Her songs and performances are about personal and collective memories. The mundane becomes surreal and the incomprehensible is examined into familiarity. That sense of dislocation is how Anderson has carved out a career in the space between the art world and pop culture. Anderson's multimedia approach to genre and style are played out on terra infirma. She is a storyteller in exultis who uses music, film, video, dance, and computer animation to explore her themes of American character.
Anthologies are always difficult to navigate.
For an artist who is a maverick with an original approach, it can be particularly problematic. This is true of Talk Normal . From a purely archival-sampling standpoint it offers the essential recordings and covers all the permutations of Anderson's style in chronological order. One wishes that the same inventiveness Anderson tapped for her 1994 career-retrospective book, Stories from the Nerve Bible, had been used here. For Anderson's impressionist narrative sense and themes of time and memory to be so timeline-bound seems counterintuitive.