Think It Over

Shot through the heart by another Lou Reed love song. There’s a lot to be said about the optimistic school of songwriting, of the Paul McCartney variety, in which love is practically a natural resource, shining down like the sun, inexhaustible and nourishing and eternal, …

There Is No Time

When Lou Reed made New York in 1989, he was documenting a time when society felt on the verge of collapse. Society for the most part did not collapse, at least not in Lou Reed’s corner of the world, although in other parts of the …

Temporary Thing

I guess he means life. Or, more on theme, it’s probably about doing drugs and slumming. I don’t think Lou Reed was into anything healthy in 1976, which is why most of his songs from that era sound like he scribbled them down in between …

Tell It To Your Heart

Lou Reed has written some of my favorite love songs, and this is definitely one of them. Lou really makes something as mundane as “looking out across the Jersey Shore” sound like a romantic moment akin to frolicking in a rose garden. But with more …

Teach the Gifted Children

I always come back to Lou Reed for his tenderness. He is, of course, the man best known for aggressively uninviting, feedback-laden songs about hard drugs and kinky sex. Dipping into the seamy underbelly of New York – and, by extension, human nature – is …

Talking Book

“I wish I had a talking book that told me how to act and look” and I hope that Lou Reed eventually got the smartphone he didn’t know he had been wishing for. That technology, of course, was not yet invented in 1996, and even …

Stupid Man

I’m the biggest Lou Reed fan, but there are some of his albums that I can’t listen to at all, and The Bells is one of them. While not as excruciating as the work he did in the immediate wake of quitting drugs, it’s less …

Street Hassle

Only Lou Reed can set out to write a great rock monologue that could’ve been written by Raymond Chandler or William Burroughs, and then actually achieve exactly that. Anyone else who said that would look like a pretentious asshole. Lou Reed was an asshole with …

Strawman

“Does anybody need another politician, caught with his pants down, money sticking out of his hole?” I really hate that this question, and all of the others Lou Reed asked, has traveled intact to us through time, as though time were in fact a flat …

Spit It Out

Good advice. It’s weird to find a good pep talk on an obscure record from 1986, but it seems that most of what Lou Reed was writing about in those years hasn’t changed by much. If anything, life is even more fraught by instability and …