Lou Reed - Ill Be Your Mirror: The Collected Lyrics

The exact line is Pass thru fire licking at your lips My other favorite line is theres a door up ahead not a wall. There are many favorite lines of mine that run through the album Magic and Loss. It was originally intended to be about Magic, real magic, the ability to make oneself disappear. I had heard stories of magicians in Mexico with strange powers. I thought if I put out songs about magic they would get in touch with me and tell me their secrets. After all, people are always telling me their secrets, and I often put them in song as though they happened to me.

Unfortunately two friends died of a virulent cancer within one year of each other while I was writing and so Magic became Magic and Loss. I wished for a magical way to deal with grief and disappearance. I wanted to create a music that helped with loss. It seemed we are always starting over, given a chance to deal with things again. In the New York album Im struck again by the interest in outside forces. Caught between the twisted stars The stars are twisted, the map is faulty.

Romeo Rodriguez loses his soul in someones rented car. A bleak environment to start out in. But predictable enough if you believe the dictum of one of my earliest songs, Ill Be Your Mirror, where the singer offers to reflect what you are, in case you dont know. That was a love song, but the ability and desire to reflect can go other places, and show us other rooms and conditions within and about us. I have always thought my lyrics went beyond reportage and took emotional, albeit nonmoral, stances. In the early lyrics this was often seen as a celebration or glorification of what was commonly seen as sin.

Sinful behavior and actions going unpunished. That this occurred in a recording was of itself thought sinful. A recorded cauldron of sin. This plus the backing of Andy Warhol made for an incendiary brew. I came back to these times in Songs for Drella, which was an attempt to give you a feeling for the times and the man and the position of respect he held in our eyes as an artist. Its wonderful to this day to see how he manipulated and handled the press, his extreme work ethic, his attempts to stay relevant in a world geared to the latest whatever.

The new generation looks to define itself and the first thing it does is throw away the prior, the old. In Time Rocker, a play that I did with Robert Wilson, we were interested in transcending time, passing through it and its various boundaries and worlds. This type of travel meant something to me, being a form of magic. We didnt have a rented car but a time-traveling fish. It brings me back to the desire in Trade In from Set the Twilight Reeling to transcend oneself to trade your very soul the very same soul that was up for sale in Coney Island Baby. The same Average Guy in The Blue Mask who put pins through the nipples in his chest and thought he was a saint.

Love and the desire for transcendence run through these songs. The Proposition; Make Up My Mind; Wild Side for that matter. The characters in these songs are always moving toward something; there is conflict and they try to deal with it. In Some Kind of Love he put(s) jelly on your shoulder. While later trying to Hang on to Your Emotions so that you can Set the Twilight Reeling as the moon and stars sit set before my window. The actresses relate because theyre acting.

They understand the desire to see The Bells, to hear the announcement of transcendence and freedom. And thats what all the lyrics are about. Lou Reed, 2000