Under the Covers: Beck + Nate Ruess / Lou Reed

Your weekly dose of genre-bending with your favorite WBRU artists/songs! From the genuinely good to the what-the-hell weird, we got you covered.

Last week, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted Lou Reed, Green Day, Joan Jett & the Blackhearts, Bill Withers, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, and Stevie Ray Vaughan. To honor Reed’s legacy, Beck performed a moving cover of “Satellite of Love,” a single from Reed’s 1972 album Transformer, with Nate Ruess on background vocals. In 2013 Beck told Rolling Stone:

I’ve been playing Lou Reed’s songs since I first picked up the guitar. They can be so simple and perfect, and they can just cut you to the bone, but he never reduced it to sentimentality or cliché. He had that conversational style that’s really not easy to do. There’s just nothing cooler than that to me. I never get tired of playing his songs – it always works.