Lou Reed
"Sometimes some songs take years to get right. You do it and you just know it's not right and you can't get it right so you leave it. I think you can only do your best with it and sometimes your best isn't good enough. At which point you have to give it a rest. Because then you start doing really strange things to it. And when it starts going that far astray it's time to go away from it."
— Lou Reed
for Creatives | music, writing, KEEP CREATING, never stop LEARNING, Lou Reed
"I took a stance [with my art] about a couple of things. I thought I'd earned the right; that I knew enough about Life at this point, and had gone through enough where I thought stating an opinion about a thing or two would not be soapboxy or preachy but was just hard-won experience trying to communicate to other people."
— Lou Reed
for Creatives | music, reaching your audience, artists must EXPERIENCE, artist's message, creative freedom, Lou Reed
"As I get older, and I get a view on the lyric a bit more, it becomes more meaningful to me."
— Lou Reed
"There are certain kinds of songs you write that are just fun songs—the lyric really can't survive without the music. But for most of what I do, the idea behind it was to try and bring a novelist's eye to it, and, within the framework of rock and roll, to try to have that lyric there so somebody who enjoys being engaged on that level could have that and have the rock and roll too."
— Lou Reed
for Creatives | creative process, novel writing, music, writing, reaching your audience, Lou Reed
"The lyric should be able to stand alone before it gets married to music." (artist)
— Lou Reed (lyrics written/drawn by Rachel Platten)
"Later on I find out what [a lyric] was really about. Lots of times I'll think it's about one thing and as I get a little distance from it—and by distance I mean like, say, seven or eight years—it suddenly becomes very obvious to me it was about something else entirely. It happens especially onstage. Periodically I do something older and I suddenly realize 'God—listen to what this is about. I can't believe that I said this in public.'"
— Lou Reed
for Creatives | music, writing, artist's message, Lou Reed, performance art
"There are certain kinds of songs you write that are just fun songs—the lyric really can't survive without the music. But for most of what I do, the idea behind it was to try and bring a novelist's eye to it, and, within the framework of rock and roll, to try to have that lyric there so somebody who enjoys being engaged on that level could have that and have the rock and roll too."
— Lou Reed
for Creatives | novel writing, music, writing, reaching your audience, Lou Reed