I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Collected Lyrics

Out of print for several years, a comprehensive volume of Lou Reed’s lyrics, now updated in a new text design to include the lyrics from his final album with Metallica, Lulu.

Through his many incarnations - from proto-punk to glam rocker to elder statesman of the avant garde Lou Reed’s work has maintained an undeniable vividness and raw beauty, fuelled by precise character studies and rendered with an admirable shot of moral ambiguity. Beginning with his formative days in the Velvet Underground and continuing through his remarkable solo albums like Transformer, Berlin, and New York, Doin’ The Things We Want To is crucial to an appreciation of Lou Reed, not only as a consummate underground musician, but as one of the truly significant visionary lyricists of the rock ‘n’ roll era.

Containing a body of work that spans more than four decades and facsimile pages from late career lyrics, this is a monument to the literary qualities of an American original whose images and storytelling genius are now embedded in the counter-cultural narrative.