(Credits: Far Out / Album Cover)
Sun 4 January 2026 21:15, UK
Lou Reed has always worn his heart on his sleeve when it comes to creativity. His words were poetic and brutally transparent, sometimes too much.
If you ever want to try and understand the toll that comes with being creative, you should read what Lou Reed has said about the song ‘Heroin’. In trying to write a track that disparages the drug and explores the darkness which surrounds it, Reed accidentally created something that a lot of drug users listened to when engaging with their addiction.
“I meant those songs to sort of exorcise the darkness, or the self-destructive element in me, and hoped other people would take them the same way,” he said, “But when I saw how people were responding to them, it was disturbing. Because, like, people would come up and say, ‘I shot up to ‘Heroin’’, things like that.”
He continued, “For a while, I was even thinking that some of my songs might have contributed formatively to the consciousness of all these addictions and things going down with the kids today. But I don’t think that anymore; it’s really too awful a thing to consider.”
While Reed was on the receiving end of the tribulations that come with being a writer, he was given free rein to write about these different themes because of how much the style of the musicians he worked with varied. In the Velvet Underground and as a solo artist, there were very few kinds of music off limits. As a result, regardless of whether Reed wanted to write about, whether it was something sad, moving, dark, or light, he had musicians on hand who were able to help him out.
It was the variety of The Velvet Underground that drew so many listeners to them. David Byrne confessed that Talking Heads probably wouldn’t exist without such a band. There was previously a great deal of pressure for bands to fit within one specific genre, so when Lou Reed and Co found success by diverting from that approach, it was clear that a new branch of music had started growing.
“The Velvet Underground were a big revelation. I realised, ‘Oh, look at the subject of their songs: There’s a tune and a melody, but the sound is either completely abrasive or really pretty’. They swing from one extreme to the other,” he said, “‘White Light/White Heat’ is just this noise, and then, ‘Candy Says’ is incredibly pretty but really kind of dark. As a young person, you go, What is this about?”
While Lou Reed might have had the privilege of working with a range of different musicians and, as a result, dabbled with a variety of musical sounds, there were still some genres that he stood in awe of. Avant-garde jazz remained an inaccessible form of music to him, as he would listen to artists celebrating the haphazard style of music and wonder how they were doing what they were doing. The whole point of the genre was to take something in tune and well-constructed and completely deconstruct it. Many found it unlistenable, while others heard revolution in the notes. Lou Reed was one of the latter, and there were two artists in particular he really enjoyed.
“I’d been listening to [avant garde jazz artists] Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman,” he said, “Of course I was not trained to play like them. I couldn’t read and write music. I couldn’t even begin to think of having technique like that. But I certainly had the energy—and a good ear.”
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