The project that changed the way Lou Reed wrote songs: “The greatest short stories ever”
Nobody wrote songs quite like Lou Reed. From the outset, the Velvet Underground songwriter had an entirely different way of working from virtually everybody else in the music industry of the time, complementing the otherworldly experimentation of John Cale expertly.
From narrative tales of drug deals – ‘I’m Waiting for the Man’ – to harrowing explorations of soliders fighting in Vietnam – ‘Xmas In February’ – Reed has always had a knack for telling boldly original stories within his work, and that is something he largely owes to the mentors and writers he absorbed during his early days.
To say that Lou Reed led a tumultuous adolescence would be an egregious understatement. The future songwriter seemingly struggled to find his place in the world, and never fit in with the American ideals of a young person growing up in the surroundings of Freeport, New York. He was plagued with mental health struggles, characterised by frequent panic attacks and social alienation. In fact, during his first stint at college during the early 1960s, he suffered a complete mental breakdown and was eventually subjected to electroconvulsive therapy as a result.
Throughout this difficult period in his life, Reed’s only salvation came in the form of music and literature. As well as immersing himself in the sweet sounds of R&B as a means of escape, the young songwriter also found inspiration in the world of detective novels and Beat writers like William Burroughs. His mentor at Syracuse University, the writer Delmore Schwartz, was particularly influential on Reed during his college years, and, in fact, he went on to inspire the very way in which Reed wrote songs.
Reed called upon the inspiration of Schwartz on multiple occasions throughout his discography, perhaps most notably on the tracks ‘European Son’ and ‘My House’, the latter of which explores the deep personal connection between the pair, and just how inspirational Reed found the Brooklyn-born poet. Reportedly, Schwartz once warned Reed, “You can write, and if you ever sell out and there’s a heaven from which you can be haunted, I’ll haunt you,” and Reed certainly stuck to that advice over the course of his incredible career in music.
Not only did the songwriter pay direct tribute to his mentor on tracks like ‘My House’, but Schwartz, along with writers like Raymond Chandler or Hubert Selby Jr influenced Reed’s whole outlook on writing and crafting narratives. “I would say I owe 100% to them,” the songwriter told Record Collector in 2008. “To this day, I think In Dreams Begin Responsibilities by Delmore Schwartz is one of the greatest short stories ever written, and that changed my life.”
“For a writer, it was an inspirational thing to have looked at,” he continued, heaping praise onto Schwartz’s writing. Reportedly, Reed did try to make it as a novelist at one point, but it was music which captured his attention the most. “I did try to write a detective novel at one point, but I wasn’t good at it; anything that went along those lines ended up as a song. Some of it is on the Raven album, and some of it is on Street Hassle… the perfect little piece of film noir. It’s quite a monologue, I guess you could say.”
It was those narrative, noir tracks in which Reed really shone. He constructed those tales with all the poise, intrigue, and compulsion of a skilled poet, owing to his deep-rooted appreciation for writers like Schwartz, along with his prolonged adoration of detective novels. In fact, you could probably string a pretty great detective novel together by tying Lou Reed’s tracks together – it’s a wonder he never did so himself.
