Lou Reed’s songs, both with the Velvet Underground and as a solo artist, constitute a body of work that ranks with Dylan and Lennon-McCartney as among the most significant and influential songwriting catalogues of the twentieth century.

Reed was both an artistic exhibitionist and an intensely private man; a restless experimental soul and an ardent fan dedicated to the most elemental, even conservative, principles of rock & roll; a writer with the highest literary aspirations and a guitarist with a boundless love of distortion and noise.