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During a recent Boston performance of Laurie Anderson's new show, Homeland, a rather extraordinary thing happened. Anderson had just launched into a catchy little number about the recruitment practices of the US army and their gory consequences on the battlefields of the Middle East.

About halfway through, protests began to ring out across the auditorium, then a conspicuous and well-heeled contingent made a dash for the exits. "I was literally shocked," says Anderson, back in the sanctuary of her cavernous New York loft overlooking the Hudson. "With everything that's been going on, it has been impossible to avoid putting politics in this work. On the one hand, I was pleased I was provoking a response. But before I was pleased, I was very surprised. I thought, 'This is not at all controversial.'"

Perhaps the audience revolt had more to do with Anderson's current status, achieved over an astonishing four-decades-long career, than with the actual content of Homeland, a 100-minute musical appraisal of everything from the Iraq war to the excesses of billboard advertising.

These days, with million-selling albums and countless tours under her belt, Anderson is often still regarded as the kooky, spiky-haired queen of 1980s pop experimentalism, guaranteed to provide a little social comment but never to spark actual outrage. It's generally forgotten that she began her career as an avant-garde sculptor and performer in 1970s New York, where mass walkouts were a nightly staple. Among her earliest wild and wacky works are a symphony for car horns and autoparts entitled An Afternoon of Automotive Transmission, and As:If, in which she stood on stage wearing skates frozen into large blocks of ice.

Almost single-handedly, Anderson coined the notion of multimedia performance, culminating in her eight-hour opera United States I-IV, a scathing treatise on Reaganite America, where she forged music, storytelling and pioneering visual projection techniques that have now become standard. She is the world's first hi-tech poet, says collaborator and friend, the artist Jene Highstein: "You've got to remember that when she was starting out, we didn't even have fax machines."

Anderson, slight and wiry, with her electroshock hairdo seemingly conveying perpetual if pleasant surprise, calls Homeland "one-third political, one-third from an odd dream world, and the rest music". It is, she says, "inspired by the fact that there is very little information in America: I am very aware that the media has totally failed us. The journalists have become entertainers, so I thought we should take the next step and ask, 'Why don't entertainers become journalists?'"

Homeland's lyrics certainly have the ring of a hard-hitting article. Take the lyrics to Only an Expert: "And if a country tortures people/ And holds citizens without cause or trial and sets up military tribunals/ This is also not a problem/ Unless there's an expert who says it's the beginning of a problem." Given that Homeland is a Laurie Anderson show, there are also whimsical numbers such as The Underwear Gods and a beautifully poignant song concerning her childhood in Chicago.

If anything, Homeland harks back to the days when Anderson had yet to discover technology. "I think of it as a 'back-pocket' kind of show," she says. "It was written not in a studio, but with just a bunch of musicians getting together on the road." The show has little of her trademark back-projected hi-tech wizardry. "Those things get in the way of the music," she says, an almost sacrilegious statement given her body of work. "Every music show has to have those visuals. I'm getting totally distracted by them. I just wanted to make something dreamy and musical and multimedia-free."

In their place is a narrative drive reminiscent of her early downtown shows. She insists there couldn't be a better time to be a storyteller. "We have an extremely story-savvy government here," she says. "Take the way George Bush recently retold his Iraq story about the evil dictator and weapons of mass destruction. It went over just fine because it really doesn't seem to matter whether it's a true story. It matters whether it's a good story, with evil people and a plot.

And then, with Hillary and Barack Obama, you have another wonderful story. It doesn't matter who wins, because kids and young people have gotten interested in the story and they will be different as a result. And, given that it's an election year and Bush will be leaving, we'll soon move on to an entirely new story. America is a good place for stories".

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