{"id":665693,"date":"2026-06-30T08:00:16","date_gmt":"2026-06-30T08:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/665693\/"},"modified":"2026-06-30T08:00:16","modified_gmt":"2026-06-30T08:00:16","slug":"the-1979-lyric-lou-reed-wanted-to-be-remembered-for","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/665693\/","title":{"rendered":"The 1979 lyric Lou Reed wanted to be remembered for"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Lou<\/p>\n

Credit: Far Out \/ Sony Music Entertainment<\/p>\n

Mon 29 June 2026 17:42, UK <\/p>\n

It has been six decades since The Velvet Underground formed, but artists in the alternative and avant-garde realms still look to Lou Reed<\/a> for guidance. He\u2019s the north star for songwriters looking to find their own voice.<\/p>\n

He remains one of the most frequently cited influences in guitar music, and his legacy continually reasserts Brian Eno\u2019s claim that everyone who purchased The Velvet Underground and Nico went on to start a band of their own. <\/p>\n

Reed\u2019s talent for lyricism was an essential element in forging this legacy. As the frontman of The Velvets, he lent his distinctive voice to transgressive tales of sex and drugs, pushing the boundaries to their very limit. It wouldn\u2019t win them much commercial success at the time, but it would win them one of the longest-standing legacies in art rock. <\/p>\n

Though Reed\u2019s unflinching lyrics may have put listeners off at the time, they have since endeared themselves to audiences and found an enduring place in music history. Above all, they\u2019re singular, honest, and always utterly Reed. <\/p>\n

\u2018I\u2019ll Be Your Mirror\u2019 contains some of the most gorgeous sentences strung together in song, and there\u2019s even a band named after \u2018Pale Blue Eyes\u2019. Then there\u2019s also the gruesome realities of \u2018Heroin\u2019. Together this blend inspired Nick Cave to comment, \u201cHe taught me that you can put the most sonically aggressive music and put it side by side by some of the most beautiful ballads that anyone has ever written.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Lou<\/a>Credit: Far Out \/ Album Cover<\/p>\n

In his solo career, Reed has also come to be recognised for his lyricism. The stories told in \u2018Walk on the Wild Side\u2019<\/a> have been immortalised in the counterculture, while \u2018Perfect Day\u2019 invites listeners to delve into its simplicity to find something more, to turn a love song into the experience of addiction. His poetic lyrical style has produced a number of all-time greats<\/a>, but there is one that stands out for the songwriter himself.<\/p>\n

In 1979, Reed released The Bells, which demonstrated his boundary-pushing artistry across both music and lyrics. The album also produced Reed\u2019s favourite self-penned lyrics in its titular closing track. It\u2019s an eerie nine-minute piece that veers between layers of saxophones and indecipherable vocals before finally settling upon Reed\u2019s potent words, afforded all the more weight by his dread-inducing delivery. <\/p>\n

Reed imagines an actor standing upon a ledge, hollering, \u201cLook, there are the bells\u201d. While the lyrics seem to touch on death and perhaps more specifically on suicide, the instrumentation swells around Reed\u2019s words in a strangely cathartic climax. But his lyrics are vague enough to be interpreted in several ways, which is one of the things that marked \u2018The Bells\u2019 out as his favourite. <\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve always been very affected by it,\u201d he once stated during an interview with writer Neil Gaiman<\/a>, \u201cAnd as I get older, and I get a view on the lyric a bit more, it becomes more meaningful to me.\u201d It certainly is the mark of a great song if a track can grow with you and can change meanings depending on the person who listens to it and the time or place that surrounds them. <\/p>\n

To extend this even to the songwriter, who first imbued it with meaning, is all the more impressive. \u201cLots of times I\u2019ll think it\u2019s about one thing and as I get a little distance from it \u2013 and by distance I mean like, say, seven or eight years \u2013 it suddenly becomes very obvious to me it was about something else entirely,\u201d he explained. That\u2019s a sign of great, timeless depth, and \u2018The Bells\u2019 is a proverbial bottomless pit.<\/p>\n

Between beautiful imagery, heavy themes, and malleable meaning, \u2018The Bells\u2019 seems like a worthy pick for Reed\u2019s favourite work of lyricism from his own catalogue. Beyond changing meaning throughout his own life, the song will have taken on so many other meanings imposed by its listeners, meanings that are intrinsically linked to time, to place, to person. It\u2019s one of the marks of a truly great song and a truly great lyricist.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

ADD AS A PREFERRED SOURCE ON GOOGLE \"\"\/ <\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Credit: Far Out \/ Sony Music Entertainment Mon 29 June 2026 17:42, UK It has been six decades…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":553340,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[42201,173019,96,33325,128,65883,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-665693","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-1970s","tag-173019","tag-entertainment","tag-lou-reed","tag-music","tag-the-velvet-underground","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/665693","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=665693"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/665693\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/553340"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=665693"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=665693"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=665693"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}