Saturday, November 2, 2013

Another Reason to be Grateful to Lou Reed



Here is a gorgeous song from Okkervil River, a band I found out about this week from reading "A Reason to Keep Singing," a tribute to Lou Reed by its lead singer Will Sheff.  

Sheff writes: "(Reed's) music changed something in us and changed what we wanted to be. We didn’t want to make people happy. We wanted to make people hurt. We wanted to make music for adults, music that didn’t lie to you and feed you a line of shit. And then if we did make happy music, that happiness would have a genuine impact on people because it would be real happiness, happiness that coexisted with the real knowledge of pain. That happiness—like the happiness in 'Sweet Jane'—wasn’t false. It was something you could really hold on to."

The entire remembrance is here and it's so good.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for this. You maybe saw Sasha Frere-Jones's post on The New Yorker. This sentence was on the site's highlight page when happened to land on it last night, "You can always imagine Reed and his characters talking directly to you, as if they were standing next to the song as it played, not entirely convinced by this whole “music” scam."

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/sashafrerejones/2013/10/postscript-lou-reed-obit.html

Anonymous said...

Thanks for this. You maybe saw Sasha Frere-Jones's post on The New Yorker. This sentence was on the site's highlight page when happened to land on it last night, "You can always imagine Reed and his characters talking directly to you, as if they were standing next to the song as it played, not entirely convinced by this whole “music” scam."

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/sashafrerejones/2013/10/postscript-lou-reed-obit.html