With The Bells, Lou Reed fulfilled—maybe even laid to rest—a longstanding ethos: one of grim choices and unsparing accountability. A song like "Families" sounded as if it used up the whole of Reed's emotional being. It didn't seem possible that either his art or his life could ever be the same again. They can't. Growing Up in Public tells us why, and then tells us something more….

Growing Up in Public is an album about summoning high-test courage: the courage to love, and along with it, the will to forgive everybody who—and everything that—ever cut short your chances in the first place. As Reed himself has noted, there's always been a powerful personal quality to his work that, on the one hand, implied an "agreement of mores" between the artist and his audience, while, on the other, suggested that the singer and the first-person characters in his songs were more than likely identical. This led certain listeners—especially those reared on "Heroin" or Berlin (the latter an embittered dramatization of Reed's brief first marriage)—to applaud Lou Reed as a jaded proponent of decadence and nihilism. Conversely, most critics championed him as a compassionate commentator on sin and salvation in an urban mythos.

On Growing Up in Public, Lou Reed's material bridges the difficult chasm between moral narrative and unadulterated autobiography. In part, the new compositions are about Reed's decision to marry again—a decision that flabbergasted many of the people who'd pegged him as a middle-aged, intractable gay—but they're also seared recollections of the prime forces that shaped and almost fated him….

Much of this record is like the family scrapbook that nobody wants to share with polite company: sharp recountings of the ways in which parents thrust their disillusions upon their children….

He shatters the claustrophobic web of hatred and self-defeat—easily the most frightening he's ever constructed, because it's also the most universal—by choosing to run the same risk at which his parents failed: the risk of the heart….

[The words of "Think It Over"] might be the bravest lines Reed has ever sung. Why? Because the faith they advertise runs against the grain of his past and maybe his chances. More important, because he's placed his faith in somebody else's heart—and that's never a small risk. They're also brave because they could anger a cultist crowd that prefers Lou Reed as some sort of pariah-poet of bleakness. It was Reed, after all, who helped spawn a burgeoning rock & roll movement that feels more at home singing songs of alienation, hostility and nothingness than of romance; marriage or even sex.

But Lou Reed has never advocated despair. He called it choice, even when it entailed self-negation. His choice now is to believe in the indispensability of love. Reed's love is like the love that Pete Townshend sings about on his into-the-fray solo disc, Empty Glass: unflinching and lucidly compassionate—love in spite of dread. In other words, even if the world is imploding and love can't save it, come out for love anyway. It's the ultimate act of defiance….

[On "Teach the Gifted Children"] Reed doesn't offer the children blithe promises but realistic certainties and a prayer that the world might show them a little more mercy than it ever showed him. "Teach the Gifted Children" is a tune about redemption in the truest sense, since it reaches beyond a concern for one's own fate toward a concern for the whole of humanity….

Reed's entire career—more accurately, his entire life—has been leading up to Growing Up in Public. It may or may not be his finest album, but it's surely his hardest-fought victory: a record of the long road back from Berlin. There were foreshadowings of it in last year's "All through the Night" ("With a daytime of sin and a nighttime of hell / Everybody's going to look for a bell to ring"). Now that Lou Reed has found his bell, it tolls for you and me, loud and clear, pealing a clarion call of hope that the glory of love—despite our daytimes of sin and nighttimes of hell—might see us all through yet. (p. 54)