Like its predecessor, Big Science, Mister Heartbreak contains reworked elements of Anderson's performance piece United States Live ("Langue d'Amour", "Kokoku", and "Blue Lagoon"). However, Anderson also introduced new material ("Sharkey's Day"/"Sharkey's Night" and "Gravity's Angel"), while "Excellent Birds", written in collaboration with Peter Gabriel, was written for video artist Nam June Paik's installation Good Morning, Mr. Orwell.
Background
"Gravity's Angel" borrows imagery from Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973). Anderson had "wanted to make an opera of that book ... and asked him if that would be OK... He said, 'You can do it, but you can only use banjo.' And so I thought, 'Well, thanks. I don't know if I could do it like that."[3] "Blue Lagoon" contains allusions to other tales of the sea: William Shakespeare's The Tempest and Herman Melville's Moby-Dick.[citation needed]
The album's opening track, "Sharkey's Day", formed the basis of a popular music video. Author William S. Burroughs read the lyrics of "Sharkey's Night", while Peter Gabriel co-wrote and provided vocals on "Excellent Birds", an alternate version of which, entitled "This is the Picture (Excellent Birds)", also appeared on the CD edition of his 1986 album So.[4] According to Anderson, she and Gabriel "could never agree on what a bassline was...it turned into a standoff and so we each put out our own version of the song."[5] A third version of the song can be heard in the music video version, directed by Dean Winkler.
Despite Anderson's aversion to guitars on Big Science, she changed her approach on Mister Heartbreak and employed the services of King Crimson guitarist Adrian Belew, who appeared on four tracks. Belew recalled that Anderson originally conceived of "Sharkey's Day" as having a "hoedown kind of feel" that centered around an instrument resembling a jew's harp. When describing his approach to the song, Belew stated that "I gravitated toward a very aggressive sound from a pedal called the Foxx Tone Machine, an octavefuzz pedal whose sound resembles the solo sound in Jimi Hendrix's 'Purple Haze'". Anderson subsequently reworked "Sharkey's Day" to accommodate for Belew's guitar overdubs.[6]
Most of the songs on the album were later performed in Anderson's concert film Home of the Brave. Burroughs appears in the film in two brief segments, reciting lines from "Sharkey's Night". "Gravity's Angel" was used in a trailer for the 1991 film Naked Lunch, an adaptation of Burroughs' 1959 novel of the same name. "Sharkey's Night" was also featured in the Australian short documentary film Ladies Please! (1995).[citation needed] The album art was originally made as a series of lithographs published with Bud Shark when Anderson was a visiting artist at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Colorado.[7]
