7/8/2023 0 Comments Think of me lyrics![]() I’m running it through a Barber Burn Unit overdrive pedal and an Electro-Harmonix POG (opens in new tab) with the settings down a little, so it just added some low-end depth to create a more aggressive, bluesy lead sound. ![]() Yes, the lead guitar is a Carter pedal steel in E9 tuning. Is that you playing pedal steel on “Pretty Soon”? I’m not sure if they’re brass, but I use them on my little finger, and they’re just big enough to cover an octave from the first to fourth strings, so it’s easy to move around fairly quickly. I’ve tried a lot of different slides, and I finally had a guy make me some custom ones that are extra-thick metal. I just pushed the amp hard enough to get it to saturate. I just cranked it through a Fuchs 1x12 combo amp and ran a cabinet in a closet to help a little bit with leakage. I always try to get Jimmy’s guitar on every record I make. Of course, we lost Jimmy a long time ago, but his wife, Peggy, felt that Jimmy would want me to have one of his guitars, so I got this Zemaitis of his. I loved the Pretenders, and Jimmy and I jammed a lot together and palled around quite a bit. It’s just standard tuning, because there’s a lot of chording, and I used this beautiful custom Zemaitis guitar that belonged to James Honeyman-Scott, who was one of my dear friends. What guitar did you use for the slide part in the title track, and is it in open tuning? (Image credit: Gijsbert Hanekroot/Redferns) Nils Lofgren performs on stage in Amsterdam, Netherlands, 1975. We just learned 20 songs, tore ’em up and experimented with different arrangements, and when we had all of them in shape to play live as a band, we started recording. I don’t think we even went after a take for at least seven or eight days. We wanted to keep this album very old-school and earthy and as live as possible, and we pulled it all off. I didn’t even want them to come in until I could sing and play each song well and go for live performances, because all the little touches are a lot more exciting when you get the meat of the song done. I wanted a band in a room where we’re all looking at each other, and so it was Andy Newmark on drums and Kevin McCormick on bass – two of my favorite musicians ever. So now there’s five sitting in my basement, and in the back of my mind I always thought Lou would call one day and say, “Let’s dust off those songs we never got to.” But then, tragically, we lost Lou, and I just felt that we had to get those lost songs in shape to share.ĭid you record Blue With Lou mostly live? And then I released another one called “Driftin’ Man” on my Breakaway Angel (opens in new tab) album. In ’95, I released “Life,” with Branford Marsalis playing this beautiful sax on it. So he used three songs and I used three, and I put out a couple after that in ’85 on the Damaged Goods (opens in new tab) album. Lou did a spoken version, though, and I always wanted to do a version with the actual melody in it. He loved my chorus to “City Lights” and didn’t want to mess with it, but he wrote a story about Charlie Chaplin, and he wanted to use it on The Bells. There were three he wanted to use right away. In the back of my mind I always thought Lou would call one day and say, 'Let’s dust off those songs we never got to' Nils Lofgren So I made some coffee and stayed on the phone with him for two hours, meticulously writing down every single lyric he’d written for all the songs. It startled me, and I thought, Did I just write 13 songs with Lou Reed? He was jacked up about it and wanted to dictate them to me right then. And then Lou woke me up at four one morning and said he’d been up three nights straight and had finished 13 sets of lyrics that he felt great about. So I sent him a 13-song cassette – remember this was 1979 – and just carried on my pre-production work with Bob.Ībout a month went by, and I kind of forgot about it, because I was wrapped up in a lot of music that we did have. He asked me to send him a tape of what I had and leave all the lyrics and titles in, and just let him live with that. How did you actually start the writing process? I told him that I wrote songs all the time but lyrics always took more work, and he said it was the exact opposite for him: Words poured out in pretty good shape, but the music was more of a struggle. So Bob called Lou, and he was into the idea, which I was pleasantly surprised about. Bob suggested that rather than have me keep attacking them with rewrites, what about co-writing with Lou Reed? It seemed an unlikely thing to pull off, but I was certainly open to it. We had a lot of songs we liked, but I also had a lot of music with titles and partial lyrics, none of which we felt strongly about. It was kind of a magical musical accident where Bob Ezrin and I were doing pre-production for the Nils album. How did you meet Lou Reed and wind up co-writing all those tunes?
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