Last week, I sat down with the artist Laurie Anderson at her office in TriBeCa for what I expected would be a fairly short interview to discuss the archive of her late husband, Lou Reed, who died in 2013. We wound up speaking for almost two hours; with Will, her latest dog, sitting next to me, I heard the little robotic voice on her laptop first announce “4 o’clock,” then “5 o’clock.”

She and Don Fleming, her archivist, explained the origins of the project and played clips from some of the more than 600 hours of audio from the archive. All of it is now being cataloged and digitized, and will eventually be available for anyone to listen to at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, at Lincoln Center.

Ms. Anderson also spoke about her hopes for the archive, the “art ranch” that she and Mr. Reed dreamed of starting in their retirement, and the parts of life that can’t be saved on a shelf. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Origins of the Archive Project

Lou and I didn’t really talk about [his archive]. He fought for his life to the very last second.

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We had this sort of retirement plan. It was the L&L Art Ranch. Lou always wanted to have a club where he could play every night, and musicians could drop by. We had the brand: it was an X with two L’s, like that. [Crosses fingers.] After he died, I went through a moment of like, “O.K., I’ll build it!” Julian Schnabel was helping design the L&L Art Ranch in Red Hook.