"One thinks of what one hoped to be/And then faces reality."
Lou Reed - "Who Am I? (Tripitena's Song)"

In 2000, Lou Reed collaborated with director Robert Wilson on Poe-try -- a retelling of the life and art of Edgar Allan Poe through music and spoken word. 3 years later we have Reed's interpretation of the show in The Raven, and he is determined to find the humanity in the man who became the avatar of terror.

It is a natural task for Reed, whose life in art, like Poe's, has been waged with and against self-destructive impulses. But if the road of excess led Poe to an early grave (he was 40), it has led Reed to truths as unadorned as his ballad voice: quiet and gnawing and precise. He knows about "Living the past of the maddening impulse/The pure driven instinct, the pure driven murder" ("Call On Me"). He also knows its bitter consequences, stirring his pain into snarling guitars and baritone sax on the instrumental "A Thousand Departed Friends." In "Vanishing Act" one can imagine Poe living in an alcoholic twilight, unable to recover from the death of his wife 2 years before his own: "It must be nice to disappear/To always be looking forward/And never looking back/With a young lady on your arm." Still, Reed is too smart to become wistful too often. The Raven veers from lullaby to burlesque with abandon, retaining the "show" quality of its predecessor.

We get a new version of "The Bed" (perhaps even more menacing than on Berlin) and a spooky reworking of "Perfect Day" by Antony, who sounds like Jeff Buckley but more fragile (if that’s possible). There's spoken word by Willem Dafoe ("The Raven"), Steve Buscemi as lounge lizard ("Broadway Song"), the palpable "Blind Rage," and a free-form duet with Ornette Coleman ("Guilty"). But as great and varied as the album is, it’s not until the sublime "Who Am I? (Tripitena's Song)" in which Reed sizes up the past, however painful, in search of an answer. When he sings "If it's wrong to think on this/To hold the dead past in your fist/Why were we given memories?" he speaks both of Poe, his own life and art, and to the integrity of this project.

Darren Reidy