(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Thu 5 February 2026 20:00, UK
As time has gone on, technology has obviously improved.
In some ways, artists curse that, with the rise of AI risking true artistry or even just the hyper-clean recording tool sucking some of the life out of music, but on the other hand, it’s a blessing protecting pieces of art and allowing them to flourish in their most sparkling form. For Lou Reed, on a project where he rediscovered his own music, he was thankful.
Overwhelmingly, Reed didn’t look back, unwilling to dwell on the last project and didn’t care to reflect too much on his old music, as, instead, he liked to keep things moving forward and evolving. On occasion, he’d talk about his favourite of his own songs, or a lyric he wrote way back when that still moved him in his older age, but mostly, even in his final years, he wasn’t one for nostalgia.
However, when an invite landed in 2003 to take charge of a compilation album of his work, Reed, on a rare occasion, said yes and got fully involved. NYC Man wasn’t just another greatest hits record, but was fully curated, sequenced and remastered by the musician himself.
It was a mammoth 31-track career retrospective that included both Velvet Underground and solo hits, alongside previously unreleased tracks he loved and some deep cuts he’d always liked most. The ordering is interesting too, as it doesn’t move chronologically. Instead, it is in some unknown order that clearly made sense to the artist, playing a song like ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ in the middle between ‘The Kids’ from Berlin, and a random live performance of ‘Kill Your Sons’ from Sally Can’t Dance. Across both discs, he jumps around like that from album to album, era to era
Doing the record became a passion project for Reed, mostly for the technology more than anything. In his mind, the purpose of it was to take the songs he loved and fix them, cleaning them up after the quality had been mangled by earlier iterations. “The first generation of CDs sounded terrible. Any chance to remaster would make the music sound better than what was already out there,” he said as his reasoning behind it, adding, “Sound quality was the reason I listened to those songs. That’s it. They sound better now.”
However, saying yes to that project led him to say yes to another, leading to the album he believes sounds best out of all his releases. Decades after it came out, Reed was approached to do a live performance of his divisive record Berlin and record it for a live album. The result was something Reed wasn’t just happy with, but that he saw as a gold standard, telling Spin, “The Berlin DVD, I’ll match that up against anything. The sound is murderous. Murderous”.
When it comes to Berlin, “murderous” is a huge compliment given that the whole point of the record is that it sits as Reed’s darkest, most abrasive album. It’s one that he always felt didn’t get the life it deserved when it was first released, explaining, “People never really got to hear Berlin because of the critics,” believing that the jarring reaction impacted its reach.
However, with the re-do on the live album, playing the record in its entirety for the first time, and recording it with better technology to release in better quality, Reed felt like it finally got the life it deserved.
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