Songs for Drella

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Songs for Drella

Studio album by Lou Reed and John Cale
Released	April 1990
Genre	Art rock
Length	52:54
Label	Sire Records
Producer(s)	Lou Reed and John Cale
All Music Guide link Robert Christgau (A-) [1] Q Rolling Stone link
Lou Reed chronology
New York (1989)	Songs for Drella (1990)	Magic and Loss (1992)
John Cale chronology
Words for the Dying (1989)	Songs for Drella (1990)	Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1991)

Songs for Drella is a concept album by Lou Reed and John Cale, alumni of The Velvet Underground

It was released in 1990 by Sire Records. A live performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, directed by Ed Lachman, was filmed and released on VHS and laserdisc formats.

The album is the pair's first collaboration since 1972, and is dedicated to the memory of Andy Warhol, their mentor, who had died unexpectedly in 1987. Drella was a nickname for Warhol, a portmanteau of Dracula and Cinderella, used by Warhol's crowd.

Songs for Drella offers a kind of vie romancée of Warhol, focusing on his interpersonal relations. The songs fall roughly into three categories: Warhol's (semi-fictitious) first-person perspective, third-person narratives chronicling events and affairs, and first-person feelings towards and commentaries on Warhol by Reed and Cale themselves.

Reed and Cale had been playing the songs live in 1989 as a song cycle before committing them to tape. By the end of recording Cale vowed never to work with Reed again due to personal differences; nevertheless, Songs for Drella would prove to be the overture to a full-blown Velvet Underground reunion.

Although the album was conceived as an indivisible whole, a single was released off it, "Nobody But You".