“Caroline Says I” by Lou Reed

"Caroline Says I" belongs to Berlin, the bleak concept album Lou Reed put out on RCA in October 1973, his third solo record, and Reed wrote it alone, words and music. The name in the title gives it away: Caroline is one half of the doomed couple, with Jim, whose slide through drugs and abuse the whole album follows.

Berlin got its shape when producer Bob Ezrin told Reed his songs had great openings and no endings, and asked what became of the pair he'd sung about in "Berlin", back on his debut solo album. The answer was a tragic rock opera of addiction, prostitution, violence at home, depression and suicide. Rolling Stone wrote the album off as a disaster in 1973; by 2012 the same magazine ranked it No. 344 among the 500 greatest albums of all time.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz.