John Cale Talks Lou Reed and Remaking ‘Music for a New Society’
When John Cale looks back at his experimental solo album Music for a New Society, all he remembers is personal chaos and turmoil. Since exiting the Velvet Underground in 1968, he had explored different hues of art rock, minimalist classical music and straight-ahead rock on since-celebrated albums like 1973's Paris 1919 and the following year's Fear. He also produced records by the Stooges, Nico, Patti Smith, the Modern Lovers and others. But in 1982, when he made Music, he felt lost, like he was at an existential impasse, and it tortured him.
"I was trying to figure out why I stopped doing avant-garde music and doing Paris 1919, and what really did I expect from rock & roll?" he tells Rolling Stone from Los Angeles on an early morning. "I just was getting lost as to what future direction my music was gonna be. So I started thinking about where I started, in Wales, and I went back to Dylan Thomas and started writing songs about Dylan Thomas. It was trying to figure out where in my background I got lost."
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When he looks back on the period now, he's impressed by how hard he tried and "the fact that I stuck to it and pushed through," but he still senses the anxiety that surrounded the time. He'd essentially coaxed an LP from himself, forcing himself to record every thought he had. It all came out bleak. The characters in the songs felt trapped. They were aware of their shortcomings but did nothing to change. "If I looked right at it, I'd be honest and say, 'That's exactly what was happening [to me],'" he says.
Now Cale, age 73, has given Music for a New Society a second look and re-recorded most of it as M:FANS, an album of variations on his themes. A lot had changed in the three decades since he'd first sequestered himself in the studio. He had new technology to experiment with, a new friend to record with — Dirty Projectors' Amber Coffman sings on "Close Watch" — and he had hindsight. When his Velvet Underground foil, Lou Reed, died during the M:FANS sessions, Cale went through a whole new set of extreme emotions. It's all present in the lush textures of his two new versions of "If You Were Still Around," the uplifting throbbing of "Changes Made," the electro R&B of "Thoughtless Kind" and the hip-hop beats of "Close Watch." He's coupled the new record with the original album for comparison, and the differences are staggering.
Here, Cale reflects on why it was all so difficult for him.
You've described Music for a New Society as a painful experience. Why revisit it?
I liked some of the lyrics. I liked some of the ways that the songs evolved. And organizers of European festivals have asked me to do Fear and Music for a New Society. Since people were asking for that, this was one way of dealing with it. No matter how harrowing the experience was, when I looked back on it, I was glad I went through it.
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