Lou Reed

Writing music is not a 9 to 5 job - at least, it wasn't for Lou Reed. Like most songwriters, Lou collected myriad items like matchbook covers and cocktail napkins with bits of spontaneous lyrics scrawled on them, but these inspirations came on a direct channel straight from his brain. He told The Guardian: "I have a radio in my head that's playing unrecorded things for me constantly, and I'm always listening to it for my own amusement. And by now I'm very familiar with the process of getting this stuff down and how to make things altogether easier for myself than I would even have guessed at in the past - when I really did not understand how this all works. But I don't come into an office and write - if I tried to do that it would be a real way of closing things down. I just leave it alone and as time gets shorter and shorter I ward off panic and the process starts."

Throughout his career, Reed earned a reputation for being rather prickly with journalists. When he was persuaded to give interviews, he often refused to answer questions or ignored the interviewer altogether. But by the '90s, trembling journalists felt more at ease with a kinder, gentler Lou. In fact, he insisted his legendary disdain was exaggerated by the press. He told The Guardian in 1996: "All this stuff about me not liking journalists is not really accurate. It's just that I don't like talking about myself. Why would I? I mean, that's really work. I don't listen to my own stuff. Why should I? I already know my stuff. I would much rather listen to someone else."

Reed often cited the poet Delmore Schwartz as a major influence for his writing, specifically the short story "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities." He told Performing Songwriter: "Simple language, five pages, the most astonishing thing I have ever read to this day. It's just incredible. Imagine being able to do something like that with the simple language that is available to anybody. It's mind-bending. Now imagine putting it into a song. It's so simple, it's ridiculous." Schwartz, who taught the singer at Syracuse University, actually hated music with lyrics, but that didn't stop Lou from dedicating songs to him like The Velvet Underground's "European Son" and his own "My House." He even wrote a prose piece for Poetry magazine in 2012 called "O Delmore How I Miss You."