If you visited a McDonald's in New York City's Chinatown early this summer and the cashier looked suspiciously like Laurie Anderson, chances are it was. In the interest of putting herself "in places where I don't usually belong," Anderson strolled into the restaurant one day and filled out a half-page application.

"I got the job," she relates over the phone from her home. "It was a really fantastic experience. I was having a techno-phobia spell and was really curious about McDonald's. Like a lot of Americans who spend time in Europe, I see the golden arches there and think, `Oh, how embarrassing, our crummy food.' But then I thought, `Wait a minute. They're always crowded.' I wondered how you make something with that kind of mass appeal, whether it's CDs or hamburgers. So I went in with the attitude that I was going to see a factory, but I had the greatest time.

"The thing about it is, my last day was so sad. They raised prices that day, so coffee that was 99 cents went to $1.05 and the meals went up 20 cents. People I had been getting to know came in and I'd say, `Welcome to McDonald's. What can I get you?' And they'd leave because they didn't have the extra six cents. But I learned a lot from the people I worked with, and it was very satisfying giving people what they wanted. They'd say, `Coke.' I'd give them a Coke."

It's no wonder that Anderson, who follows the late-August release of her first album in six years with a performance at Harvard's Sanders Theatre this Saturday, took delight in satisfying the public, or that she's intrigued by the notion of mass appeal. Such things are a departure from her usual day job, in which she creates music and performance pieces that overspill with sounds and ideas, inviting many interpretations while defying any single one. Her work has always been fascinating. Pleasing, too, thanks to the way she modulates her soft-toned voice into small melodies even in conversation.

But it's never been easy. "O Superman," the brashly electronic-sounding 1981 radio hit that brought Anderson and, through her, multimedia performance art to the mainstream's attention, was a wind-tossed tumbleweed of allusions about big government, family, fascism, surveillance, love, need, and intimidation. Until then her best-known work was a performance piece in which she played her violin while wearing skates, being encased in blocks of ice from her ankles down.

Even when she made her most overtly pop album, 1984's Mr. Heartbreak (Warner Bros.), Anderson drew on a talent pool that included the crusty beat poet William S. Burroughs and musical avant-gardists Adrian Belew, David Van Tieghem, Sang Won Park, and Bill Laswell. The album was her last to receive any significant airplay, and at that it failed to reach the Top 100. Nonetheless, the quality and intelligence of her art, as well as her romance with Lou Reed in recent years, has kept her in the spotlight. Her major works since Mr. Heartbreak include an epic on-stage exploration of America, United States, and the concert film Home of the Brave. She scored the Spalding Gray/Jonathan Demme movie Swimming to Cambodia, and she's toured four more large-scale performance pieces, including 1990's Empty Places, 1993's Stories from the Nerve Bible, and 1999's Songs and Stories of Moby Dick.

There's good reason for her concentration on the stage. Anderson's art is best experienced live. In her performance pieces she organizes a palette of electronic sounds, projections and video, music, dance, mime, acting, and spoken and written words. And she always appears alone, channeling her constant flow of concurrent ideas with unflappable charisma and nonchalant mastery.

The 54-year-old New Yorker, who was born in Chicago and studied classical violin, and who once taught art history and Egyptian architecture at City College, made only two studio albums in the 1990s. Bright Red was a 1994 collaboration with the respected producer Brian Eno; it was followed by 1995's The Ugly One with the Jewels (both on Warner Bros.). Last month she released another, the lovely Life on a String (Atlantic).

I'm tempted to call the new disc her best. It is certainly her darkest and most personal, and in some ways her most daring. In the past 15 years Anderson's fans have come to expect her to extract music from technology's maw, carving soundscapes from the guts of computers and keyboards. But Life on a String is a product as much of the last 100 years as of the loops-and-samples present. Lording over the clangs of guitar atonalities, sonic percolations, and backward tracks of stringed instruments, and the often slanted tribal rattle of the drums, is a violin-colored small-ensemble sound akin to classical chamber music that is as human and rich as her voice.

Life on a String is the typical result of a collision of Anderson's recent interests and experiences. "One was a big orchestral piece, a commission from the American Composers Orchestra, on Amelia Earhart. It's based on the log of her last flight around the world." Another was an essay on New York City that she was asked to write by the editors of the Encyclopædia Britannica. She took long walks to search for inspiration, and those sparked the delicate portrait of urban beauty and loneliness that became the album's title song.

Most significant, perhaps, was the death of her father, whose final moments Anderson shared. She describes them with great detail and delicacy on the album's "Slip Away." It's the most candid, emotional, and undistanced lyric she's ever written, in which lines like "You told me you had no idea/How to die/But I saw the way a light/Left your eyes" are rendered even more poignant by the mournful wails of her electric violin. Then there's the violin itself, a prototype designed by guitar specialist Ned Steinberger.

Anderson explains how things coalesced. "It was really so much fun hearing a whole orchestra play my work. I had kind of lost interest in instruments made of wood, metal, spit, and horsehair. For the album, I started just doing stuff on the computer and keyboards and making sounds. I hadn't played the violin in years. But the violin Ned Steinberger sent me was in the corner kind of hanging out. He wanted me to check out the action and harmonics and stuff. With the sound of the orchestra in my head, I finally picked it up and thought, `This is fantastic!', mostly because I could hold it in my arms, unlike a computer, and walk around with it. So that turned the album into a strolling record."

Since strolling at sea hasn't been in vogue since Jesus's day, Anderson abandoned her original plan to record songs from her Moby Dick. A few numbers from the show, the overture "One White Whale" and "Pieces and Parts," nonetheless snuck aboard. "Pieces and Parts" is thematically pure Anderson, layered with images of angels and deliverance, mortality, wonder, and a sense of the power of the heart over the mind. But its sound is, as she describes it, "a little string trio." There's also an instrumental, "Here with You," that has the same character. These arrangements are a major departure from her stage production of Songs and Stories of Moby Dick, which employed a tambourine as its only organic instrument. Nonetheless, Anderson insists her reputation as a "technology person" is unjustified.

"People ask me, `How do you feel now that technology has caught up with you?' And I go, `What, was this a trade show?' The thing I like least about technology is how fast and cool it is. When you use it for going somewhere, it can be pretty interesting, but the learning curve is steep for some people. So they turn a machine on and go, `Wow! There it is! A work of art!' It's just a dumb tool. I feel very resentful of technology at this point, because it's so tyrannical -- trying to convince people they need the biggest hard drive, the smallest cell phone, the best Web site, or they're going to fall behind. It's the smartest marketing technique, because it works on fear."

Anderson also believes that the proliferation of new communication tools has clouded real connections between people by creating an environment that constantly bombards us with information and demands. "So a lot of the album is about an aversion to machines that I developed, and trying to get away from them."

That aversion drove her not only to the violin, but to McDonald's and a stint working on a Quaker farm. "I'm just feeling very overwhelmed by the stupidity of this technology culture. The best example I can think of is silence. If people stop talking at a dinner party and it's really awkward because everybody's waiting for somebody to say, `Um, I saw a really good movie!', there's so much going on at those times when there's supposedly no communication. When you're in an elevator with somebody, even if you don't say a word to this person, you pick stuff up and get a sense of who they are by the time you get off.

"Silence to a computer is nothing. It goes [she affects a Dep'ty Dawg cartoon voice] `Nuthin's happ'nin' ' and shuts down. We're so much more exquisite in that way."

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Laurie Anderson performs at Sanders Theatre in Harvard Square this Saturday, September 15, at 8 p.m. Call (617) 931-2000.

Issue Date: September 14 - 20, 2001