As far as I'm concerned, ["Lou Reed" is] the album we need most of all right now—the one which takes us above and beyond all the superstar crap and back into music. Or forward into music, because I don't want to say that this is a "back to the roots" album. It's just that listening to it gives me the kind of charge I haven't had in God knows how long.

Velvet freaks (and there are more than you think) will recognise in [the lyrics of "Wild Child"] the characteristic quality of Lou's best writing: what Geoffrey Cannon has pinned down as Reed's journalistic approach…. [His] reportage [is] as evocative as any newsreel.

Thus, for example, he approaches Lorraine, the Wild Child, through other people, and what he talks to them about. Directly, he says almost nothing about Lorraine herself—but by the time the song's over...