Laurie Anderson Speaks With Dazed About Lou Reed's Do Angels Need Haircuts?

Lou Reed's poetry collection Do Angels Need Haircuts? hit bookstore shelves last month; it's, in Chai Ravens's words, "a glimpse of a brief but pivotal moment in the life of an artist who is still, [Laurie] Anderson thinks, rather misunderstood." For Dazed, Ravens spoke with Laurie Anderson about combing through Reed's archives to put together the book. "Anderson and Reed’s paths didn’t cross until 30 years after his tentative foray into poetry. Since his death from liver disease in 2015, Anderson has been sorting through Reed’s huge archive of notes, lyrics, and recordings," Ravens explains. From there: 

The poems he read out at St. Mark’s that night are now being published in Do Angels Need Haircuts?, a compact poetry collection featuring an afterword by Anderson, the first in a series of retrospectives from Reed’s archives being issued with the New York Public Library.

Leaping from the quotidian to the profound in the space of a line, Reed’s poems often bury their wisdom in deadpan humour. Some couplets read as simply as nursery rhymes, concealing an acerbic streak: “If lipstick were black you’d wear it / If love were straight you’d curl it,” runs the opening of “Lipstick”. Others tap into the psychedelic experimentation of the late 60s, like the droning wordspill of “Murder Mystery”, which had previously provided the lyrics and title of a Velvet Underground song.

On that night, Reed perhaps thought he was swapping rock and roll for writing, a career he felt pulled towards through the encouragement of his college professor, the poet Delmore Schwartz. In the end, he began recording his debut solo album just a few months later, with the iconic Transformer LP arriving the next year.

Read their conversation at Dazed.