Still, the narrator manages to snap out of his stupor to thank the one with whom he’s spending this “Perfect Day.” “You made me forget myself,” Reed sings, slivers of emotion creeping into his voice. In any case, there’s always the feeling that this idyllic day is just a tiny oasis in a dark desert. Maybe it’s the way that Reed sings the line, “It’s such fun” as if he were being lobotomized. Maybe it’s the eerie stillness that permeates the song or the dirge-like pace.
Yet there’s something gently unsettling about it. Produced by David Bowie and Mick Ronson and featuring Ronson’s swirling string arrangement and piano flourishes, it really is a gorgeous track on the surface. The most obvious candidate, at least musically, would seem to be “Perfect Day”, the lush ballad that became one of Reed’s signature songs practically from the moment it appeared on his second solo album, 1972’s Transformer. But such a task was never going to be easy with Lou Reed, who passed away on October 27 at age 71, simply because Reed’s songs were always coming from way too many angles to snugly serve any single purpose. Whenever a great musician dies, it’s customary for grieving fans to look back through the body of work left behind for something movingly elegiac in an effort to say a proper goodbye.
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