This is a very recent addition to the phone playlist. The Velvet Underground’s Loaded has been on my laptop’s iTunes library since about 2013. It’s not my favourite album of the band’s, but moments from tracks on there like ‘Who Loves the Sun’, ‘Sweet Jane’ and ‘Oh! Sweet Nuthin” have always popped in my head from time to time. But sometime around September/October time, something inside was telling me to revisit ‘New Age’. And so I did. And apart from the glorious ending, I still wasn’t very interested. Clearly that opinion changed. It’s now the song I most go to from that record.

Like all the other songs on Loaded, ‘New Age’ was written by Lou Reed. But it’s also one of the four on there sung by fellow band member Doug Yule, who would be encouraged by Reed to take the lead vocal from time to time. Something interesting about Reed’s writing here is how he shifts the narrative perspective from verse to the next. The first sees him recounting a conversation between a “fat blonde actress” and her fan with a mix of third and first person point of view. The next has him saying “You’re over the hill and you’re looking for love”. Who’s you? The listener? Maybe he’s writing about himself. And the ‘I’ll come running to you…’ sections cover the first person straight up. Alongside his writing, the chord changes progress in a way that they never quite resolve fully. They rise and fall, climb and then lose a step, so you’re waiting for that moment when that big release happens. And it does with the almighty ‘It’s the beginning of a new age’ chorus that’s repeated until a guitar solo comes in and closes the song out. Listening to it on vinyl, it’s the last song on the first side before you’d have to turn the record over. It’s a great way to go out.

Doug Yule does a fine job on the vocals here. He’s not the greatest singer, but like on the aforementioned ‘Who Loves the Sun’ or ‘Candy Says’ from the previous album he does well enough that I couldn’t imagine how Lou Reed would sound if he sung them himself. The rhyming of ‘Robert Mitchum’ and ‘catch him’ isn’t too great to my ears, but that’s by no means his fault. He just had to sing what was written down. For whatever reason, the ending was somewhat butchered on the official 1970 release. It was edited in a way that backing vocals come in early, repeat, cymbals come in where they shouldn’t… You can hear out kind of awkward it is. Quite strange that it’s labelled as the “Full Length Version” when it really isn’t. Luckily, a re-release of the album back in 2015 included the track at its fullest, which I hope you would have heard by now ’cause it’s only up there.