“Sweet Jane” by Lou Reed

"Sweet Jane" was Lou Reed's song long before it was a solo showpiece. He wrote it for the Velvet Underground, who put it on Loaded in 1970, in a version with the bridge snipped out (the missing section only came back decades later on the Peel Slowly and See box set and Loaded: Fully Loaded Edition). Reed never let it go after walking away from the band: it kept turning up in his concerts and on his own live records, Rock 'n' Roll Animal and Live: Take No Prisoners among them.

This take, produced by Reed with Steve Katz, keeps that chugging riff front and center, and Reed delivers it with the bored, streetwise cool of a man who knows the guitars will do the heavy lifting.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.