‘Pale Blue Eyes’: The softer side of The Velvet Underground
Time and time again, change reveals itself to be the death of a band. If an act never changes, they grow stale and rot away into irrelevance. If they change too much, they lose track of their listeners as they leave them behind. It can feel like a damned-if-you-do and damned-if-you-don’t situation, but The Velvet Underground found the loophole when they realised that simplicity and sincerity never steered anyone wrong. ‘Pale Blue Eyes’ is proof of that.
It was 1968. By now, the band had established themselves as the darlings of the underground. What had started out as a scrappy musical project has exploded with the help of Andy Warhol, introducing Lou Reed and his band to the art scene and rocketing them to countercultural notoriety thanks to their collaboration with Nico and then their wild follow-up record, White Light/White Heat.
By this time, the band has seemingly done everything. They’d accomplished classic rock and roll on tracks like ‘Run Run Run’ or ‘I’m Waiting for the Man’. They’d done bold experimentation on their odyssey ‘Sister Ray’. They’d made it clear that not only were they a great recorded band but were an excellent live unit, too, thanks to their shows at Max’s Kansas City. They’d gained success from all of that, but then the question comes: what’s next?
For Reed, the only answer was to keep moving. “I really didn’t think we should make another White Light/White Heat. I thought it would be a terrible mistake, and I really believed that,” he said. Instead, he knew the band had to keep evolving and proving the breadth of their capabilities. He said, “I thought we had to demonstrate the other side of us. Otherwise, we would become this one-dimensional thing, and that had to be avoided at all costs.”
But when you’ve already ventured to the far corners of experimentation, what’s left to do? As the group had already made wild and weird left-field tracks, it seemed that the most radical thing they could do next was to do nothing, to pull it all back to basics and deliver a simple and honest song with no other distractions.
The result was ‘Pale Blue Eyes’, arguably their discography’s most tender and gentle track. It’s built of little more than a simple and quiet guitar and soft tambourine shakes in place of any drums. It’s got a lullaby-like quality to it as Reed almost whispers his way through the song, showing a starkly different side to the often dark and violent world of their other songs. But here, they’re surrendering to sincerity, letting the lyrics be straightforwardly emotive and creative a track that remains beloved for it’s bittersweet, reflective energy.
Guitarist Sterling Morrison described the track and the self-titled record it sits on as “the closet mix” because it sounds like it’s been recorded in isolation, letting it sound private and intimate. That perfectly captures the song but also the decision to make it. It’s radically simple and purposefully small. From the grand peaks of rock and roll or wild left-field experimentation, the only daring next step the band had to take was to retreat inwards and deliver something different by delivering something soft.
