John Cale picks his favourite song of all time
Although he grew up in Wales, John Cale seemed predestined for fame across the Atlantic. He was not so much a big fish in a small pond, but he required a setting more receptive to his innate artistic urges. By age 13, Cale had discovered his latent talent as a violist and pianist and subsequently earned a scholarship to study music at Goldsmiths College, University of London.
In a 2016 conversation with Nathan Bevan of Wales Online, the musician opened up about his early yearning for a change of scenery. “I’d forever listen to foreign radio broadcasts as a kid,” he recalled. “My mind was always somewhere else—that notion that the grass is always greener someplace else, you know?”
In his late teens, Cale moved to London for his studies, but a voice beckoned from the land of the free. “The notion of places like New York as this 24-hour society where you could work as long as you liked, stay up as long as you liked was fascinating to me,” he added. “To end up in America had always been my aim, even before I got an offer to go there.”
In 1963, Cale moved to the US to continue his musical training alongside the legendary composer Aaron Copland. He continued to pursue his passions for avant-garde European music, but the overwhelming influence of contemporary rock music by such bands as The Kinks and The Who was difficult to resist.
In 1965, Cale formed The Velvet Underground with his new native acquaintance Lou Reed. In a recent conversation, Fat White Family’s Lias Saoudi, who worked with Cale on his 2023 album Mercy, told me that Cale was “pure music”, while Reed was “more your song and dance man”. Indeed, Reed was generally more preoccupied with the lyrical and vocal side of the operation, while Cale oozed instrumental originality.
The Velvet Underground arrived just as the so-called British Invasion was reaching its climax. The band’s dark, unorthodox approach to sound and subject matter immediately placed them at odds with the hippie-generation groups that soared in the UK and America’s West Coast. Salacious, hedonistic quirks earned the intrigue of Andy Warhol but failed to make a commercial impact with early releases.
Cale’s penchant for unconventional and progressive rock music drew him into collaborations with Brian Eno and Fat White Family later in his career. Still, he can appreciate a well-written pop song when he hears one. While appearing on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs in 2004, the avant-garde musician picked out popular tracks by The Beach Boys, Leonard Cohen, The Beatles, Elbow and Peter Gabriel, showing his taste for some rather big names.
Among his selections, Cale also singled out ‘She Belongs to Me’, a romantic classic from Bob Dylan’s 1965 album Bringing It All Back Home. As a relatively simple acoustic song, the real beauty in this selection resides in the lyrics. “Everybody was looking sideways at Bob because they were astonished at all this power that was coming out of his lyrics,” Cale praised. “We knew that Nico had just come down to be a member of [The Velvet Underground], and she used to hang out with Bob in Woodstock. So when this song came along, everybody looked at each other and said, ‘Wait a minute, this is about somebody we know.’”
Although Cale seems sure that Dylan wrote ‘She Belongs to Me’ about his former bandmate Nico, other sources point towards Suze Rotolo, Joan Baez and Caroline Coon as potential muses. Dylan has never clarified.
When asked which of his desert island selections he would pick as his Castaway’s Favourite, Cale said, “I think I’d take Bob Dylan.”
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