Laurie Anderson accepts the Artist Indie Icon award from Justin Kalifowitz at Billboard’s Indie Power Players 2024 event.

Justin Kaliforwitz
Please join me in giving a big round of applause to the 2024 Billboard Indie Icon Laurie Anderson.

Laurie Anderson
I’m really overwhelmed. Thank you so much. Great to be here. I just want to play a little short song for you and it’s, I’m a violinist, and I also work with a lot of technology, but I always wanted to sing like a violin, so I finally figured out how to do this. And this is, it involves this thing called a pillow speaker. The pillow speaker is the thing that you put in your pillow at night so you can, like, learn foreign languages in your sleep. This never worked for me. I just woke up feeling, like, super paranoid, yeah. Anyway, so I figured out how to do this. And because I I’m kind of an oral person, I like putting electronics in my mouth. So this is how this goes. Oh, you just want to say, whoa, I wanted to say one more thing. I was in Miami, and I decided to do this song, so I was reversing it in a hotel room, but it was kind of an old speaker, so the battery acid was leaking out of the speaker, and this thing got stuck to the roof of my mouth like this. And I was like, the roof of my mouth is being eaten away by battery acid. This is like. So I ran. I ran to the elevator, down to the street. Found a pharmacy. I ran to the pharmacy with this cable hanging out of my mouth. And the pharmacist was so cool. He just took a Q-Tip. He went, you know, no questions asked. Anyway. Thank you so much for this wonderful honor, and thanks for being here. It’s really fun to meet all of you.