"I Heard Her Call My Name" is a song by American avant-garde rock band The Velvet Underground. It is the fifth track from the band's second album, White Light/White Heat. It is a particularly loud, brash and aggressive song that features a pair of atonal guitar solos performed by Lou Reed and repeated use of piercing feedback. The heavy levels of guitar distortion is often said to have influenced punk music and heavy metal. Indeed, Zyklon-B Zombie by Throbbing Gristle uses the same rhythm and high levels of distortion, complete with the line "And then my mind split open!"
Reed's vocals are especially unintelligible and enthusiastic. He further accents his lyrics by singing them in a purposely off-key voice, often adding exclamations of "eehee!" and the like.
In their biography Uptight, the band claimed they were unhappy with the recording of "I Heard Her Call My Name", saying that the recording was a poor attempt to capture the energy of live versions of the song.
The lyrics show the influence of the blues, including the lyrics of the Son House recording "Death Letter" from the 1965 album Father of Folk Blues, which features phrases such as "the gal you love is dead" and "I thought I heard her call my name."
Read more about I Heard Her Call My Name: Personnel
Famous quotes containing the words heard and/or call:
“A seeming ignorance is very often a most necessary part of worldly knowledge. It is, for instance, commonly advisable to seem ignorant of what people offer to tell you; and, when they say, Have you not heard of such a thing? to answer, No, and to let them go on, though you know it already.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“The poet alone knows astronomy, chemistry, vegetation, and animation, for he does not stop at these facts, but employs them as signs. He knows why the plain, or meadow of space, was strewn with these flowers we call suns, and moons, and stars; why the great deep is adorned with animals, with men, and gods; for, in every word he speaks he rides on them as the horses of thought.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)