In his memoir, “What’s Welsh For Zen,” published in 1999, John Cale tells a story about a party that Columbia Records threw for Bob Dylan at the Whitney Museum in the mid-eighties. Beneath a bank of televisions showing Dylan’s face, a staggering assortment of stars queued up for photo ops: Iggy Pop and David Bowie, Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro, Billy Joel and Christie Brinkley, Yoko Ono and Judy Collins. Somewhere in the line was John Cale, very drunk. “It was one of the times when I completely lost self-esteem,” Cale writes. Lou Reed, his estranged friend and former bandmate, walked by and shot him a look, “as though to say, Fuck you,” Cale recalls. By the time Cale reached the end of the line, he was standing with Talking Heads, “but it seemed to me that all the photographers were really taking pictures of Talking Heads and Bob Dylan, and I was excluded.”
Cale, who has released more than a dozen solo studio albums—among them “Paris 1919,” “Fear,” and “Music for a New Society”—and composed the scores for dozens of films, including “Basquiat” and “American Psycho,” is something of a musical Zelig. Born to a miner and a schoolteacher in Wales, he took to music early, joining the National Youth Orchestra of Wales, as a violist, when he was thirteen. After studying at Goldsmiths, in London, he came to the United States with the help of Aaron Copland. Cale was an early enthusiast for the work of John Cage and, in 1963, joined La Monte Young’s avant-garde group, eventually called the Theatre of Eternal Music. Two years later, with Lou Reed, he co-founded the Velvet Underground; the band came to work closely with Andy Warhol. Cale has also produced albums by the Stooges, the Modern Lovers, and Patti Smith, among others. He’s conducted an orchestra of drones and he has even walked the runway for Comme des Garçons and Yohji Yamamoto.
Despite all this, he seems oddly underappreciated. (David Bowie once called him “one of the most underrated musicians in rock history.”) When I asked him about this recently, he said it didn’t bother him. “What I did was work very hard and do as much as I could in spite of all the difficulties, so I don’t have an axe to grind,” he told me, on Zoom, from his recording studio in Los Angeles. Cale, now eighty, will release “Mercy,” his first album of new material in a decade, this month. A slinky, nocturnal collection evoking bombed-out buildings, seedy bars, and vampiric criminals, the album is steeped in the paranoia and madness of contemporary American life. It is also a testimony to Cale’s enduring appeal to younger artists: Weyes Blood, Laurel Halo, Animal Collective, and others make guest appearances. In late December, we spoke not only about the new album but about growing up in Wales, his friendship with David Bowie, the ways in which he and Lou Reed’s legacies are forever entwined, and the rapacious appetite for the new that keeps him going. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
I was really struck by how apocalyptic the new album is—not only lyrically but even the sound of it, with the glassy synths on “Time Stands Still,” for instance, or the droning strings on “Marilyn Monroe’s Legs.” How much of what was going on in the world over the last few years informed your songwriting?
Oh, very much so. I mean, it’s something that climbed up my neck. This album started about two and a half years ago. I didn’t want to go that route but in the end it was impossible to avoid it—what happened in the world took over. The medical side of the world and the noisy side of the world with guns going off. Some of these songs were not a direct reaction to what was going on, but it had all the elements of it.
The opening lines of “Mercy”—“lives do matter, lives don’t matter”—recalls that period, in the summer of 2020, and the protests against police violence that were raging at the time.
You couldn’t avoid it. The album was really dictated by what was going on with COVID and the hurt that everybody was feeling, and I just went with it.
The album has these rather sinister images—melting ice caps and animals migrating and liquor and guns. But amid all of this you manage to convey a sense of hope as well.
There was the reacting to the world side of it, and then there was also the fantasy side of it—like in “Marilyn Monroe’s Legs,” which came from being in the studio with a bunch of string players. I was really happy with everything they were doing. I had them improvise drones. There was a lot of intensity in how they approached the task. Pain and anger are beautiful in the right strokes.
Another striking thing about the album is how contemporary it sounds. Some of the beats evoke hip-hop, and you recruited a number of younger artists to collaborate with you on it. What keeps you pushing and challenging yourself at this point?
There’s a lot of reasons for going in this direction. The approach was not to write a song and then have so-and-so participate. I knew a lot of these artists before from participating in some Velvet Underground retrospectives over the years. I thought that the structure of the thing was something they could all approach and enjoy.
What made you think of Natalie Mering of Weyes Blood for “Story of Blood”? It’s a great pairing, with her voice sort of gliding around yours, creating this spectral feeling.
Yeah, the range—her vocal range is great. There were many different aspects to the song that were really pinpointed by how she sang it. She has a very elegant and passionate approach to singing. It may be raining outside, but her voice transcends all of that. Her tonality was the perfect fit to bring the dark and the light into the thread. Her appreciation of harmonic dissonance was exactly what I was after.
On “Moonstruck (Nico’s Song)” and “Night Crawling,” songs about Nico and David Bowie respectively, you conjure these dear people from your past and pay homage to them. Was there something in particular that compelled you to revisit them in this moment?
In the case of “Moonstruck,” I didn’t really know it was about Nico until I finished it. And it was bothering me that I didn’t quite know where it would sit in the album—but then all of a sudden there it was, I couldn’t avoid it anymore. The main character in the song seemed bent on self-destruction, but all the while she actually left an artistic footprint that only grew as time went on. I wanted to illuminate her groundbreaking contributions to true independence. She craved respect but only on her own terms. That’s when I knew it was about Nico.
I was thinking a lot about how she evolved as a songwriter, and it slapped me in the face, thinking about these songs she wrote and how they just got better. And I started laughing about it—here was this German national writing songs in English. I was happy to see that she spent so much time developing something that was, I think, really for Jim Morrison. She was always happy to talk about his role in her development.
You’ve said that “Night Crawling” is about the times you spent with Bowie in New York in the seventies, collaborating and partying together—and maybe a bit more of the latter than the former. Like you, Bowie constantly evolved. Did you feel a kinship with him?
Absolutely. He was someone who was not gonna go away. He deliberately went for categories of songwriting, and there was a depth to what he did. He patterned himself after a type of overt musical-theatre genre, but deconstructed it so it became something particularly his own. He crafted his images so carefully, as specific identities where those songs lived. They were notated by character names, like Ziggy, Thin White Duke, et cetera. So I wanted to take that on.
I was kind of stunned by how that song came about and worked itself out. I was thinking of when I taught Bowie viola for a benefit concert we were doing at Town Hall. I asked him if he wanted to play the viola part on a song and he said, “Yeah.” You can be awkward about these things or you can be creative. He just came aboard and did it, which is the sign of a great artist.
“I Know You’re Happy” may be my favorite song on the album—it’s such a beam of light amid the darkness, and works so well for that reason. You sing with Tei Shi, who often writes and performs in an R. & B. mode—another pairing that you wouldn’t expect, and yet it works.
I jumped at the chance to do a Motown, Marvin [Gaye] and Tammi Terrell kind of song, so I was really happy it worked out. She’s got such a great voice. I always want to take advantage of the variety that’s available. I happened to be in a little back and forth with Dev Hynes, and he played acoustic guitar on that track. He heard I was trying to reach Tei Shi, and he thought she’d be perfect. Sure enough, she was.
In your lyrics, you sometimes juxtapose autobiographical details with more fantastical elements in a way that is incredibly evocative.
Well, if you read enough Dylan Thomas you’ll come across it. If you look at “Marilyn Monroe’s Legs,” that’s the mirror image of what Dylan Thomas is trying to do.
I saw an old interview with Martin Scorsese where he talks about how Steven Spielberg can perfectly time a shot of the sun rising by seeing if there’s mist coming off the ground, because he grew up in Arizona. Scorsese says that he could never do that because he’s from New York, and is more at home in the shadows, in hallways and apartments. How do you think the physical reality of the world you grew up in as a kid in Wales shaped the way you saw the world and the way you made art?
That’s interesting. I’m sorry to say, but I think a lot of it is travel. I really wanted to get out of Wales. When I was growing up, I was a little rough around the edges, and I tried to do whatever I could to develop a musical style. All the music I was raised on was Alban Berg, Schoenberg—a lot of strange groupings. And there was a little library in my village; the library was put there by the coal miners’ union, and if you wanted to learn anything about a song or a style of music you could find something in the library that would have that, and I went for it. That’s where I found Stockhausen. So I was growing up with real music. And by the time I went to study at Goldsmiths I just wanted to run around Europe. Those characters were all kind of still around—or their ideas were, at least. When I went to Tanglewood for my scholarship, they were there. I was very lucky in that way.
Education was really stressed by your family, is that right?
Yeah, my mom would not let that go. She was great.
Did subsuming yourself in art save you, in a way?
Absolutely. Between the coal miners’ union library and my mom, I didn’t stand a chance. These were incredibly positive influences. I had a family that had a lot of art in it and a lot of musical development. My aunt originated a radio program on the BBC Wales that was a talent search kind of show—with some kooky characters but also some very talented people. All of it had a link to music, so I just stretched it as far as I could. And then I got ahold of the twelve-tone music that was in Stockhausen.
But I became worried there was nowhere else to go, that there was no other alleyway that I could run down. But it wasn’t true, because all of a sudden there was John Cage and La Monte Young. And so America saved my life.
It seems like you wasted no time when you got to New York. How quickly did you find yourself in the avant-garde music world with Cage and La Monte Young?
Oh, right away. I mean, I had a plan. I knew what I wanted to do and I went for it. And, to be honest, La Monte and Tony Conrad and Cage, they helped me—they were very helpful and endorsed what I was trying to do, until I got the band together. But that was the way ahead.
Was that part of the motivation behind starting the Velvet Underground, seeing that there was maybe more of a future in rock and roll?
Oh, yeah. That was the conclusion I came to very quickly. Finding someone who was a lyrical match for anything that would be thrown his way was important, though. I tried explaining to Lou that what we were trying to do was get the elements of avant-garde music and art, and the elements of Andy [Warhol] and the Factory, and put it in some kind of order. It worked beautifully.
When you were sixteen, you were hospitalized following a nervous breakdown. Lou Reed famously was institutionalized around the same age and given electroshock therapy. Do you think there was a sense of camaraderie between you and Lou because of your shared experience of having these kinds of troubled adolescences, where you both dealt with illness?
The camaraderie did work that way. I mean, he also helped me see things in a different way. New York was at a boiling point at that time, and I learned a lot from Lou, and I think he learned a lot from me. It was an exchange route. If I found something I’d run to him and say, “Look at this!” I’d go to London and see all these things going on—the Who, Daddy Longlegs. I was just gobsmacked. I said, “Wait a minute, we’re not the only ones doing the experimenting, there are other people doing it as well.” And I ran back to New York and said to Lou, “You gotta listen to this, this is what’s going on, and if we don’t get moving we are going to be left behind.”
I’ve heard you say that with the Velvet Underground you guys wanted to challenge Bob Dylan in a way, or wanted to up the ante. Why was he the focus of that particular challenge for you?
Lyrically, he was the apex. He was doing a lot of the lyrical stuff that I heard Lou do. For Lou, it came out in dribs and drabs—it didn’t come out in a slam-bang kind of way. And I thought it could, and I thought it should. But, you know, they just had different styles. With Dylan, he was a poet and he’d write really stirring verses, and eventually it did come out of Lou, too, I think.
There’s a story about Reed bringing in the words to “Sunday Morning,” then refusing your offer to help flesh out the song, saying that he didn’t think of you as a songwriter. How much did that hurt, and how much did it motivate you to prove him wrong?
Well, there was an element of truth to it. I was very busy seeing how far I could push the instrumental side of it. But, that being said, I don’t think it was an alleyway Lou wanted to go down.
In what sense?
In the sense that I’d become a songwriter. I don’t think that was something he was really interested in.
A few weeks ago, I went to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and took a walk through the Lou Reed exhibit they have up. In one room they have a couple shelves of the records he owned, and there were a few of yours that I spotted.
Oh, really?
Yeah. I guess I’m wondering if you guys kept track of each other’s work over the years—if there was an appreciation of each other’s work, or if there was just too much baggage there.
I think the baggage was pretty heavy. I think he was very happy once “Walk on the Wild Side” happened; he was content to just let that ride. And, I mean, I don’t think he was fascinated or inspired by whatever I was doing at the time.
Were you inspired by any of the work he was doing? It feels like you’re both doing something worlds away from each other.
Exactly. It was completely different.
I’m a big fan of your first solo album, “Vintage Violence.” I’ve heard you put that album down a bit, but are you surprised by the endurance of songs like “Big White Cloud,” which continues to find listeners, more than fifty years on?
I think I was just trying too hard to develop. I was really working to press the creativity button and go from one thing to the other to the other and have something at the end of the day that had some grainy atmosphere to it. I didn’t want to copy Lou, so that was something I was avoiding. So I worked other routes.
I find reading about the early days of your solo career inspiring. You seemed to be contending with a lot—you’re coming out of a fairly toxic band situation, a troubled marriage, and grappling with figuring out who you are. Was that a frightening period?
It was substantially frightening. I never figured it out until, like, six albums in. And I’m still trying to find the key to the lock. I think I only started to formulate some kind of map in my mind at the beginning of this album. There was always something else going on that I could attach myself to, the kinds of songs that were on the other albums, they never really satisfied me as much as this one does.
Do you feel that way with every new album? Like you’re getting closer to what you’ve always wanted to do?
It’s getting better now. In the amount of time and effort that went into this album––because of the pandemic––I think I found a pattern or style that just really helped me. And helped me formulate a style for what comes next. This album took two and half years to put together and it became a bit of a workshop for me. Once I finished it, it didn’t stop, and so by the time I got all the work for this album done I was into another album and it was a lot of effort that went into styling those upcoming songs. Because the lockdown happened, and everyone was hiding away, by the time that was done I had, like, sixty or seventy songs. They’re not ready to air yet but they’ll be there.
So you have a few albums of material just on the back burner right now?
Yes. Probably two albums.
A lot of your classic solo albums, such as “Paris 1919” or “Fear,” feel like they were composed by someone sitting at a piano or with a guitar. This album doesn’t feel that way at all. It seems less centered around song structure and more built on tone and ambience. How did these songs come to be?
You’re right. I was also happy to see it go that way. I didn’t want it to be a piano album. I did want it to be a guitar album, but I also wanted it to be an instrumental orchestral album. Wherever I could see it going, I went after it, I chased it. But, with most of this album, it all started with the beats. Sometime around a decade or so ago, I started thinking of songs in terms of rhythm before melody. The initial approach was to figure out how much separated me from what was commercially available at the time. Was this something I could do on my own, without premade samples? And could this be my path forward, a new way of expressing myself? It had to be in a spirit of uniqueness.
Once that was settled in my mind, that I could create from this other place, it was no longer interesting to simply push the strands of avant-garde, orchestral writings or disrupting traditional song structure. All of that changed when it became clear to me that what I loved about hip-hop was the production. It was the new form of avant-garde. I tend to sketch a song from a sonic palette to create how I want to hear the song, before I write the lyrics. This album began with a lot of beats and in some instances, beats and a string section.
An underrated aspect to your career that I think people forget is that you produced these incredible albums for other artists—Iggy and the Stooges, the Modern Lovers, Patti Smith, to name a few. Would you say that was a result of good luck, or did you have a sense for what was going to be an exciting project to work on?
When you’re not in a band anymore, you try to figure out what parts you have on your own. I figured out I could work the production side of things, and I just did as much as I could. You’ve gotta find the right groove for the band that you’re producing. And there’s many a slip between the cup and the lip, and you don’t necessarily have the answers all the time. Jonathan Richman [the frontman of the Modern Lovers] was an amazing kind of individual because he had this style that was strange, but it was really alive. He was such an oddball character. Everything he did on stage was just fabulous. And it still is.
How do you feel about the legacy of “Songs for Drella,” an album that saw you and Lou reunite, in 1990, to pay tribute to Andy Warhol? It only seems to grow in appreciation.
It has grown. “Songs for Drella”—I think we had three weeks to finish it, and we got to the end and I said to Lou, “You’ve left Andy out. So we’ve gotta go back in and put another verse in there about us and the band.” And he did. It was very refreshing.
Much has been said about Warhol’s relationship to the Velvet Underground, but how did he influence you individually?
The Factory was a particular kind of safety valve in creative circles in New York. It was very important in the history of my development at that time because it was the example of a fervent pursuit of an extraordinary work ethic. Art is work. Work is art. I never realized until I arrived at the Factory how important it was having a place to go every day. Andy fostered so much creativity for so many of us.
Not long after “Songs for Drella,” you made this effervescent art-pop record with Brian Eno, “Wrong Way Up”—some of the most commercial music either of you has made. I know there was some tension in that collaboration, too. Is that tension necessary to making good work, or does the good work come out in spite of the tension?
Well, generally, in my case, it has bred good work. I’m very satisfied with everything we did with “Songs for Drella” and “Wrong Way Up.” I think both of those composers, Lou and Brian, were hard workers, and I don’t think there’s much you can teach them—they’re not people who are going to take to heart what your ideas are.
I don’t know if you want to discuss this, but I’m curious whether things were left in a positive way between you and Lou before his passing? And do you think about him often?
I do. I do. I think a lot of good things about him. But it was an awkward parting of ways.
Does it ever bother you that your legacies are kind of tethered to each other?
No, not really. I mean, I think he has his way of doing things, and I have my way of doing things.
Your first band together was called the Primitives, and a certain level of primitiveness, so to speak, or simplicity, is celebrated in rock and roll, and is used to great effect in your work. But your musical background—the classical training, the time in the avant-garde world—is more varied than that of many rock musicians. Has that allowed you to have a more interesting late career than most artists?
It’s possible. Yeah, I think that’s right. It has a lot to do with my background. If diversity is your thing, and you’ve gotta spread your wings, and you can’t sit down, all of that will help.
Is there a chapter of your career that you look back on with particular pride at this point?
I don’t really look back. I sit down at the keyboard or the computer and let go.
You’re focussed on the work ahead?
Always. ♦
