LOU REED
〰️
LOU REED 〰️
Vinyl redesign
This project explored Lou Reed as a poetic, gritty, urban punk rock frontman from the infamous band, the Velvet Underground, along with an extensive solo career. His name is embedded with pop culture and 90s music legends. I planned to research Lou as hard as possible to find my own way to express what Lou makes me feel in his music. The two songs featured on our vinyl redesign are “Waiting for My Man” and “Wild Child.” These two songs are fascinating to compare because they're almost complete opposites in tone.
Process
After researching the visual language of Lou Reed's New York. I was feeling black-and-white grain, cigarette ash, and neon bleeding into rain-slicked asphalt. Also, his iconic Sunglasses. Minimal, not because things are simple, but because everything unnecessary has been stripped away.
"Wild Child" is a completely different register — quieter, more melancholy, almost elegiac. The song moves through a series of conversations Reed has with various people — Chuck, Phil, Betty, Ed — and each one circles back to a woman named Lorraine, a homeless woman sleeping on the street. The tone here is observational but tender, like a series of snapshots from the margins of bohemian New York. Lorraine is described as someone sleeping on the street, living alone without a house or home, asking for spare change. The refrain "always back to Lorraine" has a haunted quality — she keeps surfacing in conversations the way guilt or grief does. Reed isn't editorializing; he's just noticing. But the noticing itself is the compassion.
"I'm Waiting for my Man" is all tension and momentum. The music is described as a tough garage rock, proto-punk workout — Reed deadpanning a story about scoring heroin in Harlem. The tone is driven, anxious, almost mechanical — the repetition of "waiting" mirrors the physical experience of addiction, the compulsive loop of needing a fix. There's no romance in it, no self-pity. Reed said, "Everything about that song holds true, except the price." That's the key to the tone: reportage. He's not judging the narrator, not dramatizing the suffering — just describing the transaction with flat precision. The white guy out of place in Harlem, the dealer who's always late, the brief relief. It's blunt, even a little matter-of-fact, which makes it more unsettling than any hand-wringing would.
Photo Process
I found many inspiring pictures and thought about the contrast in the songs and the artists on this record. My favorite colors are blue and red in that order so when I was working on these covers, I found myself thinking the colors gave a little personality to the songs. The same goes for the typography of each artist’s name
Touch Points
Touch points
