It’s always been somewhat obvious that Lou Reed’s sneering persona and transgressive antics were cover for a sensitive soul. This is a man who escaped the stultifying suburbs of 1950s Long Island, found a place at the Warhol Factory, and then helped revolutionize rock and roll by telling the stories of junkies, drag queens, street hustlers, and other denizens of New York City’s underbelly, first as the leader of the Velvet Underground and then as a solo artist. For all his aggressive posturing, and sometimes genuinely bad behavior, Reed was a purveyor of empathy above all. He helped the rest of us understand what it’s like to be on, or beyond, the edges of society.

But the persona made quite an impression, especially since he was such a ubiquitous New York character until his death in 2013 at age 71. I met him a few times, and he was always suitably grumpy. The one time I interviewed him, for this magazine, he hung up on me. I don’t think he was offended by anything I said. He was just being “Lou Reed.” Obviously, I was flattered.

If anyone could bring out Reed’s softer side, it was his wife and partner of 21 years, Laurie Anderson. A renowned musician and performance artist, Anderson is as cheerfully Midwestern as Reed was snarlingly New Yawk. And the choices she has made as the keeper of Reed’s legacy are slowly, steadily sanding off the edges of his bad-boy image.

According to Anderson, Reed devoted the bulk of his time and energy in the last eight years of his life to the practice of tai chi. Last year, Anderson published The Art of the Straight Line, a book collecting Lou’s reflections on the form alongside testimonials from his many teachers, students, and friends. Among its more poignant revelations comes from the musician and artist Ramuntcho Matta, who remembers Reed weeping with remorse in 2011 over the damage he’d done to his body in his druggy heyday.

And now comes Hudson River Wind Meditations, a collection of hauntingly beautiful ambient tracks that Reed released in 2007 to accompany tai chi sessions with his longtime teacher, Master Ren Guangyi. Anderson describes it as “a quiet version of Metal Machine Music,” Reed’s 1975 noise album, which was so blisteringly panned that RCA pulled it from shelves after just three weeks. Naturally, it, too, is now the stuff of legend.

I’ve always been curious about the shockingly functional relationship these two mavericks seemed to share, so I jumped at the chance to interview Anderson about the new release. Over a delightful hour, we talked about everything from Kung Fu magazine, to Barbie and Gen Z feminism, to the trans dimension of “Walk on the Wild Side,” to Lou’s “cartoon” persona, to her exceedingly dim view of biographers.

Vanity Fair: I’m really excited to talk about this…I don’t know, can we call it a record?

Laurie Anderson: Let’s call it a record. Why not?

Okay, this record. I wanted to start by asking how it was made.

He made this late at night by sticking the microphone out the window and processing all of the sounds of the Hudson River. I thought it was such a good idea. You’d think you’d hear more traffic, but with a directional microphone you can pick up a lot of sloshing and surface noise. There’s a lot going on in that river, the current going up as well as down. And the wind currents around it are also pretty complicated. The way the water responds to the wind is…I just feel it in there.

He filtered that a lot and just made it as a quiet version of Metal Machine Music, in a way. He really made it for his teacher, Master Ren Guangyi. And they tried to use it in class, and people hated it. But they kept playing it, and then they realized this is the best tai chi music ever.

I don’t know if you’ve played it in the background at all, but it’s a really interesting thing to have going on in a room quietly. It definitely works its magic on you after a while. He put it on his website. It wasn’t a secret. But we decided finally, Let’s do a vinyl thing. I’ve fallen in love with vinyl again. I like the process of putting a record on. It’s a slightly ceremonial thing, to put a disc onto a record player. Do you listen to records?

It’s funny, all of my vinyl is hidden away now. I have a three-year-old, and I know what I did to my parents’ vinyl collection when I was a little kid. But I think I can bring it back out soon. She’s not ripping things apart presently.

I think for kids, records are really magic in a way that sound coming out of speakers and laptops isn’t. Because you see the physicality of the needle and the weirdness of the sound being embedded in those grooves.

When you say Lou was taking this sound and manipulating it, how did he do that? With pedals?

Mostly pedals. He had something called the Death Pedal that he ran audio through, and it was really scary. It was all kinds of delays and crunches and things that would bring out various aspects of those sounds. But he also was really looking for something that was not the classic Chinese erhu-style music that is often used in tai chi. I learned tai chi with that music, and I had the same resistance to this piece of music when I first heard it. But eventually—I can’t do tai chi without it, basically.

Can you tell me a little about the role tai chi played in Lou’s life?

Well, it was huge. He went to China a couple of times to the Chen village where this form originated. And he’s more well-known in China as a martial artist than as a musician, which I think people do not know. He was really thrilled to be on the cover of Kung Fu magazine. That was a big, big accomplishment for him.

I remember when he said, “I’m going to spend all my time now doing tai chi.” This was around 2005 or so. He did some wonderful music in that time. He did Berlin and Lulu, and a lot of other projects and tours. And he wrote new songs. But his main focus was tai chi. And I so admired that. A lot of people say what they’d like to do if they had all the time in the world, but it’s hard to put that into action. He did.

Do you think it helped him find peace? Honestly, there’s something I’ve been dying to ask you about for a long time. There’s an idea that Lou’s relationship with you was very healing for him, and that somebody who had some really dark times got to a much lighter place. I’m curious what you think about that, and how you think your relationship played into that, and how tai chi played into that.

I’m not somebody who necessarily uses that language, and I am not able to go into somebody else’s mind to say what changed them or what their motivations were. I don’t even know that for myself, so I would never try to do that for somebody else. I can say that when I met Lou, he was a super-angry person in many ways, and also very, very generous. Very complicated person. And in my observation, I would say that as he grew older, for whatever reasons, I just noticed the more charitable parts. For example, if we’d go to see a play or something, I would be the one going, “I thought that was a piece of junk.” And he would go, “But think about the score.” He was very generous to other artists, because he knew how hard it was to make things. He had real respect for people who did that.

For whatever reasons, all of us change a lot. I think people tend to think their personalities are more stable than they are. I think people are also encouraged not to change too much. “That’s just not like you. Why are you doing that?” If you had a brand that you were supposed to stay inside of, why can’t you just do something that’s way out of what you would normally say or do or be?

But he did have a brand, right? He had an image as an angry, dark guy.

But that was a cartoon. None of his friends believed that for one second. It was a joke, really. And one that he was happy to just keep doing. I think a lot of people fell for that, but nobody who knew him did.

Do you think tai chi offered him a healthier way to get to interesting places mentally and psychologically than the drugs he used early in his career?

I think tai chi has many similar effects to a very powerful drug. It takes you into another world very, very quickly. And by your own volition, rather than just being taken for a ride by heroin or something, so you get to be the boss. And Lou was enough of a control freak to want to be the boss. Free rides are cool sometimes, but I think tai chi for him was a way to be in a power situation. His music was also about being able to have a huge amount of power. It’s a big power chord, really. And that’s the rush he got from tai chi.

He did get a rush, and that’s what he was going for. It wasn’t that you’re going to lull yourself into some other state. It’s the thrill of being able to do something you didn’t think you could do that had so much chi, so much force. I would say force, power, and on the other side grace were what he loved about it. Lou didn’t really do sports when he was a kid. This was the first time he could carry a sports bag and really be one of the guys. Kind of.

So it wasn’t like meditation for him. He approached it as a martial art.

It was a combination. He loved the meditative part of it as well. He was very proselytizing with tai chi. He’d say, “What is wrong with your shoulder? You’ve got to do some tai chi.” He was a wonderful observer of people. His songs were about people, and they all had names. He’s not a songwriter sitting in his room going, “I’m so lonely.” It’s like, “Stand up, walk out your door, and you’d be a lot less lonely. You’d write songs about something else.” He did walk out his door and he wrote songs about Little Joe and Candy from the Island. I really felt he had a Shakespearean cast of characters. And of course, what meditation and tai chi both have in common is observation.

You mentioned “Walk on the Wild Side,” and it’s funny how a song that was once about the Warhol Factory now, in our current moment, feels almost like a pioneering song about the trans experience.

The Warhol Factory was trans. It was almost 100% trans. I think that it’s not surprising to me so much that it’s back as much as how incredibly conservative and staid and judgmental our culture has become. It wasn’t like that in the ’60s. You think, Are we going backwards? We seem to have slid back into the ’50s. But the good thing about the ’50s is that the ’60s are coming next.

There you go.

Although I said that to somebody who said, “Oh, no, you’re wrong. This is not the ’50s. This is the ’30s.” And I was like, “Oh, boy.” I don’t know where we are, and whether it’s cyclical. It feels cyclical. But anytime I see music or art that has a certain freedom and audacity, I get very, very happy. That’s what I personally want more than anything, is to be free. When there are people who remind you that it’s possible, that you don’t have to be stuck in somebody else’s idea of what you should believe. And I think Lou’s work was always about that.

It’s terrible that we lost him too soon, but I can’t help thinking that he’s fortunate to have you as the keeper of his legacy. I’m curious how you think about that.

Frankly, at first, I felt it as a huge, overwhelming responsibility that I was not at all prepared for. Because we never, for one second, talked about his death, his not being there. We just didn’t talk about it. Not that he was in denial, but we just didn’t talk about it. I was like, wait, I’m responsible now? Oh, my God. And it was, for a while, very heavy. But it’s so much fun thinking of him and his work, and getting a chance to read it and reread it and think about it in different ways. It’s a wild way to be with your partner. You learn certain things about them. And I didn’t do that when I met him, I didn’t do any research. I just met him as a person.

Is it true that at that time you didn’t know who he was?

I had heard his name, but I thought he was British, for example. That’s a stupid thing. I’m not proud of that. You’d think everybody in New York knows everybody in New York in their field, but music is huge in New York. It’s composed of 100 different scenes that don’t necessarily intersect.

I’ve actually been thinking about the power of these legacy releases. Around the time you and Lou met, I was in high school and a friend of mine got hold of that CD box set of the Velvet Underground with all the albums and outtakes. I bought a copy, and it was almost life-changing. It really became foundational music for me.

It’s funny how generations forget things. When I went to the Barbie movie—I liked the movie. It’s not a great movie, but what was great about it was the girls there. Feminism was news to them. I was like, “That’s why I should keep these ideas percolating, because there are kids who’ve grown up in such a different world that they don’t even know any of that.”

And of course, they have to make it their own anyway, and they have to figure out all of that for themselves. But it’s also nice to know that, before you, there were some people who thought that through. And it was mind-blowing to me that those were new concepts. And these are 13-, 14-year-old kids. And I thought, I feel such great solidarity with these girls. It was wonderful. Yeah, I think introducing music from 50 years ago to kids who are trying to figure out, like you were, what is music? And here’s something that comes floating in a box. And they go, “Whoa, where did that come from?” It’s amazing.

I do think there’s value in reminding people of the great things that humans have done, great movies they’ve made, great books they’ve written, beautiful sculptures. Lou and I used to go to The Metropolitan Museum and look at the weapons collection.

Really?

In New York, we live in a city of incredible treasures. And it’s all things that we can go and have a look at and go, “Who made that for what?” You forget that culture isn’t just what’s coming down the pipeline into your laptop. I’ve been rereading Ginsberg lately, and just having my mind opened up to some of the great things that he…I knew Allen, and so did Lou, and we both liked him, but he had this way of bumping heads that we both hated. He would see you and he’d knock your head.

Physically bump your head?

Yes. It was a Tibetan greeting. And he would, like, boom. I was like, “Oh, stop doing that.” But for some reason we just…maybe it was because we were friends or we were too close to see what a genius he was, what incredible works of art he made. And then when you see it from another perspective, “Howl” is like the national anthem. What an incredibly rich history we have as Americans, as people who’ve made really just insanely great things. And so being part of the engine that keeps things coming out, I’m really, really happy to help do that a bit.

Is there anything you can share about what else you’re planning to release?

There are a bunch of things that we found in the archives that we’re going to put out. The Lou Reed archive is at the New York Public Library, and anybody can go in and hear anything they want. They can hear the first Velvet Underground rehearsal. It’s all free. You can just go in and geek out. And that, to me, was very important. It’s not a white-glove thing. And people really use it.

On March 2, which is his birthday, we’re going to do an event there. Lou started most of his concerts with drones. He and his guitar tech would have a whole array of amplifiers, and then he’d lean the guitars against them and the feedback would just be crushing. It was Metal Machine Music to the max. So we’ve done that in many places—in churches, cathedrals, caves, venues, festivals, music festivals. And this year we’re going to do one at the New York Public Library

At the risk of departing entirely from Vanity Fair–friendly topics, can we talk a little bit about drones? In 2022, you released a collection of Lou’s demos called Words & Music, May 1965, where we hear him singing “Heroin” in a folky style reminiscent of Bob Dylan. Fast-forward two years and we get the album version with John Cale sawing away on an electric viola. My assumption was that John Cale had brought the drone to Lou from the world of classical music, but is that right? Is this something that you ever discussed?

We did. We did a lot. Because to tell you the truth, drones were everywhere then. Mostly, it was La Monte Young, but everybody was doing drones. It wasn’t anything new. Charlemagne Palestine was starting to do things around then. Terry Riley. Drones were in. They were how you did music. And I don’t think anybody would say, “I invented the drone.” It would be crazy. Lou was at La Monte’s things, and so was John. They were getting that from there, and they were getting that eventually from ragas. La Monte had spent a lot of time in India. That’s really where it came from. It came from meditation. It came from India. It came from ragas. Endless, very loud brainwaves. And so it’s gone full circle, in many ways.

Do you think he was frustrated by the critical reception to Metal Machine Music at the time? Or did he think it was funny that he’d freaked everyone out?

On the surface, I think he loved to be the bad boy, but he was hurt that people didn’t get it or like it. He wanted people to like what he did. It meant a lot to him to make it, and he wanted it to mean something to people who listened to it. He cared about that a lot. I think he pretended he didn’t, but he did.

Will Hermes recently published a biography of Lou. How did you feel about that?

Well, I don’t really talk to any of the journalists who write these things, and I don’t read them. Although I did read a couple of things in here, because supposedly he was quoting me. And it did sound like he had talked to me. I never talked to him. I am in the school of Oscar Wilde, who said, “Biographers are the body snatchers of literature.” He also said, in a much harsher way, “Some people have a lot of disciples, but only Judas writes the biography.”

I have read biographies of people, and Catherine the Great was a great biography. I can’t read them about Lou because they’re all so wrong. Unless you really were with somebody, even the greatest active imagination will not get you there. That’s all I have to say about it. I know people write biographies, but I myself don’t read them. I don’t especially like being quoted in them.

[Will Hermes responds: “Laurie declined to be interviewed for this book for reasons I totally appreciate—a lot of people were writing books about Reed after his death. I did interview Anderson for my first book, Love Goes to Building on Fire, and for a New York Times feature a while back, and I quote her from those interviews. She and her team were helpful and encouraging during the years I worked on this book, and I make a point of stating clearly in the book that it’s not an ‘authorized biography.’”]

Do you feel that you have an obligation to tell the story the right way, in a sense?

No, this is not a contest. And there is no real right way to tell somebody’s life story. And I appreciate the impulse of wanting to tell someone’s story. I really do. I can’t say I admire it, but I appreciate the idea. Why wouldn’t I want to tell this person’s life story? It could be interesting to people. All of that’s true, and all of that means that I also don’t want to read it.

What about Todd Haynes’s Velvet Underground documentary? Did you see that?

Yeah, I thought it was okay. I wish there was a—yeah, no, it was fine.

Before I let you go, can you tell me what you’re up to? Because you obviously have your own incredible career and artistic practice.

Well, I’m working on finishing an orchestra piece about Amelia Earhart. And I’m working on a new big work for next fall about the end of the world. And let’s see, what else? A couple of books and some exhibitions. All kinds of things. I’m making a movie.

What’s the movie?

The movie is kind of a bunch of stories strung together.

Well, listen, I really appreciate you talking to me about this. I love the record, and I’m going to make it the first thing I put on the turntable with my toddler.

Good luck with that!