Tag Archives: lou-reed

I n the late 1970s, many of music’s top tastemakers felt sure Garland Jeffreys would become the next big thing. Rolling Stone named him the “most promising artist” of 1977. The prestigious PBS program Soundstage predicted he would become “the next performer to lay claim to superstardom.” And powerful radio …

For years, people told Adam Duritz not to bother releasing full albums, that “nobody wants to listen to ’em anymore.” So he released Counting Crows‘ most ambitious music ever —an interlocked, glam-rock-infused four-song sequence — as an EP, 2021’s Butter Miracle, Suite One. “But I found that there was a …

Driven by dubious metrics, fumbling with clearly baked-in blind spots and biases, in recurring corrective mode (see Sister Rosetta Tharpe) when it musters the will, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is always missing much of the real action in its attempts to canonize music that, if it sticks …

Herbie Flowers, the bassist who played on songs like Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side” and David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” has died at the age of 86. Flowers’ September 5 death was confirmed on social media by the bassist’s family members (via the Guardian); no cause of death was …

If Brat Summer has taught us anything, it’s that Charli XCX is always full of surprises. This just in: She wants to make a Lou Reed record. In a cover story with Billboard, the pop star contemplated the future of her career and what it would be like if Brat …

John Cale is on a formidable hot streak in his 80s. When the Welsh avant-garde legend released Mercy last year, it was his first album in a decade. But he’s already produced another gem with POPtical Illusion, a masterful tribute to his bleak imagination. Six decades into his career, Cale …

Keith Richards takes on the Velvet Underground’s classic “I’m Waiting for the Man” for an upcoming tribute album dedicated to the music of Lou Reed. Arriving a day before what would have been Reed’s 82nd birthday, Richards also shared a new video of studio footage from the recording of his …

You may know Kōji Yakusho as the oyster-slurping mystery man from the noodle-Western extraordinaire Tampopo (1985). Perhaps you remember him as the depressed suburbanite who ballroom dances his blues away in the international feel-good hit Shall We Dance? (1996). He’s the reformed felon in the Cannes-winning character study The Eel …

Lou Reed died 10 years ago, in October 2013. But since then, he’s just become a more massive, more famous, more influential figure. His life is one of the strangest music stories ever. Will Hermes tells the whole epic tale in his new biography,Lou Reed: The King of New York. …

This year, John Cale will turn 81. In the decades since he co-founded the Velvet Underground with Lou Reed in the mid-1960s, the adventurous Welsh singer-songwriter, producer, and composer has had a historic, if at times intentionally errant, run. Along with his own albums (which include high points like 1973’s …