Songfacts®:

• Lou Reed wrote "I'll Be Your Mirror" for Nico, anecdotally after Nico approached Reed with this line after a 1965 stage show. "I wrote 'I'll Be Your Mirror for Nico,'" Reed recalled to the audience at London's Scala cinema in 2013. "Every single word was meant for her... to make her feel better about herself."
  
  The song was said to be a favorite of Reed's.
• Guitarist Sterling Morrison told about the recording of this song in interviews. The band was frustrated with Nico for her loud, aggressive approach to the song when they wanted a more delicate vocal. they did take after take until finally she broke down and burst into tears. Then they had her do it one more time, and that's the take that made the cut.
• One of Andy Warhol's goofy ideas was to have the record album have a built-in crack so the final part of this song would repeat indefinitely until the listener moved the record player needle. That idea was abandoned, probably for the best.
• Could this be the first Goth song? In The Velvet Underground: An Illustrated History of a Walk on the Wild Side, Nico is cited as "a formidable influence on the Gothic sound, style, and ambiance." It even goes so far as to say that Nico tops even Siouxsie Sioux as "the witchiest woman in rock history."
  In the same book, David Sprague writes in assessment of The Velvet Underground & Nico that "[Nico's] deadpan delivery and dead-eyed demeanor made for a breathtakingly blank canvas, a notion driven home most effectively in 'I'll Be Your Mirror,' an unblinking sublimation of self that stands as a sort of bookend to the more blatant Domina/submissive dynamic conveyed in 'Venus In Furs.'"
• I'll Be Your Mirror is the title of a collection of Andy Warhol interviews published by De Capo Press in 2014.