Lou Reed Reveals the Only John Lennon Song He Considered “On Another Level”

Lou Reed, the uncompromising frontman of The Velvet Underground, was never one to hand out musical praise lightly—especially to mainstream acts. Known for his gritty realism and avant-garde experimentation, Reed openly dismissed much of popular music, including The Beatles. In a 1987 interview with Joe Smith, he famously declared:

“The Beatles? I never liked The Beatles, I thought they were garbage.”

This blunt disdain wasn’t just limited to the Fab Four—it reflected Reed’s wider resistance to the polished world of pop. He gravitated toward raw emotion, stripped-down arrangements, and art that challenged rather than comforted. His fans came to expect that if Reed did admire a song, it was for deeply personal, unfiltered reasons.

That’s why it’s so remarkable that Reed openly praised one John Lennon composition, calling it “one of the greatest songs I ever heard.” The track in question? Mother.

Why “Mother” Stood Out to Reed

For Reed, Lennon’s work with The Beatles often felt too polished, too safe. But when Lennon went solo after the band’s breakup in 1970, he began exploring darker, more personal themes. Mother, the opening track on his John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band album, was born from primal scream therapy—a radical form of psychotherapy that encourages patients to relive and vocalize suppressed childhood pain.

Yoko Ono described the process:

“It’s just a matter of breaking the wall in yourself and letting it all out to the point you start crying. He was going back to the days when he wanted to scream, ‘Mother’.”

The song is a direct outpouring of Lennon’s trauma: losing his mother in a car accident at age 17, and being abandoned by his father, who spent much of his life at sea. The track begins with funereal church bells and unfolds into an emotional climax, Lennon’s voice cracking as he screams the word “Mother” over and over.

For Reed, this kind of unfiltered honesty was rare—and powerful. Speaking to Mojo magazine, he admitted:

“That was a song that had realism. When I first heard it, I didn’t even know it was him. I just said, ‘Who the fuck is that? I don’t believe that.’ Because the lyrics to that are real. He wasn’t kidding around. He got right down to it, as down as you can get. I like that in a song.”

The Lennon That Reed Respected

In Reed’s eyes, Mother proved Lennon could step outside the commercial comfort zone of his Beatles years. Lennon himself acknowledged the track’s polarizing nature:

“Many people will not like ‘Mother’; it hurts them. The first thing that happens when you hear it is you can’t take it. The second time, you start to understand. I didn’t need anything else—the piano does it all.”

This rawness appealed to Reed, who built his career on songs that refused to sugarcoat life’s darkest truths. While he maintained he had “no respect” for The Beatles as a band, Mother transcended his criticisms. It was, in his view, “on another level.”

Two Artists, One Common Ground

Though their styles were worlds apart—Reed’s urban minimalism versus Lennon’s pop-rooted songwriting—both shared a desire to strip away artifice. For Reed, Mother wasn’t just a song; it was proof that even one of the world’s most famous pop stars could create something brutally honest and emotionally raw.

In the end, Lou Reed’s praise for Mother serves as a rare moment of crossover between two musical outsiders—one who rejected pop’s gloss from the start, and another who had to shed it to find his truest voice.