NEW YORK, NY.- Imagine — or perhaps remember — a time when the world seemed much larger, when air travel was novel and dangerous, when wireless communication could never be taken for granted.

That’s the era Laurie Anderson conjures on her new album, “Amelia,” coming out on Friday. In a fast-moving 36 minutes and 22 tracks, “Amelia” traces the doomed final flight of Amelia Earhart, who set out “to become the first woman to circumnavigate the Earth,” as Anderson narrates. Earhart took off from Oakland, California, on May 20, 1937, and flew across the Americas, Africa and Asia before her plane disappeared over the Pacific on July 2.

“I really fell in love with Amelia,” Anderson said in a video interview from her New York City studio, where she was surrounded by keyboards and mixing equipment, preparing for a tech rehearsal. “Amelia really was this badass person.”

Like nearly the entire body of work that Anderson has created since the 1980s, “Amelia” is an uncontainable hybrid. It unfolds as something between a song cycle, an oratorio and a vintage radio drama. Anderson deploys a string orchestra, electronics and a jazz-tinged rhythm section along with her gallery of singing and speaking voices. Parts of “Amelia” are matter-of-fact and diaristic, noting dates and places. But there are also stretches of heaving orchestral counterpoint that grow enveloping, even dizzying, evoking the vastness, and danger, of sky and ocean.

Anderson describes “Amelia” as “a distant cousin” of music she composed for a concert series in 2000 by the American Composers Orchestra for the turn of the millennium. Conductor Dennis Russell Davies had called on Anderson, Philip Glass, Samuel Barber and others to write music about flight.

Airplanes and flying had long been subjects for Anderson’s lyrics and spoken words. “Here come the planes” was the ominous refrain in her 1981 single, “O Superman (for Massenet),” which became a left-field hit in Britain. “Amelia” also ties in with many of Anderson’s other long-running themes: technology, communication (and miscommunication), geography, nature, travel and cross-cultural interactions.

“The Letter,” on “Amelia,” notes that when Earhart flew out of Khartoum, she carried “a letter which I myself cannot read,” Anderson calmly explains over pizzicato cellos and moaning, buzzing electric guitar. “It is addressed to Arab tribesmen and it explains how and why a woman pilot might drop out of the sky and onto their land.”

Anderson is currently working on a larger project, “The Ark,” a three-hour epilogue to “United States,” her 1984 magnum opus. “I like doomed ships,” she said.

It was Davies who suggested Earhart to Anderson, who “didn’t really know that much” about the pilot, she said. But she delved into Earhart’s history, quickly coming to admire her feminist spirit, her practicality and her technical skill. “She would talk to women saying, like, ‘Ladies, when you’re in your kitchen, it’s kind of like me in my cockpit with lots of equipment.’”

Earhart “never really got credit for being such a good mechanic,” Anderson added. “She was not a white gloves person at all. She wasn’t just stepping into her plane and going, ‘I’m a lady pilot.’”

Anderson’s original version of “Amelia,” titled “Songs for A.E.,” had its premiere in February 2000. “It was for full orchestra with a lot of electronics, completely different from this record,” she said, adding: “It had nothing to do with the last flight. It was just generally things about flying and air and aviation.”

Anderson wasn’t used to writing for a full orchestra, and she recalls her initial version as overwhelmingly cluttered. Her first rehearsals of “Song for A.E.” were a shock. “The performance was supposed to be the next night, and he played it, and it was probably one of the worst things I’d ever heard. And he turns around and goes, ‘How was that?’ I was like, ‘Um, um, you know …’ And he said, ‘Faster?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, that would be over quicker.’”

Davies has kinder memories, and a few years later, when he was leading the Stuttgart String Orchestra, he urged Anderson to revisit the music. “He said, ‘I think there’s some really beautiful melodies in there,’” she said. “‘Let’s just do it for string orchestra.’”

Davies created a new arrangement, paring down Anderson’s overstuffed, full-orchestra score for an ensemble of 19 strings. “You find what the important lines are and make them sing,” he said. “And she was able to really then hear what she had done.”

Anderson completely reshaped the piece. She focused on Earhart’s final itinerary, drawing on the pilot’s own journals without quoting them directly. Earhart “was the original blogger,” Anderson said. Every stop she made on this last flight, she would send telegrams to G.P. Putnam, her husband and press agent. “She would call reporters. She would write in her logs, and she would write in her diaries. This was very, very documented. She had a real sense of what she was doing with history.”

Anderson was leery of simply talking over an orchestra. “That idea of ‘Peter and the Wolf’ really scares me a lot,” she said. “So I tried to sink into the music.” She developed multiple vocal strategies. There was a reportorial voice. There was a voice on the radio, and the peaky, nasal voice of someone speaking through a 1930s-era microphone. There was “a story voice, sort of a softer one.” Another voice was “just delivering hard facts.” There were “a lot of vocoder things that were trying to slide around, mostly in the viola range.” For other vocals, Anderson said, “I tried to drown myself in the swirl.”

During the pandemic, Davies and Anderson agreed to revisit the material once again. Davies recorded his string arrangement with a Central European string orchestra, Filharmonie Brno, in the Czech Republic. Then, in the studio, Anderson took the music further. She brought in improvisers including bassist Tony Scherr, percussionist Kenny Wollesen and guitarist Marc Ribot. They extrapolated above the string-orchestra arrangements. “I never did a record like this,” Anderson said. “It was just upside-down.”

One of the album’s foundations — recurring at the beginning, middle and end — is the drone of Earhart’s airplane engine. It’s loud, thick, intrusive, unavoidable, wearing Earhart down as the mission continues. “I’m just trying to imagine what it would be like,” Anderson said. “It’s so hot in that cockpit, and loud, and for days and days and days and days and days and days.”

On the album, the engine sound is not a recording of an actual airplane engine. Anderson constructed it from a guitar drone created by her late husband Lou Reed’s guitar and amplifiers — his setup for “Metal Machine Music” — mixed with her own heavily processed viola playing, a recording of tires going over gravel and many more elements. It’s an artist’s interpretation, not a document.

That play between reality and impression, artifact and experience, facts and sounds, is at the core of “Amelia.” Anderson is relating events, telling a story and trying to convey what history felt like in the moment — a disastrous moment.

In the album’s penultimate tracks, “Howland Island” and “Radio,” Earhart is trying to navigate to a vital fuel stop; a Coast Guard ship was supposed to guide her. But she’s using the wrong frequency, and her signal is drowned out in other traffic; it was an unregulated radio era. Anderson mixes in Morse code that Earhart didn’t actually use; it says, “I can’t hear you. I can’t see you.” Earhart didn’t transmit Morse code; it wasn’t what happened. But it sounds like it could have been.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.