Lou Reed, "Heavenly Arms" (1982)

(listen)

It's none of my business, but I still miss Sylvia. In retrospect, maybe Lou Reed was more in love with something she helped him find in himself than with her—though who can say that isn't the reason most of us are in love in the first place anyway? Not my business, as I said, and beside the point anyway. I can go visit her any time I like in this song (or, if not her, then what I miss, because obviously I don't know her). It's the song Reed used to climax The Blue Mask, his first great album of yet another reascendant period, the early '80s. And that's no coincidence, because among other things the (carefully incidental) priority is on the lines of a heterosexual agenda. "I love women, I think they're great," he says in the song "Women." Everywhere you look on that album it is women, women, women. So if it's going to be a torch song at the end the ground is laid. But it's laid with other elements too: this amazing band he assembled, with Robert Quine on guitar, Fernando Saunders on an aching soulful bass, and rock-solid drummer Doane Perry. The birth of 2 guitars bass drum as self-conscious ethos buoys this. Not to mention something about emotional recovery, the details hazy but the feeling of assessing and owning up strong here. It all comes to a bracing head in "Heavenly Arms," one of Reed's most nakedly revealing songs. The heavenly arms of the title belong to Sylvia, of course, called out by name. Not just called out, but implored, beseeched, howled for, from as vulnerable a point as may ever have been recorded, more or less. A bellow of love. It's fair enough to call it calculating—it's Lou Reed, after all, and I've outlined the case above. But that doesn't mean it won't move you, over and over again.