“Like many musicians, John Cale tends to excel in collaboration – see the Dream Syndicate, the Velvet Underground, albums with Nico, duets with Terry Riley and Brian Eno, and production for the Stooges, the Modern Lovers and Patti Smith. Cale's 1982 LP Music For A New Society, however, was a largely solo effort, and one of the grimmest, loneliest LPs ever made. There are songs about shame and death”
“For all its surface fury, punk rock has always had a surprising metaphysical aspect. In New York in the mid-Seventies, when Tom Verlaine and Patti Smith were friends struggling to remake themselves as artists — Verlaine with his band Television, Smith as a poet — their shared tastes in reading, from Rimbaud to Paul Bowles, […]”
