Nils Lofgren On His New “Blue With Lou” Album, Working With Fantasy Records & More

This week rock singer-songwriter-guitarist Nils Lofgren will be releasing Blue With Lou, his first new studio album in eight years. Hitting stores on April 26th, Blue With Lou is an all-new collection featuring six songs penned in collaboration with the late, legendary Lou Reed. The 12-track collection — as issued on Lofgren’s own Cattle Track Road Records — was produced by Lofgren and his wife Amy. Basic tracks for Blue With Lou were recorded live at his home studio in Arizona with longtime collaborators drummer Andy Newmark and bassist Kevin McCormick; legendary saxophonist Branford Marsalis is featured on a new studio recording of the Lofgren-Reed composition “City Lights.”

Amazingly, Blue With Lou is only one of Lofgren’s current projects. Beyond remaining a member of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, the multi-instrumentalist is a member of Neil Young’s Crazy Horse. He also pops up regularly in other bands and collaborative efforts, as Lofgren’s other credits include Ringo Starr, Jerry Lee Lewis, Lou Gramm, Grin, and E Street bandmate Patti Scialfa.

In early May, Nils Lofgren will kick off a U.S. tour in support of Blue With Lou. This includes dates in Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Chicago, Cincinnati, Boston, New York, Atlanta and Nashville before wrapping in Dallas on June 2nd. I had the pleasure of speaking with Lofgren himself by phone, and a few minutes from that chat is transcribed below. The full chat with the Rock & Roll Hall Of Famer will be airing next month as part of an episode of the Paltrocast With Darren Paltrowitz podcast.

More on Nils Lofgren and Blue With Lou can be found online at www.nilslofgren.com.

Blue With Lou is the new record. I wanted to know how long you spent recording it or even writing it.

Nils Lofgren: Well it was near the end of the River tour. We were in Australia actually doing kind of the last leg of what was a long River tour. I started writing in earnest. I do have a notebook with ideas as I go… But I was about two years chipping away at it, from conception to where we actually recorded it.

Suddenly one of the goals was to get the Lou Reed songs left behind because I always thought Lou might record those, but once we lost Lou — which was an awful loss to the planet and the musical community — I thought, “Well my next record has to include those songs nobody ever heard that we wrote”… “City Lights,” I just thought it was so great. Lou narrated it and I wanted to do it with the original melody. He did it on the Bells album.

So those six co-writes [with Lou] and of course six of my own, I wrote a lot of songs about 20/ By the time we started recording it, one of the goals was to also be able to sing live in the studio and play the songs live… So we did… Looking at each other like kind of the olden days, so off and on it was almost two years before I had about 20 songs — the six Lou Reed co-writes included — that I was ready to sing and play on live.

I called my dear friends Andy Newmark on drums and Kevin McCormick on bass, explained what we were doing and they came into the home for two or three weeks. [Wife] Amy set up the home for an musical invasion and looked after us and fed us and kinda made us feel welcome and at home while we jumped into this project. So on and off, of course, I was doing other things and touring… These are the ones that I felt would make a great album at the end of the day.

The fact that you had six songs that you worked on with Lou Reed from over the years, that kind of begs the question if there’s a lot of unreleased and great stuff in your archives that one day still might come out.

Nils Lofgren: Well you know, Lou used the songs “City Lights” on the Bells album, so I wanted to rerecord my own version. The other five got left behind and of course once we lost Lou I knew it was my job on my next album to share those… Gosh, it’s been what four or five years? Fantasy Records kindly put a 10-disc box set together called Face The Music. I’m very proud of it, it is my favorite release, a DVD and nine CDs. They let me handpick the best of every record I ever made… We included 40 bonus tracks, so there were 40 rarities, basement tapes, demos… I’ve got a lot left, of course, but you know that was really kind of a watershed moment to handpick my top favorites of all the unreleased material over the decades to share it.

So that was kind of a good housecleaning that I shared on Face The Music… My wife Amy produced the packaging with their art departments who were great… I did get to kind of share the cream of the crop of my outtakes there. So yeah, there’s a few more here and there.

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Tags: Andy Newmark, Branford Marsalis, Bruce Springsteen, E-Street Band, Fantasy Records, Lou Reed, Neil Young, Nils Lofgren

About the Author

Darren Paltrowitz Darren Paltrowitz is a New York resident with over 20 years of entertainment industry experience. He began working around the music business as a teenager, interning for the manager of his then-favorite band Superdrag. Since then, he has worked with a wide array of artists including OK Go, They Might Be Giants, Mike Viola, Tracy Bonham, Loudness, Rachael Yamagata, and Amanda Palmer. Darren's writing has appeared in dozens of outlets including the New York Daily News, Inquisitr, The Daily Meal, The Hype Magazine, All Music Guide, Guitar World, TheStreet.com, Businessweek, Chicago Tribune, L.A. Times, and the Jewish Journal. Beyond being "Editor At Large" for The Hype Magazine, Darren is also the host of weekly "Paltrocast With Darren Paltrowitz" series, which airs on dozens on television and digital networks. He has also co-authored 2 published books, 2018's "Pocket Change: Your Happy Money" (Book Web Publishing) and 2019's "Good Advice From Professional Wrestling" (6623 Press), and co-hosts the world's only known podcast about David Lee Roth, "The DLR Cast."