Lou the writer.

Reed: Well look at me. [beats on the desk with his hands] Yeah, I feel pretty good. I feel really great. I'm just feeling really good these days. You never know. Talk to me in a week. Maybe it's the opposite.

ATN: I only ask you this because you've already been public about it. But do you feel having a new relationship [with singer Laurie Anderson] has helped or sparked feeling revived?

Reed: I feel like I walked into one of those 40 billion new galaxies that Hubble found. That's what I think. Lucky me. Major domo lucky, that's what I would say. I mean I write about everything. To my own detriment in some ways--how many secrets can you keep? But on the other hand, I am a writer, I do move things around. People forget about that. Things do get... Well, you write. You must know what I'm talking about. It's real up to a point. It's true up to a point. I mean, it's all true in it's entirety. It's just not exactly that way maybe or it's an amalgam of different things. I don't completely really understand the whole process myself. I just think that I'm lucky that it chooses -- and I don't want to sound New Age-y but I can't help it, this is the way it is -- it's just this talent and ability and it goes through me like water. And I've learned how to treat it respectfully, to try and get the most out of it. I take it for granted in the sense that I'm listening to it most of the time anyway. So I never thought of it as like having brown eyes. This thing is always there. I'm always listening most of the time. It's going on and on and on. Sometimes it's not my stuff either. Some of these lyrics that I wrote, they were so good, I was concerned I was quoting Yeats or something or there was something Biblical. I had people check. I said listen, "Set the twilight reeling." Has someone used that? And somebody said to me, "It's from the 'Star Spangled Banner.' Starlight's last gleaming. Twilight's last gleaming.' " Close, but that's not what I said.

Reed, Lou, "Hello It's Me" from Songs For Drella
(45 second excerpt)

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ATN: A line like "I was thinking of Van Gogh's last painting / was that perhaps what you've been feeling?" -- a line like that is so beautiful and moving. You think of saying that to somebody. That just pops into your head, those lines?

Reed: Oh yeah. My favorite line in the whole album is "first came fire / then came light / then came feeling / then came sight." Oh my. Oh my! Who am I quoting? Where is that coming from? I had an interview with a younger guy and he explained back to me what it meant. And it was so stunning because I hadn't really gotten that far into thinking what it meant. He said this means... Wow. I said I'm going to use that from now on. I don't get into what it means very much because it's like the centipede that starts thinking about which leg comes first. It would grind to a.... Unless in the process I say something awful, then I say please, no one must ever see this, I don't even want to see this. And

Lou the...well, you recognize this one.

Photo by Jay Blakesberg

I'm the one who wrote it. That's part of the thing about writing. Some of what you write, you say "let's get that out of here and burn it." So these are only the things I want you to see. They've been polished and buffed and set in a little crown and off they go. But as far as the actual meaning of some of it, if it's not a hurtful, ugly destructive thing, if there's a purity of heart there, then out it goes whether or not it points at me in a way that may or may not be flattering. I don't get into a deep thing of what it means. But it is amazing to me to find out from other people what I thought it meant and these other layers of meaning. And these other layers are really there and there's a very good argument that can be made for them. And people get into psychological...well there's this... This is what that meant. And it's all true. It's just that I don't sit down to officially write a song. I don't do that. So I also don't make these...There's some serious link ups on this album but that's just because it's written by the same person who's interested in the same subject so it's running through all of it. It's not this calculated...well now we'll reiterate...it's not that.

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