Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed’s rules for living

“The first one is: Don’t be afraid of anyone.”

Jul 08, 2025

(Lawrence Schwartzwald/Sygma via Getty Images)

Last time, I shared Courtney Love’s excellent (to my mind) advice for young artists. This time, I want to share another batch of life advice from alt-rock royalty: Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed’s three rules for living well, which Anderson outlined in a 2015 interview.

(An admission: These rules have been posted in several other places over the years—but they were new to me when I stumbled across them the other week, and I suspect that they will be new to many of you as well. And who couldn’t use some rules for living these days?)

First, some context on the interview: Anderson was talking about her 2015 documentary Heart of a Dog, which she made in the years after her beloved rat terrier, Lolabelle, passed away. At one point, the interviewer tries to ask Anderson about her final months with her late husband, Lou Reed, who had died two years earlier. Anderson doesn’t really want to go there, so instead she offers “some rules that he and I made about how to live,” which she says they spent a lot of time thinking about together. Their premise, Anderson explains, was that life moves fast and is often complicated, so if you had some rules that you could always keep in mind, it would make it easier to navigate confusing situations and life in general.

Here are the rules they came up with:

OK, so the first one is: Don’t be afraid of anyone. If you can imagine: living your life, you’re not afraid of anyone. That’s number one.
Number two is you get a really good bullshit detector, and you learn how to use it. You know, just: “Is that really happening or not?”
Third is to be really, really tender. And with those, you’re covered.

What do we think? I’d say these are pretty great rules for anyone but especially for artists, who have to know what interests them and follow that wherever it leads, and not let that process get derailed or watered down by other people’s opinions, by the lure of money or success, or by one’s own self-doubts. Anderson and Reed’s rules distill all of that into what could almost be a checklist for moments of uncertainty: Am I staying unafraid? Am I using my bullshit detector? Am I being really, really tender?

That said, I’m also curious: If you were to add one more rule to this shortlist, what would yours be? Please let me know in the comments, and I’ll be reading and replying this week.

PS — BE LOOSE!

OK, here’s a possible fourth rule from Anderson herself, via a 2016 interview with the Louisiana Channel.

“Be loose!” Anderson advises in the video. Especially when it comes to defining yourself as an artist, she says, “make it vague. Because there are so many forces that are there to push you in certain directions, and they’re traps.” (That’s why she calls herself a “multimedia artist,” she says, because it encompasses any kind of work she might feel like making.) She continues:

Curators do it. Curators are like, “This is our theme, so stay in the theme.” Really? How about if I stay in my theme? Let your own interest and your own obsession rule that, and don’t be caught in that trap of definition.

“I’m an artist because I want to be free,” Anderson adds. “That’s my whole goal. And I hate it when people tell me what to do. So I would say that the branding thing is something to really avoid.”

ANOTHER VIEW

As much as I love Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed, I can’t resist sharing a not-so-flattering glimpse of them in achingly-cool-couple mode, circa 2002, as recorded in Terry Castle’s wonderful book The Professor. Here, Castle—a decidedly uncool English professor visiting New York from Stanford—has been invited by her friend Susan Sontag to a dinner party at the loft of the artist Marina Abramović. Castle writes:

Abramovic—plus hunky sculptor boyfriend—lived in a huge, virtually empty loft, the sole furnishings being a dining table and chairs in the very center of the room and a spindly old stereo from the 1960s. The space was probably a hundred feet on either side: major real estate, of course, as Sontag proudly explained to me. (She loved using Vanity Fair–ish clichés.) She and Abramovic smothered one another in hugs and kisses. I meanwhile blanched in fright: I’d just caught sight of two of the other guests who, alarmingly enough, turned out to be Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson. Reed (O great rock god of my twenties) stood morosely by himself, humming, doing little dance steps and playing air guitar. Periodically he glared at everyone—including me—with apparent hatred. Anderson—elfin spikes of hair perfectly gelled—was chatting up an Italian man from the Guggenheim . . . .

Later, at the dinner table:

At one point I thought I saw Laurie Anderson, at the other end of the table, trying to get my attention; she was smiling sweetly in my direction, as if to undo my pathetic isolation. I smiled in gratitude in return and held up my little place card so she would at least know my name. Annoyed, she gestured back impatiently, with a sharp downward flick of her index finger; she wanted me to pass the wine bottle. I was reduced to a pair of disembodied hands, like the ones that come out of the walls and give people drinks in Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast.

WORM SCHOOL EXTENSION 🪱 🎓

Since early June, I’ve been writing a series of bonus posts for paid subscribers, reflecting on the things that helped me finally, actually, for-real get my long-overdue book project done. To read the first four installments—including a private letter I wrote to my project as well as some fairly embarrassing excerpts from my personal journal—plus one more lesson coming ~~this afternoon~~ tomorrow [sorry, I’m behind!], upgrade to a paid subscription today:

These posts are a follow-up to last year’s Worm School, my eight-part summer course of “wriggling through” a creative life. If you missed it, I do think there’s some useful, evergreen advice here for anyone trying to build or maintain a serious creative practice. Here are links to the full series:

WORM SCHOOL EXTENSION:

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