David Colosi pays personal tribute to Lou Reed on the third anniversary of the poet-singer-songwriter supreme’s passing. Host Colosi on this special episode: “Whenever I’ve been invited as a visiting poet, students always ask me what poets I like. My first answer is always Lou Reed. They don’t get it. Neil Gaiman said it best when he spoke about his fans who respond to his characters by dressing or making-up like them. He said he’s touched to see that he contributed to furnishing someone’s internal landscape. Now I never took heroin, but all of Lou Reed entered my veins from the earliest Velvets through his collaborations with Metallica and John Zorn and Laurie Anderson, and those rivers have done some carving in my landscape – not in the way I look, but in the way I write, make art and navigate. Lou considered himself a literate rocker, and one of his goals was to pursue the good line. And he wrote many of them. His literary influences are well know, Delmore Schwartz, Hubert Selby, William Burroughs and Edgar Allan Poe. He never tried to rewrite them, except for Poe, but even then, he made it his own. And this is where I come in. Lou went from literature to rock, and I’m going from rock back to literature. If he demonstrated his path of influence from Poe, then I could show mine from him. I didn’t know Lou Reed, and he sure as hell didn’t know me, but I met him a few times, and we exchanged a few words. These are some of the songs that inspired me to write, make and be. They’re blended in my head like a Mayonnaise Soda (that’s what life’s like without Lou). This is Disco Mystic; this is Waves of Fear.”
Release date: 2016 October 27
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