Lou Reed
The Raven

THE REVIEW

Lou Reed and Edgar Allan Poe, a rather unusual combination given especially the chronological distance that separates the two. One Halloween night a few years ago, Lou Reed had a sort of revelation, feeling that there was a point of contact between him and the writer who lived in the first half of the 1800s. Lou Reed has always been fascinated by the supernatural and a certain degree of obsessiveness, which have ended up characterizing his musical work since the days of the Velvet Underground. A psychologist would say that his existence was marked as a child, in the 1950s, when his parents subjected him to electroshock treatment to quell his turbulent spirit. We would simply say that this trait of the singer's personality is probably the point of contact discovered on that distant Halloween night. A point of contact that Lou Reed had already used as a pretext to stage a theatrical piece years ago entitled "POEtry" with director Robert Wilson.
In 2003 the partnership between the musician and the writer continued with The Raven, a double CD resulting from that theatrical experience. The title takes its name from Edgar Allan Poe's poem of the same name and seems to align with the questions that have most frequently tormented the American musician: "why am I driven to do what I shouldn't? What's wrong? And then, what is wrong and what is not?" Thus, we find the point of contact between Reed and Poe: the torment between the desire for survival and the instinct for self-destruction.

The album alternates music with spoken word, the most Reed-like rock, which fades into a gospel and re-emerges as funk, with the different voices that make up the spoken parts. A rich album, full of ideas and sounds. A discovery after another, a volcano in continuous eruption. Perhaps too rich, since a "cleaned up" edition has also been released, largely stripped of the spoken pieces.

Poe died at only forty years old, shortly after publishing the collection "The Raven and Other Poems," succumbing to the vice of drinking that led him to the hospital struck by delirium tremens. Reed translates those obsessions into rock, making use of a quartet composed of Mike Rathke, Fernando Saunders, Tony Smith, Friedrich Paravicini, and a host of guests ranging from David Bowie to Steve Buscemi for the spoken parts.
The double CD is more than a homage to the American writer who died one hundred fifty years ago; it is the result of a true partnership, as could happen between two artists who find themselves sharing a part of their lives, a fusion of souls, tormented souls balanced between pain and pleasure. And we are convinced that Edgar Allan Poe, if he were alive today, would fully recognize himself in the music of his compatriot Lou Reed.