john cale tour review

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Live music, reviews and opinion / est. 2018, john cale – town hall, birmingham: live review.

John Cale delivers a fulminant retrospective, blending the current with the past, a mix of deep cuts and a lot of new.

Mercy, John Cale’s 20th solo release in the 55 years since his partner in crime/nemesis, Lou Reed, engineered his being bounced from the Velvet Underground, is a beguiling and sometimes baffling listen. Yes, his powerful boom of a voice is intact, his gift for melody largely preserved, but, as with much of his work this century, it is as if he is driven to remain at the more experimental end of his oeuvre, sometimes at the expense of appeasing his audience. Fair play; it’s his party and he can (make us) sigh if he wants to. But, tin hat, the album tries just a tad too hard to be forward looking, managing a feel somewhere round about 1993, with too many dated synths and vocoders messing with voices. Having said that, there are at least two or three bangers, up there with his best, that make it worth a detour.

So it was with some sense of anticipation that I sat in the stalls at Brum’s Town Hall, a venue nearly as iconic as the performer and his backstory. Sadly, only 2/3 full, nonetheless the expectation of the committed faithful was palpable, many of those present possibly able to have seen VU in their pomp. And many, no doubt, as the story goes, would anyway claim to have, whether or not they then started a band.

A brave young woman started things off. Alone on stage, save the, largely, props of a bass, a guitar and a keyboard, she tinkered with each in turn, her laptop doing most of the musical heavy lifting. With vocals as nervously breathless as she clearly was: “it’s an honour to even being in the same city as John Cale“, she was a rabbit caught in the headlights. Yes, one could sense the germ of probably a decent idea in each of the songs she played, but it was if she had forgotten that, in the glow of the spotlight. Best received came an unadorned voice and guitar of Jackson Browne’s These Days. Or, given present company, Nico’s. Manu Grace her name, I would actually like to hear her records, to hear how she should sound.

Lights back down, a low keyboard drone filled the hall, like a cloud of malevolent flies, mood music while we waited for the man. Apt and atmospheric, with more of those flies later. As the stage lights came up, smack on 9, strangely, so did those in the auditorium: “so I can see you”, said the surprisingly sprightly figure, standing, behind a keyboard, front stage right: “Hello, Brum”. With every fibre in me saying don’t say his age, it’s impossible not too, as, a slight stoop in his steadied gait, he looks ridiculously good for a man a fortnight shy of 81. Lights back down and showtime!

With a conventional trio of musicians behind him, guitar, bass and drums, there came the reassuring feeling this might show the more human side of his more recent material. And that it was, as they opened with the clash and clatter of Jumbo In Tha Modernworld, immediately displaying Cale’s baritone to be in fine fettle, and displaying the pedigree chops of his band from first note onward. Alex Thomson showed himself to be a percussionist of no little nuance, his mighty thumps riding both around and on the rhythm. Regular bassist, Joey Maramba, and even more regular guitarist, Dean Boyer, locked horns and locked in, Maramba with surely 8 fingers on either hand, and Boyer providing accord in his discordance, finding melody from chaos. Cale, singing apart, was content to add sporadic tinkles of piano, guiding the flow, turning his head back to his boys as the destination arrived. This 2006 single was a triumphant start.

With a screen suspended at the back, above skyline of the band, random visuals now became a distorting image of the much younger Cale, alongside Nico. For the next song was Moonstruck (aka Nico’s Song), from the new album. Without all the orchestration of the studio version, it was nonetheless a delight, the simpler arrangement carrying better the beauty of and affection in the song. Then the more challenging Rosegarden Funeral of Sores, with it’s uplifting and catchy title, let alone lyric. Less gaunt than in the form first aired, this was a textbook definition of post-punk, the band a controlled coil of pent-up energy, Maramba a metronomic pulse, Cale intoning the vocal with implied threat. From there a return to Mercy, the double whammy of the title track and Nightcrawling. The former is as melodic as any song he has written and, here, without any of the FX that come with the album, it showed a far greater naked beauty. Nightcrwling is a tale looking back to his and David Bowie’s late night cavortings in a New York of long ago last century, and came accompanied by a short cartoon video of the two of them, and other notables of the time, doing just that, repeated on a loop to underline the sense of another age. Or the shortness of the clip. Again, with the band and without studio trickery, it was a delight, a very, appropriately, 70’s feel to it.

Wasteland, from 2005, is another of Cale’s more majestic tunes. No viola tonight, whilst that would have been nice, the rendition tonight didn’t need it. It was good to see the band enjoying it; no mechanoids these, the glee with which they pummelled this and all the selections was a delight, all smiles as they added the backing vocals. I think for Wasteland came a striking film clip, maybe for another song, but featuring the above promised flies. A motley selccion therof, crawling over what seemed initially to be a shoulder, later a unscpecifiable haunch of meat. Lovely…. Guts is another winnining tune, to my mind very early Roxy Music in feel, yelps and all, with pounded piano and guitar flourishes. Is this good or is this better? Cale then shuffles from behind his keyboard to accept a stratocaster around his neck, playing this for a faithful Cable Hogue, a storm kicking up behind his causal strum.

If Paris 1919 is his most accessible album, Half Past France is one of the more elegiac songs, here treated to a somewhat different arrangement and even tune, to the delight of my gig-buddy, well versed in all things Cale. Out Your Window is another from Mercy, and, like the recorded version, had me wryly rueing on how much like a mid-period Human League song it sounded, the vocals strainingly like Phil Oakey, together with the chordal progressions and Thomson’s use of an electronic drum pad This thought returns on re-listening to the album, and in a number of places. It is an irony not lost on me, somehow feeling one of the singers might take more pleasure from the comparison than the other, convinced that Cale was a prime influence on the original Being Boiled hitmakers. Caribbean Sunsight is generally seen his nadir, but, from that album, Villa Albani gets a radical reworking, all extreme noise terror. The band again grinning like loons as they deconstruct with abandon, bowed bass and Theremin featuring alongside the cataclysmic drums, with Boyer laughingly giving Thomson’s tom-toms a sly wallop on his way past. A cacophony of controlled chaos, it seemed clear we were at the end.

Encore? Even the lighting crew seemed uncertain, the long pause triggering the house lights to start coming back up again, despite the sustained applause. Were we to get one at all, Cale notoriously fickle in that department? Heartbreak Hotel had been aired on an earlier night, his revisioning of the Presley great into Brecht and Weill territory, and as aired on the Ayers, Cale, Nico, Eno live album of, shh, 1974. No, joyously and gloriously it was personal Cale favourite, Close Watch, performed straight and solo, the keyboard set to piano, and showing he has lost no jot of his mastery of the keys. His voice, frail for the first time tonight, matched perfectly the tender lyrics and it could not have ended a stupendous evening better. “See you again”, a wave and he was off. Not if I see you first, John!

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Tagged as: Domino Recordings , Featured , John Cale , Velvet Underground , Weyes Blood

Published by Seuras Og

"Well, what sort of music do you like, Seuras?" Ever since that question was first aired by his mother a decade or six back he has struggled with the answer. And struggles still now. Call him a folkie, a country dude, a bluesman and he'll be happy, but don't forget the whiff of jazz, electronica and more. Not so keen on the charts, mind. View all posts by Seuras Og

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John Cale review – unsettling, absorbing full-canon reboot

Roundhouse, London The ex-Velvets pioneer takes an intimate tour through decades of relentless experimentation, from cranky electronic pop to leftfield opera

O ne of the most striking aspects of David Bowie’s death was its deftly plotted artistry. Most established musicians shrug helplessly against the dying of the light; a handful remain unpredictable and self-challenging throughout the later chapters of their careers. Among them we count John Cale, a sprightly 73, who arrived at this intimate In the Round show in a T-shirt, tattered Converse and conductor’s coat, as if it was dress-down Friday at the Proms. The avant garde Paul to Lou Reed’s irascible John in the Velvet Underground , his solo work over four decades has covered alt-folk, experimental drones, cranky electronic pop, leftfield opera and an abusive attitude towards violas that has probably earned him a 500-yard restraining order from every string section in the world.

Cale is no septuagenarian shrugger. London last saw him perform a 2014 Barbican show accompanied by an “orchestra” of flying drones resembling giant space wasps, and reconstruction is his current byword. In April he’ll rework Velvets material at a Paris anniversary show , and his new album M:Fans is a distorted neo-disco reimagining of his bleak 1982 “personal exorcism” album Music for a New Society. Tonight, studying a laptop and seated at a keyboard containing every sound from tuning orchestras to exploding minarets, he treats a career-spanning selection to the same inspired tenderising over two hours as disjointed and unsettling as they are utterly absorbing.

It’s a full-canon reboot. The Endless Plain of Fortune, from 1973, becomes an authoritarian avant disco piece with a climax that sounds like Four Tet: The Opera. Coral Moon (1975) could now be a twisted poltergeist’s love song from an Eli Roth torture-porn remake of The Music Man. Fear Is a Man’s Best Friend starts as a Bowie boogie, turns into a piano sonata, then ends in a fit of deranged glam screaming, as if the Spiders from Mars are being attacked with a gigantic rolled-up newspaper.

Yet even when scouring the danker corners of M:Fans – on desolate sound collage Close Watch, or his stirring and strange rewrite of the church-organ ballad If You Were Still Around, now with added ghost trains – a slithering melodic subtext binds the set. Take the stunning Buffalo Ballet , redone as a Magnetic Fields industrial torch song with a melody seemingly played on an oil rig, or the malformed funk rock of Ship of Fools with its trumpet-like guitars teasing hints of 1960s Batman. “There’s gonna be some changes,” Cale intones on Changes Made; his work here is far from done.

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John Cale: Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff – live review

John Cale feat. Sinfonia Cymru, House Gospel Choir, Cate Le Bon, James Dean Bradfield, Gruff Rhys Llais Festival Wales Millenium Centre, Cardiff 28 October 2022

A special show at Wales Millennium Centre belatedly marks the 80th of the most-known Welsh sonic auteur that is John Cale.

Located in the harbour area, Wales Millennium Centre is a contemporary reflection of the opposing Pierhead, a late 19-century building of the Welsh Parliament. With its facade that conjures up Icelandic basalt rocks, the venue looks well-embedded in the breeze-and-light scenery of the capital. In the mind of the Scandinavia enthusiast, the area might bring up associations with other places like Aalborg, Helsinki and Reykjavik. The genius loci resonate with the music of John Cale, who despite being Welsh has always felt foreign in his country. Nevertheless, his status in Wales is undeniable. At Wales Millennium, he is performing with local acts – Sinfonia Cymru, Manic Street Preachers’ James Dean Bradfield, Gruff Rhys and Cate Le Bon all of whom admit John Cale being a role model.

A role model for the younger generation of artists in Wales and worldwide, Cale doesn’t need the audience to love him. He is far from being a crowd-pleaser, and the show is not what one might expect it to be. Despite the number of artists on the stage, the sound is stripped-down. Each instrument, including Cale’s keyboard, is as distinct as atom-like round-shaped projector screens above the stage. Featuring hypnotising riff, a two-chord Moonstruck (Nico’s Song), a mesmerising song from Cale’s forthcoming album Mercy, has a simplicity of a nursery rhyme and the spiritual depth of a mantra. “Don’t be afraid of this light / Be afraid of this light”. The image of Nico appears on the small round screens. Of all members of The Velvet Underground, Cale had the most prolific creative collaboration with the singer, having produced almost all of her albums.

Ironically, some compositions evoke the vibe of post-Cale The Velvet Underground. In fact, what Cale did in the early 70s doesn’t sound miles away from the oeuvre of late VU, particularly their Loaded album. Gideon’s Bible from the 1970 album Vintage Violence features Cate Le Bon on vocals. With its sonic halo of upbeat psychedelic pop origin (The Flower Pot Men’s Let’s Go to San Francisco comes to mind), it brings up a slightly sinister vibe of David Lynch’s films, with 60s music playing on a radio in the dark. The quirky visuals make references to the album cover, showing a strange glass mask concealing the artist’s face.

The Velvet Underground’s repertoire inevitably resurfaces with I’m Waiting for the Man. The familiar drone ignites a spark. Cale switches between New York and Welsh accents – closing eyes for a second, one could imagine the whole band performing. He pays homage to Lou Reed more explicitly with Style It Takes from their 1990 collaborative album Songs For Drella. The current rendition sounds darker and more cinematic, permeating the space with eerie strings and impressionistic guitar. The lyrics of the song as well as of the rest of the album address their mentor Andy Warhol, who died a few years before the release. “This is a rock group called the Velvet Underground / I show movies on them / Do you like their sound”, sings Cale, causing an expected splash of applause.

Despite his connection to The Velvet Underground, John Cale has always stood out as a sonic auteur on his own. At Wales Millennium Centre, he generously displays various facets of his musical oeuvre, playing songs from albums across his nearly fifty-year solo career. The two-hour show runs seamlessly with no intermissions or encores. Waving goodbye after the final Ooh La La, Cale smiles coyly, saying “See you when I see you”. Tan y tro nesa.

More news and music from John Cale on the official website of the artist.

Words by Irina Shtreis, you can find more of her writing here .

Photo credit: Polly Thomas

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At 80, John Cale Is Still Inventing His Future and Wrestling With His Past

By Joe Gross

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He’s also haunted by thorny recollections of old friends who have left us. Cale’s album collaborations with the Velvet Underground’s German singer Nico were her career highlights, but the regal “Moonstruck (Nico’s Song),” with its rigid strings and harmonium-style keys, pulls no punches: “You’re a moonstruck junkie lady, staring at your feet/Breathing words into an envelope/To be opened on your death.” The jazzy “Night Crawling,” about hanging out with Bowie when they were young gods, is equally honest: “I can’t even tell/When you’re putting me on.” 

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The album got John Cale’s stint on Island off to a deliciously deranged start.

Published on

When John Cale labored alongside Lou Reed in the Velvet Underground , he wasn’t exactly a shrinking violet. Cale matched his bandmate step for convention-shattering step, employing his avant-garde training to kick up a righteous ruckus on viola (among other axes) and co-writing some seriously confrontational tunes.

But when Cale went solo at the start of the 70s, he seemed to shake off a lot of the grit and grime of his VU days. His first three solo albums, Vintage Violence , The Academy in Peril , and Paris 1919 , while not lacking in adventurousness, were full of neoclassical gestures, tuneful chamber-pop arrangements, and haunting balladry.

Listen to John Cale’s Fear now.

When Cale switched over to Island Records, something shifted inside him. Maybe it was the acceleration of his notorious appetite for controlled substances, or his dive into the deep water as producer for Nico ’s dark night of the soul The End , or maybe he simply decided it was time to get his freak on again.

Whatever the impetus, Cale pulled out his old black magic playbook and went to town, churning out three albums busting with gloriously bad vibes for Island in the space of a single year. The ball began rolling with 1974’s appropriately entitled Fear .

John Cale’s Fear

The front-loaded album leads off with the almost-title track, “Fear Is a Man’s Best Friend,” one of the most commanding songs in John Cale’s catalog. Over ominously insistent piano pounding, Cale comes off like a TV horror host, delighting in dragging you through the gruesome muck, introducing himself by way of the couplet, “I’m a sleeping dog but you can’t tell/When I’m on the prowl you’d better run like hell” and calmly declaring, “We’re already dead but not yet in the ground.” By the coda, the song’s relatively stately pace devolves into musical mayhem, with a berserk Cale screaming the title phrase again and again.

There’s nothing else as overtly unhinged on Fear , or the album would be given away free with a copy of the DSM . In fact, Cale peppers the record with a few of the beautifully ghostly ballads he seems to be able to spin out at will. “Buffalo Ballet” serenely captures the development of the American West, with an almost ecclesiastical chorus contrasting the ugliness that gradually seeps into the story. It’s been covered multiple times over the years, by Paul Kelly & The Messengers, The Walkabouts, and others.

A bittersweet remembrance of an old flame, “Emily” is as close as Cale gets to a straight-up love ballad even though he’s clearly camping it up a tad, going so far as to fill the background with ocean sound effects. The sprightly sparkle of “Ship of Fools” is directly at odds with the lyric’s nightmarishly surreal travelogue, which shifts midway through from America to Cale’s native Wales.

But never mind the ballads, here’s John Cale in creepy mode. The exaggeratedly bouncy groove of “Barracuda” makes the macabre refrain “the ocean will have us all” and the bizarre bumblebee viola solo seem all the more unsettling. “Gun” is the album’s hardest rocker, a first-person account of a sociopathic criminal’s death-dealing exploits enlivened even further when Brian Eno feeds the already manic guitar solo through his synth for some brain-melting results.

“The Man Who Couldn’t Afford to Orgy” is Cale at his most sardonic, blending 50s R&B pastiche with a tale of suppressed lechery as he spars with a spoken female vocal encouraging him to let it all hang out. Cale unspools bone-deep cynicism on “You Know More Than I Know,” ranking himself one of the world’s “angry whores” and envisioning his death “among the weeds that creep into the hearts of all the weak.”

Cale ends Fear with a whiplash-inducing left turn, completely upending any impressions you might have developed over the previous 36 minutes. The epically twisted “Momamma Scuba” is a lurid, tongue-in-cheek come-on to a female scuba diver, with Richard Thompson’s razor-wire guitar solo gleefully slicing a hole in Cale’s air hose.

There were more sojourns through sadism, subversion, and sheer perversion to come in Cale’s brief but fruitful Island stint. But Fear got the triptych off to a deliciously deranged start.

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Home › Recording › Music Production

John Cale Returns Bearing ‘Mercy’

The legendary John Cale just can’t stop making new music, and guitarist/engineer Dustin Boyer is there.

By Steve Harvey ⋅

John Cale , who will celebrate his 81st birthday in March, has an enviable resumé, but he’s not one to rest on his laurels. Neither does he show any sign of slowing down, releasing this month his 17th solo studio album, Mercy, a project as fresh as anything that he’s put out during a long and storied career.

“There are no rearview mirrors with John Cale,” says Dustin Boyer, a guitarist in Cale’s band and his in-house engineer since 2005. “He’s always moving.”

Cale has certainly earned the right to retire. Born in Wales and classically trained in London, he moved to New York City and, in 1962, co-founded one of rock ‘n’ roll’s seminal bands, the Velvet Underground, whose albums subsequently became a touchstone for so many musicians. His first production gig was the 1969 debut studio album by another legendary band, the Stooges. Since 1970, he’s released a long, long list of solo albums, movie scores, collaborations and productions.

Cale Visits Ocean Way

The 12-song Mercy album emerged over the past few years, Boyer says, and was almost entirely recorded at Cale’s private ARM Studios in downtown Los Angeles, where the pair work together as many as 300 days a year. The facility includes a tracking room that doubles as a rehearsal space for the road band, a tape archive room that’s about to become a drum booth, and a gym plus other amenities.

“It’s an awesome workspace and we never leave,” Boyer laughs. “It’s really intimate here in the control room; we sit about three feet apart.”

Nita Scott, Cale’s manager and executive music producer, oversaw a major remodel of the studio during the pandemic. The control room still features the modified 32-channel Toft Audio Designs desk that was installed in 2010 and Cale’s trusted Genelec monitors from 1994. An RME Fireface interface has more recently been supplanted by a UA Apollo, Boyer reports.

CORE BAND, PLUS GUESTS

The Mercy album features Cale’s longtime drummer Deantoni Parks and bassist Joey Maramba, plus, of course, Boyer. Cale contributes various keyboards, viola, bass, drums and vocals. There are also guest appearances by the late Nigerian drummer Tony Allen, Laurel Halo, Weyes Blood, Tei Shi, Animal Collective’s Avey Tare and Panda Bear, Dev Hynes, Sylvan Esso, Actress and Fat White Family, most of whom were recorded in-house at ARM Studios.

“We went to London and recorded Tony Allen,” reports Boyer, who later co-mixed the song, an alternate version of “Mercy,” with Nita Scott. The rest of the tracks were sent out to be mixed by Seven Davis, Jr, Mikaelin “Blue” BlueSpruce, Tokimonsta and Justin Raisen. “We haven’t really done that before. They’re all cutting-edge and they all have the same passion that John has.” The album was mastered by Joey Bozzi at Bernie Grundman Mastering.

There’s little doubt that Cale keeps moving forward. There are relatively few similarities between his milestone Paris 1919 or Music for a New Society albums of the 1980s and Mercy. “He’s an avid fan of modern hip-hop and the way it’s recorded,” Boyer says, especially the sparseness of a song like Snoop Dogg’s “Drop it Like it’s Hot.”

If anything, Cale has always been ahead of his time. Take his 1980 song, “Rosegarden Funeral of Sores,” which was covered and popularized by Bauhaus. “I hear that and I’m like, ‘That distorted vocal; how’d you do that?’ It could have been recorded last week,” Boyer marvels.

When Cale comes into the control room every morning, he’s ready to work, so Boyer keeps everything patched. “He’ll start with an idea,” Boyer says. “Sometimes it’s on piano. He might tap his legs or knock on the body of a guitar. He’ll hum something or do a pseudo beatbox.” They might use a click, but lately, he says, “We’ve been doing little drum loops—it’s a lot more fun.”

RECORDING AT ARM STUDIOS

Cale uses Apple’s MainStage software live, and in the studio will build a rhythm using its Ultrabeat feature, the iMPC app or the Koala sampler app. “We do a few little noises and whatnot, then throw it into the simple sampler in Pro Tools,” Boyer says, noting that Logic is also sometimes in the mix.

Boyer used a Neumann U 87 on vocals, drums—in addition to Royer ribbon mics—and other applications on this album. But Cale’s vocals were mainly captured in the control room on a Shure SM7, often while he also played a keyboard. “The SM7 has been awesome; I love those mics,” he says. “Mostly we leave the speakers on; we don’t go into cans. You hear some of the keyboards tapping [through the SM7], but there’s pretty minor bleed.”

The vocal chain includes a Grace Audio dual-channel mic pre and a Distressor. “I like the Toft mic pres, too, and dirty them up a little bit,” he adds. “That’s on a lot of the vocals running on an auxiliary bus. We just randomly scroll through [the presets].”

The use, abuse and misuse of technology comes up frequently in conversation with Boyer. “If it’s too straight, we get itchy in here,” he laughs. “John will say, ‘What if we make that very un-guitar?’ So I head over to SoundToys and destroy it. SoundToys’ MicroShift is pretty much on every vocal; we love that sound,” he notes, also singling out the brand’s Crystallizer plug-in for guitar, along with others. “We also used Little AlterBoy, not as a vocal plug-in but on strings. We would detune them ever so slightly. I can’t get enough of those crazy guys at SoundToys.”

Many of the effects on the record run through Line Six POD Pro racks. “I run them all in succession and they sound wild. Run a bus out to them and you don’t know what you’re gonna get,” he chuckles.

LOOKING FOR SOUNDS

They are always open to happy accidents, too. “When something malfunctions, that’s when we get really excited,” Boyer says. He linked all the MIDI instruments, machines and modules through iConnectivity boxes during the remodel, which can produce some unexpected results: “Hit the spacebar, and you can run into something interesting.”

You might expect that tracks laid down during the early stages of a song would get replaced, but they often make it to the mix with Cale. “Mostly John wants to get the sound right during the writing process,” Boyer explains.

That said, songs will evolve over time. Indeed, Mercy was ready for an early 2020 release, but they hit pause in the face of the pandemic. In June 2021, they listened back and made a few changes. “We just wanted to refresh everything. A few songs even got a little bit more interesting with some sounds,” he says, and they added a song, “Night Crawling,” about Cale and David Bowie’s time together in New York.

“John’s always changing arrangements,” he says. “We never sit still.”

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Wednesday 08 February 2023

John Cale Band and John Cale

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8 Argyll St W1F 7TF London, UK lwtheatres.co.uk/theatres/the-london-palladium/

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John Cale’s Musical Journey Knows No Limits

At 80, the musician who helped found the Velvet Underground before a prolific run as a producer and solo artist is releasing a new LP and mentoring new generations of avant-garde creators.

John Cale’s new album, “Mercy,” is his 17th as a solo artist. Credit... Chantal Anderson for The New York Times

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By Lindsay Zoladz

• Published Jan. 14, 2023 Updated June 20, 2023

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LOS ANGELES — Just a few years after he’d left the provincial Welsh mining town where he was born, a 23-year-old John Cale was invited — along with his friend Lou Reed and their budding band the Velvet Underground — to Andy Warhol’s Factory in New York.

“The first day you walked in, you joined the Academy,” Cale said in the industrial but cozy lounge of his studio on a recent afternoon, recalling the first meeting with the pop-art power broker who would become the band’s manager. “The atmosphere of that place was really special,” he added; artists from all over “came in and unzipped a bag of magic.”

The musician, now 80, was reminiscing on an uncharacteristically gloomy January day in Los Angeles. Cale seemed to have summoned the Welsh weather along with his memories, and sat bundled up in a black puffer jacket and wool socks. “That’s the first thing you remember: all the work that was being done,” Cale said. “Andy was nonstop. We were nonstop. And it paid off.”

It was, however, just the beginning of one of the most accomplished résumés in rock history, if not 20th-century culture. Cale studied under John Cage and Aaron Copland, and later learned about the transformative power of drone from the avant-garde musicians La Monte Young and Tony Conrad. He had a fling with Edie Sedgwick and a short marriage to Betsey Johnson. After he was unceremoniously booted from the Velvet Underground in 1968, he became a prolific, risk-taking producer, helming trailblazing albums by the Stooges, the Modern Lovers, Nico and Patti Smith. His catalog as a solo artist is unbelievably rich, tonally varied and full of buried treasure. He is arguably responsible for plucking a little-known Leonard Cohen deep cut called “Hallelujah” out of obscurity . He is inarguably the most important electric viola player rock has ever seen.

It’s possible to chart the eras of Cale’s vast career by his succession of iconic haircuts: the chic, chin-length pageboy of his Velvet Underground days; the greasy bed head of his proto-punk ’70s; an asymmetric art-crop as the ’80s became the ’90s; and the feathery, birdlike style in which he now wears his distinguished, white-gray locks, set off by a playfully Mephistophelian soul patch. Two months before his 81st birthday, he is still spry, sneaking in a pre-interview workout in his studio’s gym. (He’s been a disciplined exerciser since the late 1980s, when he kicked drugs by taking up the most physically demanding sport he could think of: squash. “It got me through,” he said.)

On Cale’s new album, “Mercy” — his 17th as a solo artist, due next week — he occasionally glances back, on songs that honor late friends like David Bowie and Nico. But more often he’s making art focused firmly and defiantly in the present, responding to the political turmoil of the day (one song is titled “The Legal Status of Ice”) and collaborating with a supporting cast of younger avant-garde and indie artists: The celestial crooner Weyes Blood , the punky provocateurs Fat White Family and the art-rock dreamers Animal Collective all make guest appearances.

“I consider it an honor to watch little decisions he makes,” said the Animal Collective multi-instrumentalist Brian Weitz (who records as Geologist), in a phone interview. “He’ll throw out one or two sentences to explain it, and it means the world.”

Cale has always been a man of contradiction: a classically trained violist with a penchant for chaos. In our conversation, he casually referenced such thinkers as John Ruskin, Bertrand Russell and Henri-Louis Bergson, but was just as quick to ad-lib a flatulence joke. When interrupted midsentence by a deafening gurgling coming from the building’s pipes, Cale grinned impishly and said “Excuse me” with impressive comic timing.

“He could be so formal in a certain way — he’s so learned and classical,” Smith said in a phone interview. (Cale produced her landmark debut album, “Horses,” in 1975.) “But he could also be as wild as any of us.” She recalled a kinetic 1976 gig in Cleveland when Cale played bass with her band during a cover of the Who’s “My Generation,” and “it got to such a fever pitch and the ceiling was so low that John put his bass through the ceiling of the club.” 

The breadth of Cale’s accomplishments has left his collaborators and admirers in awe. “If you had one part of his career, you’d be a legend,” LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy said in a phone interview. “If you were only the producer that John Cale was, you’d go down in history. If you were only in the Velvet Underground, your ticket’s punched to rock ’n’ roll heaven. But then you did all those Island solo records, and the Eno collaboration, and then ‘Songs for Drella,’” he added, referring to Cale’s 1990 reunion with Reed, before trailing off.

For all his creative triumphs, Cale never quite became a household name like Reed, his collaborator and sometimes antagonist. Todd Haynes’s acclaimed 2021 documentary “The Velvet Underground,” though, served as a corrective, arguing that Cale was the band’s secret weapon.

“There was no way to overstate John’s absolutely primary role as a conceptual and creative partner with Lou Reed,” Haynes said in a phone interview, describing Cale as “the most elegant flamethrower of ’60s utopianism that I can think of.”

Cale loved the film (“The minute I heard Todd was going to be doing it, I relaxed”), but he’s not one to sit around and think too hard about his legacy — he still has work to do. “I think that came to me from Wales and my mother,” he said. “She was a teacher, and I got it all basically from her: You don’t sit on your laurels. You get on with whatever it is that you haven’t done yet.”

CALE, THE ONLY child of a coal miner and a schoolteacher, spent the first 18 years of his life in Garnant, a small village in South Wales, “a strange, remote, some said mystical land,” as he wrote in his autobiography, “What’s Welsh for Zen.” When he was 7, he started learning English, and classical piano. A few years later, the BBC came to his school and recorded the precocious youngster playing a composition he’d written himself. The sheet music went missing, so Cale had to wing the ending. It was a thrill: his first improvisation.

“Creatively it liberated me,” he wrote. “I started to take chances.”

The viola, the crucial element that would later transform the Velvet Underground’s sound, came into Cale’s hands by chance: When it came time to choose an instrument for the school orchestra, it was the only one left. The local library was his portal to other worlds, especially when he realized he could request sheet music. “I was able to put my fingers in all these scores of the avant-garde,” he said at his studio, citing Webern, Berg, Haubenstock-Ramati and, of course, John Cage.

When Cale was 15, he caught “Rock Around the Clock” at the local cinema; all his classmates rushed the screen and started to bop. He was electrified, bewildered — up until then, Stravinsky had been his idea of rock ’n’ roll — and a little scared that everyone was about to get in trouble. After that, he said, “I was confused. Did I want to go into the avant-garde, or did I want to go into rock ’n’ roll?”

He went to Goldsmiths’ College in London, a suitable place to figure that out. Cale’s incendiary student performances — including one that involved playing a piano with his elbows — scandalized some of the faculty, but he was already dreaming of America. After exchanging letters with Cage and Copland, Cale received a scholarship from Leonard Bernstein to study at the prestigious Tanglewood Music Center in Massachusetts. In 1963, he came to New York and quickly fell in with Conrad, Young and the boldly minimalist Theater of Eternal Music, joining them frequently to play meditative drones that lasted for hours. At last he’d found community, and the mind-expanding experiences he’d always longed for.

“I knew what I wanted from New York,” he said. “And I got it.” 

Meanwhile in Brooklyn, Lou Reed had been born exactly a week before Cale; “I always knew he had an edge on me!” Cale quipped in his memoir. So began one of the most generative and — still, almost a decade after Reed’s death — tumultuous partnerships in rock.

Each time I asked Cale about Reed, he slyly rerouted the conversation: “We drifted apart,” he finally said. But maybe everything that needs to be known is right there in the music. As he wrote in a statement shortly after Reed’s 2013 death , “Unlike so many with similar stories — we have the best of our fury laid on vinyl, for the world to catch a glimpse.” 

Last year, the archival label Light in the Attic released a collection of 17 previously unreleased tracks from Reed’s earliest recordings , including a May 1965 tape that features folky, self-recorded demos of future classics like “Heroin” and “I’m Waiting for the Man.” (Cale, who was Reed’s roommate in a drug-fueled Ludlow Street loft at the time, sings backup on some of them.) It’s revelatory to hear the material in this larval stage: They are unmistakably Lou Reed songs, yes, but they’re not yet Velvet Underground songs. 

“You see that he really hadn’t begun to imagine the potential of this music,” Haynes said of Reed, “and that what he was doing in content and lyrics hadn’t found a correlative energy and sensibility yet in the music.” Enter Cale, with his interest in drone, his connection to the avant-garde, and the low, sonorous viola that melted down traditional rock-song structures like molten lava.

“That dialectic, that tension, that attraction, that romance that brought the two of them together,” Haynes said, “therein lies the mystery of this music.”

THE GLORY DAYS didn’t last long. “I didn’t quite know how to exist outside the environment of the Factory,” Cale said. Warhol spent the latter part of 1968 recovering from a gunshot wound; by the end of the summer, Reed had given the rest of the Velvet Underground a Cale-or-me ultimatum, and insisted that the guitarist Sterling Morrison break the news. For all their merits, the albums that the V.U. released without Cale are quieter and more conventional. (“Who gets kicked out of the Velvet Underground for being too avant-garde?” Murphy mused. “I love that. That’s John Cale.”)

“It made some other people in the band unhappy, but it was just a challenge to me,” Cale said of his ousting. That Welsh work ethic, and his mother’s humble advice, saved him: “I decided, well, OK, you can sit on your hands and do nothing, or you can get up, move your butt and produce some things.” The first album he worked on would change Nico’s image forever, the stark, harrowing “Marble Index.” The second was the Stooges’ 1969 self-titled debut, one of the founding documents of punk.

After the refined chamber-pop of his great 1973 album “Paris 1919,” Cale’s solo work grew increasingly feral, too. He unleashed lacerating screams on the 1974 album “Fear” (the recording that made Smith seek him out as a producer) and embraced post-punk on the adventurous “Honi Soit,” from 1981. “There’s this counterpoint of Lou going and doing Zen,” he said and laughed, referring to Reed’s interest in meditation and tai chi, “and then I’m going and doing rock ’n’ roll.”

Cale and Reed hadn’t spoken in years when they ran into each other at Warhol’s funeral in 1987. The old spark was back, and they began work on a tribute to their former manager, which would become the theatrical, confidently sparse “Songs for Drella.” By the time it arrived in 1990, they were no longer speaking. A Velvet Underground reunion in the early 1990s was similarly short-lived, also owing to creative differences between Cale and Reed.

Cale cleaned up his rock ’n’ roll lifestyle when his daughter, Eden, was born in 1985. He released more classically minded albums and continued to exert an inconspicuous influence on musical culture. In the early 1990s, a small French record label asked him to contribute to a Leonard Cohen tribute album. He chose “Hallelujah” — a song from the quietly received 1984 album “Various Positions” that he’d first heard Cohen perform at the Beacon Theater — and made some tweaks to the lyrics and simplified the song’s arrangement. His version certainly struck a chord. When Jeff Buckley first began playing the song, a magazine editor in the audience told him backstage that he liked his Cohen cover. “I haven’t heard Leonard Cohen’s version,” Buckley is said to have replied . “I know it by John Cale.”

Cale has remarkably open ears for an octogenarian: He often speaks of “what a boon to music” hip-hop is and, in our conversation, expressed admiration for rap producers like Mike Will Made-It and Dr. Dre. “Hey guys, do you know what’s going on here?” he said to his imagined peers. “Better ideas of mixing, better ideas of melodies — it’s like, get on the train or get off.”

In recent years, Cale has become a generous collaborator with younger artists, and a kind of living conduit to avant-garde history and wisdom. “I jokingly tell people that it’s like a friendly godfather-type relationship that I have with him,” Animal Collective’s Weitz said. Cale has long been an admirer of the band, and Weitz described their reciprocal appearances on each other’s records — Cale played on the band’s 2016 album “Painting With,” and Animal Collective appear on a track from “Mercy” — as a kind of “music-for-music swap.”

Cale still makes art on the edge. In June 2019, he headlined the DMZ Peace Train Festival on the border between North and South Korea. (The wildlife surprised him: “Korean rattlesnakes!”) In 2014, at London’s Barbican museum, he conducted the first-ever orchestra of flying drones. A certain defiance also courses through “Mercy,” a slow, meditative album. The songs have immediate emotional resonance, but they ask the listener for patience, too.

LCD Soundsystem’s Murphy admires that. “He always approaches it as, ‘What’s interesting to me right now?’ rather than being careerist,” he said. “Songs made by people like that last in a very different way,” he continued. “They feel alive and current for much longer, because they’re made with respect.”

There are plenty more of them coming, too. Cale spent much of the pandemic holed up in his studio, and he estimates that he’s written around 80 new compositions in the past few years. “Something snapped, in a good way,” he said. “It was like, you can’t turn your back on this, this is something that’s going to go on. And I want to go on.”

Audio produced by Jack D’Isidoro .

An earlier version of this article misstated the release year for John Cale and Lou Reed’s “Songs for Drella.” It was 1990, not 1989.

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Main Character of the Day

John cale, ever restless, keeps moving out of his comfort zone.

Manuela López Restrepo

John Cale says hip-hop is the avant-garde of today. Valerie Macon/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

John Cale says hip-hop is the avant-garde of today.

With a legendary musical career that spans decades, John Cale is still restlessly creating and collaborating on new music.

Who is he? The Welsh musician, producer and avant-garde royalty was one of the founding members of The Velvet Underground, and had a part in some the most iconic experimental music of the late 20th century.

• Cale has collaborated with and produced for artists like Nico, The Modern Lovers, The Stooges, Patti Smith, David Byrne and Nick Drake, just to name a few.

Want more on musical legends? Listen to Consider This dive into the life of the late Tony Bennett .

What's he doing now? At the age of 81, Cale is still performing, collaborating and finding inspiration.

• His most recent Album, Mercy , was released at the start of the year and includes collaborators like Weyes Blood, Sylvan Esso and Animal Collective.

The titular track from Cale's album.

What's he saying? Cale spoke with All Things Considered host Juana Summers earlier this year about the longevity of his music career.

On why he wanted to work with these specific artists:

Most of the artists that joined me on the tracks, they had their own atmosphere to them. And I didn't try and push them in any direction. I just let them be and really inhale the spirit that they brought to the song. The emotion of the song really was joined by their performance. Weyes Blood has a very deep and emotional voice. She just warms the track. And Animal Collective really has this multi-voice personality. So I laughed a lot when we did Everlasting Days .

View this post on Instagram A post shared by John Cale(@therealjohncale)

I've always enjoyed Sylvan Esso's style of harmonizing. And I was hoping that our paths might cross, but as I was putting the finishing touches on this song, I got a call saying Amelia and Nick were in L.A. and would love to drop by and say hello. And it was then I thought that the perfect time to see if they'd want to guest on the track that I was working on. I guess that's the perfect example of serendipity, but it was a natural fit. And I couldn't be happier with the results.

On being influenced by trap and hip-hop:

I mean, I sort of fell in love with hip-hop. It has so many lively approaches to songwriting. Hip-hop is the avant-garde of today. They are unconventional approaches to emotions and creativity. They have no respect for solos and for all the other usual trappings that you have in songwriting.

On pushing himself past musical precedents he has set before:

I realized a long time ago that if you start a song with just any kind of melody or rhythm that you have, you don't just stop because you haven't got a solution yet. You're better off working at it and helping it advance its ideas, whatever they are. And your audience is then your friend.

So, what now?

• Here's Cale on what's next for him: "I have this uncanny kind of idea that if you go and end up in a corner that you feel uncomfortable in, something will happen, and you will come up with a solution. So that's kind of my mantra."
• Mercy is out now.

Learn more:

• Bradley Cooper's 'Maestro' fully captures Bernstein's charisma and complexity
• André 3000 opens up about his first new album in 17 years
• PinkPantheress, IRL

The interview with John Cale was conducted by Juana Summers, produced by Noah Caldwell and edited by Sarah Handel.

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• August 19, 2023 Setlist

John Cale Setlist at Prospect Park Bandshell, Brooklyn, NY, USA

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• Jumbo in tha Modernworld Play Video
• Hedda Gabler Play Video
• Night Crawling Play Video
• Moonstruck (Nico's Song) Play Video
• Rosegarden Funeral of Sores Play Video
• Guts Play Video
• I'm Waiting for the Man ( The Velvet Underground  song) Play Video
• Cable Hogue Play Video
• Helen of Troy Play Video
• Out Your Window Play Video
• Heartbreak Hotel ( Elvis Presley  cover) Play Video
• Mercy Play Video
• Half Past France Play Video
• Hanky Panky Nohow Play Video
• Barracuda Play Video

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17 activities (last edit by daveroberts45 , 24 Aug 2023, 10:46 Etc/UTC )

Songs on Albums

• Moonstruck (Nico's Song)
• Night Crawling
• Out Your Window
• Cable Hogue
• Helen of Troy
• Half Past France
• Hanky Panky Nohow
• Heartbreak Hotel by Elvis Presley
• I'm Waiting for the Man by The Velvet Underground
• Hedda Gabler
• Rosegarden Funeral of Sores
• Jumbo in tha Modernworld

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John Cale Gig Timeline

• Jun 19 2023 Athens and Epidaurus Festival 2023 Athens, Greece Start time: 9:10 PM 9:10 PM
• Aug 16 2023 Luna Fest 2023 Coimbra, Portugal Add time Add time
• Aug 19 2023 BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival 2023 This Setlist Brooklyn, NY, USA Start time: 9:00 PM 9:00 PM
• Aug 23 2023 Stroud Subscription Rooms Stroud, England Start time: 8:10 PM 8:10 PM
• Aug 24 2023 Albert Hall Manchester, England Add time Add time

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John Cale announces his first full UK tour in almost a decade

The last time the Velvet Underground multi-instrumentalist hit the road this side of the pond was at the end of 2012

John Cale has announced that he’ll be heading to the UK this summer for his first full run of tour dates in almost a decade.

• READ MORE: The Velvet Underground review: revisionist doc reworks narrative of New York rock and rollers

The last time the Velvet Underground multi-instrumentalist hit the road this side of the pond was for his ‘Shifty Adventures In Nookie Wood’ European tour back in October 2012.

The Welsh musician’s tour will begin in Liverpool at the Royal Philharmonic Hall on July 15, before calling at Whitley Bay, York, Bexhill, Cambridge and the London Palladium, before closing out the run at Birmingham Town Hall on July 25.

According to a press release, Cale will “perform songs from throughout his career, which is now in its sixth decade, and has earned him an international reputation as a musical pioneer”.

“TOUR News! Hello UK I’m heading your way in July! My first extended run of UK dates in several year,” Cale said, sharing the dates on Twitter.

TOUR News! Hello UK I'm heading your way in July! My first extended run of UK dates in several years. Tickets on sale Friday from https://t.co/evSuIopxNn pic.twitter.com/Yy1Ef0mELW — John Cale (@therealjohncale) February 24, 2022

Tickets go on sale on Wednesday (March 2) at 10am. You can get them here and see the full list of tour dates below.

Recommended

JULY 2022 15 – Liverpool, Royal Philharmonic Hall 18 – Whitley Bay, The Playhouse 19 – York, Barbican 21 – Bexhil,l De Lar Warr Pavilion 23 – Cambridge, Corn Exchange 24 – London, The Palladium 25 – Birmingham, Town Hall

Back in 2017, Cale teamed up with an array of special guests for a pair of shows which continued his celebration of the 50th anniversary of The Velvet Underground‘s iconic debut album .

Cale rounded off his concert series celebrating the classic album ‘The Velvet Underground & Nico’ with a pair of gigs in Brooklyn, New York, which featured appearances from members of MGMT , Animal Collective and Sky Ferreira .

Kurt Vile , Thee Oh Sees, Connan Mockassin, and Chairlift ’s Caroline Polachek also performed at the gigs.

• Related Topics
• The Velvet Underground

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Latest release, john cale poptical illusion, album | 14th june 2024.

Despite the album’s playful title, Cale’s second album in just over a year still contains the same feelings of fierce and inquisitive rage that were present in 2023 album  MERCY .  He remains angry, still incensed by the willful destruction that unchecked capitalists and unrepentant conmen have hoisted upon the wonders of this world and the goodness of its people. But this is not at all  MERCY II , or some collection of castoffs, as throughout his career of more than six decades, Cale has never been much for repetition. His vanguard-shaping enthusiasms have shifted among ecstatic classicism and unbound rock, classic songcraft and electronic reimagination with proud restlessness. 

And so, on  POPtical Illusion , he foregoes the illustrious cast to burrow mostly alone into mazes of synthesizers and samples, organs and pianos, with words that, as far as Cale goes, constitute a sort of swirling hope, a sage insistence that change is yet possible. Produced by Cale and longtime artistic partner Nita Scott,  POPtical Illusion  is the work of someone trying to turn toward the future – exactly as Cale always has.

Album Description

Tracklisting.

• 1 God Made Me Do It (don't ask me again)
• 2 Davies and Wales
• 3 Calling You Out
• 4 Edge of Reason
• 5 I'm Angry
• 6 How We See The Light
• 7 Company Commander
• 8 Setting Fires
• 9 Shark-Shark
• 10 Funkball the Brewster
• 11 All To The Good
• 12 Laughing In My Sleep
• 13 There Will Be No River

• Saturday 7th September Teatro De La Ciudad Esperanza Iris, Mexico City, Mexico  Buy Tickets

14th June 2024

John Cale MERCY

20th january 2023.

John Cale Night Crawling

1st august 2022.

John Cale Lazy Day

6th october 2020.

John Cale The Academy In Peril

20th june 2017.

John Cale Black Acetate

John Cale Circus Live

John Cale Eat / Kiss: Music For The Films By Andy Warhol

John Cale Hobosapiens

John Cale Paris 1919

John Cale Fragments Of A Rainy Season

9th december 2016.

John Cale M:FANS

6th february 2016.

John Cale Music For A New Society

22nd january 2016.

John Cale Music For A New Society/M:FANS

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By Jesse Dorris

January 24, 2023

When an icon returns after a lengthy absence, it’s tempting to feel a kind of condescending compassion.  My god , one might think,  he’s still doing it at 80 . And when he returns in the enviable company of bright young(er) things, it’s tempting to feel cynical:  Look who’s trying to stay current. Spare all that for  John Cale . He who, in co-founding  the Velvet Underground , built the bridge between European art music and American rock’n’roll with his inimitable viola drone; who managed to corral early iterations of  the Stooges ,  Patti Smith ,  the Modern Lovers , and  Nico into the studio and keep them there long enough to capture on tape all their world-changing energies; who introduced  Leonard Cohen ’s “Hallelujah” to Jeff Buckley, and after him, vicariously, to a deluge of lessor idol tryouts; who has himself released more than three dozen albums of chamber pop, post-punk, post-rock, and beyond, on his own and in collaboration with fellow icons, arguably more famous than him (frenemies  Lou Reed and  Brian Eno , gurus like  La Monte Young ), whom he often shows up—John Cale doesn’t need your charity. 

In a 60-year career full of unexpected twists, Cale arrives with another:  MERCY , an album informed by R&B and smeared with dream-pop haze and orchestral rumblings of apocalyptic terror. Yes, there’s a dream team of collaborators that reads like a festival main stage:  Weyes Blood ,  Sylvan Esso ,  Animal Collective ,  Dev Hynes , and  Tei Shi . Electronic producers  Actress ,  Laurel Halo ,  TOKiMONSTA , and  Seven Davis Jr. offer avant-cred.  Fat White Family also appear. None stand a chance of upstaging Cale, and none try.  MERCY  is Cale’s album alone, haunted and reckoning with a turbulent past that, day by day, looks more peaceful than the future.

His voice remains unmistakable, a walnut burl with cracks in the grain. The stentorian register that Cale used to wield with authority is absent. Chart the distance between its apotheosis, 1973’s classic “ Paris 1919 ,” and  MERCY standout “Time Stands Still.” In both songs, Europe has collapsed (this time, it’s “sinking in the mud”), and in both, the Church comes to save the day. Fifty years ago, Cale could imagine himself as the religious force. “I’m the church/And I’ve come/To claim you with my iron drum,” he sang, his voice like cold steel. Today, he just mourns the church’s “savagery” in a voice wafting through a cathedral of Sylvan Esso’s echoes and murmurs. The drums are uncertain, doubling back like leather heels approaching and retreating on a hard stone floor. Only in the bridge does that old voice return, and instead of enlightenment, there’s environmental chaos. Roses battle poppies for the sun, and “monsoons (are) happening everywhere, even in your own backyard.” Vanishing footsteps signify love and loss in the gorgeous “Noise of You”; Cale, suspended in blankets of synths and vintage keys the exact color of a dusk snowstorm, longs to hear them once again. “Was so long, long ago,” he hollers. A string section flutters tremendously, a scarf that could form a noose. 

On  MERCY , memory is treacherous. “Not the End of the World” sparkles with a reassuring grandeur, but each time his processed, multi-tracked voice repeats the title, it feels more like a lie. Incendiary “The Legal Status of Ice” raises a bitter toast to polar bears stranded on an iceberg; Cale intones, “Ding dong, the witch is dead,” over a tundra of frosty guitars and cracking drums, and the witch might well be us. In other moments, it’s the past that’s bewitching. “Night Crawling” stumbles around with neo-soul swagger, getting nowhere (relatively, for this very downtempo collection) fast. “I can’t even tell when you’re putting me on/We’ve played that game before,” he chants, trapped in a loop of looking back to reconfirm he’s still trapped in a loop. Centerpiece “Everlasting Days” starts out elegiac, and then  Avey Tare and  Panda Bear join Cale in dismantling the entire idea of a requiem. Breakbeats remind you they’re named for destruction, words shatter into mere syllables, and the motives behind the making of amends are thrown like snapped branches into a bonfire of historical proportions. It’s brutal. 

Warmth is rare. “I Know You’re Happy” attempts a kind of late-Motown bop, but flops rather elegantly into first recriminations and then earnest desperation. In the luminous “Moonstruck (Nico’s Song),” he tells his old collaborator, “I have come to make my peace,” as soft synth pads echo her old harmonium wheeze. One wonders what Nico, who made some of the world’s most beautiful  songs while embracing  some very ugly politics , would think of Cale calling her “a moonstruck junkie lady, staring at your feet.” Or what another doomed icon, Marilyn Monroe, would think of his ode to her, the seven-minute “Marilyn Monroe’s Legs (Beauty Elsewhere),” which sets numerological and phenomenological musings against a shivering screen of bleeps, rustles, and moans. It’s more Cronenberg than Warhol, but at least not as creepy as Andrew Dominik’s recent  Blonde .

Somehow, though, alienation isn’t all.  MERCY is a revelation of the need to connect. It’s a need that doesn’t waver as one ages, as the deaths of your loved ones hasten. Cale utterly embraces that need’s every facet. In the title track, Laurel Halo’s remarkable sound design ballasts Cale’s plea for someone to “lift me up,” an act of generosity in a song about hoping for one. In a pair of the album’s most devastating songs, Cale’s old pal the piano comes out: For a moment, it’s there in the bluesy intro to “Story of Blood,” a crisp, dizzying duet with Weyes Blood’s Natalie Mering, which suddenly bursts into some heavenly headspace between  SZA and  Slowdive . Cale rages against those betrayed by their bodies. “Bring them with me into the light,” he and Mering sing to each other, shouldering a burden built for two. And when the soul fails, connection is a mortal issue. “Out Your Window” closes the album with, mostly, Cale at the piano, invoking  Paris 1919 . For all its complexities,  MERCY ends with Cale vowing to save a troubled friend’s life. “If you jump,” he promises, “I will break your fall.” Not stop, not catch, but break. Cale’s here, once again and for now, still not making things easy on anyone. 

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