort of belonging, rather than something contrived that just appeared last night and will disappear this evening. It was the sense of wanting to make something that felt like it had a place in the world, rather than something that you just kind of stuck on for a little while to see how it works. The feeling of something that felt rooted and properly positioned in that sense, I suppose. That was what the river was for—to remind me of that link.

ANDERSON: A sense of place. What about a sense of the room and the place where the music was made? Do you hear that in music?

ENO: Well, this piece was, of course, originally made for a particular room [the Great Gallery of the Palace of Venaria]. The palace is an enormous building, and the gallery itself is about a hundred meters long and 15 meters high and 10 meters wide. It has the most incredible reverb. It's like a cathedral, you know, so it's a fantastic sound. The other thing that's interesting about the building is that it has enormous windows everywhere. It's got huge amounts of light flooding it, so it's almost like being outside with baroque ornaments floating around.

ANDERSON: What's outside the windows?

ENO: On one side there's a small town, which is the town of Venaria, and then on the other side there are these huge Versailles-like gardens. The interesting thing is that they're connected by a single straight road, which runs right through the building—not physically, but visually. It runs right through the middle of the building and through the center of the gallery itself. So it's an amazing piece of architecture. It's the kind of thing that someone like Peter Eisenman would come up with, only it was built in the 1700s.

ANDERSON: And the road came later? Or the palace was built around this idea of being bisected by a road?

ENO: The sense I have is that the road existed prior to the building. That may not be true, but I think it certainly looks that way, because the village is pretty old. So I assume it was built around that road.

ANDERSON: What about the images for the piece?

ENO: Well, again, I realized when I got to the interior of the palace's gallery that everything was about light there. It wasn't really about the building as such—it was about the way the building invited light into it. You were terribly conscious of every different mood of the day. In fact, my first title for the album was actually The Play of the Light. But the first day I went there, there was an amazing storm. I've never seen rain like that. So I suddenly started thinking about how the gallery even invited weather inside—that this gallery was really a place where you could experience the outside in comfort, actually. You could sit in the middle of this incredible rainstorm and not get wet. Wonderful idea. So when I began to think about a cover for the album, I started to look through pictures I had taken, and I found this one of a tree outside of the Serpentine Gallery in London. I liked it because it had a lot of shadow and dappling, so I thought, Hmm... I'll work on that. But I had a lot of trouble with that cover because, even though I liked it a lot, quite a few people didn't. [laughs]

ANDERSON: Why not? That's crazy.

ENO: I don't know, but some people really didn't like it and tried quite hard to persuade me not to use it. But I periodically realize every few years that the only person whose taste I really trust is me. [both laugh] Well, I don't say that to mean my taste is good or anything like that. It's just consistent.

ANDERSON: Consistency is good.