I was a Bowie fan, which meant that I had bought or borrowed Transformer when I was thirteen, and then someone handed me an acetate of Live at Max’s Kansas City and now I was a Lou Reed fan and a Velvet Underground fan. I looked for everything I could. I hunted through record shops. Lou Reed’s music was the soundtrack to my teenage years.

When I was sixteen and had my first breakup with a girlfriend, I played Berlin over and over until my friends worried about me. Also, I walked in the rain a lot.

I was willing to sing in a punk band in 1977 because, I decided, you didn’t have to be able to sing to sing. Lou did just fine with whatever voice he had. You just had to be willing to tell stories in song.

Brian Eno said that only a thousand people bought the first Velvet Underground album when it came out, but they all formed bands. That may have been true. But some of us listened to Loaded over and over and we wrote stories.

I’d see Lou’s songs surface in the stories I read. William Gibson wrote a short story called “Burning Chrome,” which is his take on a Velvet Underground song called “Pale Blue Eyes.” Sandman, the comic that made my name, would not have happened without Lou Reed. Sandman celebrates the marginalized, the people out on the edges, and in grace notes that run through it; partly in the huger themes: Morpheus, Dream, the eponymous Sandman, has one title that means more to me than any other. He’s the Prince of Stories too, a title I stole from “I’m Set Free” (I’ve been blinded but now I can see / What in the world has happened to me? / The prince of stories who walked right by me).

When I needed to write a Sandman story set in Hell I played Lou’s Metal Machine Music (which I’ve described as “four sides of tape hum, on the kinds of frequencies that drive animals with particularly sensitive hearing to throw themselves off cliffs and cause blind unreasoning panic in crowds”) all day for two weeks. It helped.

The things he sang about were transgressive, always on the edge of what you could say: people pointed to the mention of oral sex in “Walk on the Wild Side,” but the easy gender changes were more important in retrospect, the casual way that Transformer took nascent gay culture and made it mainstream.

Lou Reed’s music stayed part of my life, whatever else was happening.

I named my daughter Holly after Warhol superstar Holly Woodlawn, whom I’d discovered in “Walk on the Wild Side.” When Holly was nineteen I made her a playlist of songs she had loved as a small girl, the ones she’d remembered and the ones she’d forgotten, which led to our having the Conversation. I dragged songs from her childhood over to the playlist—“Nothing Compares 2 U” and “I Don’t Like Mondays” and “These Foolish Things” and then came “Walk on the Wild Side.” “You named me from this song, didn’t you?” said Holly as the first bass notes sang. “Yup,” I said. Lou started singing.