“A perfect song”: How Lou Reed’s ‘Pale Blue Eyes’ subverets the love song trope
Let me be perfectly clear here: Lou Reed could be a vile bully. He was responsible for some of the most aggressive, unlistenable and abrasive music of his generation, and he was very proud of both these facts. Despite this, nestled in his discography are some of the most affecting love songs of the age. ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’, ‘I Found a Reason’ and ‘Perfect Day’ are all classics, but there is one that towers above all.
One can find this as the fourth track on side one of The Velvet Underground’s 1969 self-titled third album. As a whole, the record is much softer than one would expect from the band, especially considering it follows up the blazingly loud White Light/White Heat, and the heart of this softer approach can be found in ‘Pale Blue Eyes’.
‘Pale Blue Eyes’ is an achingly beautiful track carried on a subdued, soul-inflected rock beat and warm organ. The star of the show here is Reed’s voice, mixed high enough to be intimately, almost uncomfortably close to the listener as he addresses his lover, someone who makes him feel “so happy”, yet “so sad” and yet also “so mad”.
Quoted out of context, this could sound pretty simplistic. Rhyming “sad” with “mad” is a short step up from the cat sat on the mat, and the song continues in this fashion. Keeping the vocabulary simple, Reed describes the volatile relationship he shared with his first serious girlfriend, Shelley Albin. Lines like “thought of you as everything/ I’ve had, but couldn’t keep”, saying more than 1000 words of flowery language ever could.
What made Lou Reed write the song this way?
In time, the song reveals the basic nature of its language to be entirely the point. In an interview with NME conducted shortly after the passing of Lou Reed in 2013, his widow Laurie Anderson provided a brilliant interpretation of the song. One entirely cogent with both her late husband’s fierce intelligence and his peerless ability to inhabit a song.
She says, “A perfect song. A haiku. The person he sings to is more complex than the singer. What a switch! It’s usually the other way round in songs.” Which is absolutely true. It’s not even a fault of love songs, more a fact of their existence as an act of expression from an artist. Of course, the person expressing the message is going to be more complex than the subject; it’s their expression that we inhabit.
However, ‘Pale Blue Eyes’ is a song about not being able to quite understand your partner. There may be many reasons behind it; perhaps because they’re too intelligent for you. It certainly took me a couple of reads to parse what exactly was meant by “money is like us in time / it lies but can’t stand up”. Or, perhaps, they’re just going through something that you haven’t experienced.
One way or another, their behaviour is unknowable and leaves you in the state Reed talks about in the song. A mess of emotions, but above it all, captivated by their ‘Pale Blue Eyes’. That said, dating Lou Reed probably isn’t all that fun. I’d be angry too if my partner wrote a song about me called ‘Pale Blue Eyes’ when my eyes are, like Shelley Albin’s, brown.
