A highlight of Lou Reed’s 1989 album New York, “Halloween Parade” is as evocative as it is chilling. Through a processional cast of characters the track chronicles the decade’s AIDS epidemic and the friends Reed lost to it. Subdued, while the wistful narrative works well enough on its own, it is expertly employed as the [...]

(Album artwork: Does it indeed affect our listening experience, and if so, how? Scratch the Surface takes a look at particularly interesting and/or exceptional cover art choices.) Expectations. We all have them, for better or worse, and with music these expectations are often heightened. Lou Reed was supposed to be the second coming. Based on [...]

I’ve been consumed by Lou Reed’s The Blue Mask of late and finally made time for the 1983 live document A Night With Lou Reed. The DVD finds Reed live in an intimate setting (The Bottom Line) in his native NYC, sparsely backed by guitarist Robert Quine, Fernando Saunders on bass and Fred Maher on [...]

For an audience, artists reinterpreting their own catalog, in a live setting, can be both exciting, and at times, an exercise in frustration. This trend of course also lends itself to the companion “live” album as well. One of the first instances of this I consciously remember was picking up Bob Dylan’s 1974 live album [...]

The enmity between Lou Reed and John Cale is no secret. After Cale’s departure from the Velvet Underground in 1968 (following the release of White Light/White Heat), there was really only one thing that still connected them: Andy Warhol. Seems like that was enough to put a temporary halt to about 20 years of bad [...]

Like some of you, I suffer from a condition that involves me personally investigating just about every Velvets, or Lou Reed, cover I can get my hands on — I have fuel/friends specifically to thank for this one. After purchasing, and thoroughly enjoying, Jesse Malin’s post-D Generation solo debut, 2002′s The Fine Art of Self [...]

Among the latest batch of albums seeing a digital-only reissue is Lou Reed’s 1978 full-length, Street Hassle. Granted, no one is going to arm wrestle the point that this is Reed’s finest album, but it certainly warrants a listen, and contains one absolute, bona-fide Lou Reed classic – the title-track – “Street Hassle.” Most recently [...]