Lou Reed’s favourite Lou Reed lyric: “I’ve always been very affected by it”
It has been six decades since The Velvet Underground formed, but artists in the alternative and avant-garde realms still look to Lou Reed for guidance. He remains one of the most frequently cited influences in guitar music, and his legacy continually reasserts Brian Eno’s claim that everyone who purchased The Velvet Underground and Nico went on to start a band of their own.
Reed’s talent for lyricism was an essential element in forging this legacy. As the frontman of The Velvets, he lent his distinctive voice to transgressive tales of sex and drugs, pushing the boundaries to their very limit. It wouldn’t win them much commercial success at the time, but it would win them one of the longest-standing legacies in art rock.
Though Reed’s unflinching lyrics may have put listeners off at the time, they have since endeared themselves to audiences and found an enduring place in music history. ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’ contains some of the most gorgeous sentences strung together in song, and there’s even a band named after ‘Pale Blue Eyes’.
In his solo career, Reed has also come to be recognised for his lyricism. The stories told in ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ have been immortalised in the counterculture, while ‘Perfect Day’ invites listeners to delve into its simplicity to find something more, to turn a love song into the experience of addiction. His poetic lyrical style has produced a number of all-time greats, but there is one that stands out for the songwriter himself.
In 1979, Reed released The Bells, which demonstrated his boundary-pushing artistry across both music and lyrics. The album also produced Reed’s favourite self-penned lyrics in its titular closing track. It’s an eerie nine-minute piece that veers between layers of saxophones and indecipherable vocals before finally settling upon Reed’s potent words, afforded all the more weight by his dread-inducing delivery.
Reed imagines an actor standing upon a ledge, hollering, “Look, there are the bells”. While the lyrics seem to touch on death and perhaps more specifically on suicide, the instrumentation swells around Reed’s words in a strangely cathartic climax. But his lyrics are vague enough to be interpreted in several ways, which is one of the things that marked ‘The Bells’ out as his favourite.
“I’ve always been very affected by it,” he once stated during an interview with writer Neil Gaiman, “And as I get older, and I get a view on the lyric a bit more, it becomes more meaningful to me.” It certainly is the mark of a great song if a track can grow with you and can change meanings depending on the person who listens to it and the time or place that surrounds them. To extend this even to the songwriter, who first imbued it with meaning, is all the more impressive.
Between beautiful imagery, heavy themes, and malleable meaning, ‘The Bells’ seems like a worthy pick for Reed’s favourite work of lyricism from his own catalogue. Beyond changing meaning throughout his own life, the song will have taken on so many other meanings imposed by its listeners, meanings that are intrinsically linked to time, to place, to person. It’s one of the marks of a truly great song and a truly great lyricist.
