Laughing Len strikes again: ILM Artist Poll #81 - Leonard Cohen

22. Joan of Arc (72 points, 7 votes)
from Songs of Love and Hate

Jennifer Warnes: https://goo.gl/YZzd6n

I'm Your Man:

...But in 1967, feeling he had no skill and that he had forgotten how to court a lady, Leonard went back alone to his hotel room. His thoughts full of Nico, he wrote "The Jewels in Your Shoulder" and "Take This Longing," then titled "The Bells," both of which he later played and taught to Nico. She was both "the tallest" and "blondest" girl in the song "Memories" and the muse for "Joan of Arc" ("This song was written for a German girl I used to know. She's a great singer, I love her songs. I recently read an interview where she was asked about me and my work. And she said I was ˜completely unnecessary," he told a Paris audience in 1974).

Various Positions:

"Joan of Arc" was something of an experiment for Cohen, in that he both sings and speaks the lyrics on overlapping tracks. This technique was Cohen's idea, drawn from the literary form of the palimpsest: "I had, as the model, manuscripts that you'd see with lines written over lines. I just thought it was appropriate at that moment. It's like the line of a Larry Rivers painting, you see the variations."

Songs of Love and Hate was my number one and if I'd done the song ballot another day Joan of Arc may have topped it. Some of my favourite Cohen lines in this, of course his delivery is at least half the power of it ("If he was fire then she must be wood" just stops me in my tracks, not to mention the very final lines where his spoken counterpoint comes back in).

Great writing about Paper Thin Hotel by the way.

21. Sisters of Mercy (75.5 points, 8 votes)
from Songs of Leonard Cohen

Dion: https://goo.gl/zrMw2f
Beth Orton: https://goo.gl/xwYJgd
Judy Collins: https://goo.gl/tWVWaI
Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt: https://goo.gl/U1Rvmr

As recounted to Uncut's Nigel Williamson in 1997, "Sisters of Mercy" had been written "in Edmonton during a snow storm, and I took refuge in an office lobby. There were two young back-packers there, Barbara and Lorraine, and they had nowhere to go. I asked them back to my hotel room – they immediately got into the bed and crashed while I sat in the armchair watching them sleep. I knew they had given me something, and, by the time they woke up, I had finished the song and I played it to them.”

I'm Your Man:

The two women in "Sisters of Mercy," since they are not his lovers, are portrayed as nuns. (Leonard wrote the song during a blizzard in Edmonton, Canada, after encountering two young girl backpackers in a doorway. He offered them his hotel bed and, when they fell straight to sleep, watched them from an armchair, writing, and played them the song the next morning when they woke.) Yet, however pure and holy, a sense of romantic possibility remains for a man who, in The Favourite Game, described the woman making up the hotel bed in which they had just made love as having "the hands of a nun."

Various Positions:

...in the summer of 2005, there was the discovery by several energetic Edmonton Cohenites of new details concerning the origin of the song, "Sisters of Mercy," something I had got wrong in my original biographical account. I had claimed that in 1966 Cohen met two young women in a snowstorm and brought them back to his room as he described on The Best of Leonard Cohen: "This was written in a few hours one winter night in a hotel room in Edmonton, Alberta. Barbara and Lorraine were sleeping on the couch. The room was filled with moonlight reflected off the ice of the North Saskatchewan River. I had it ready for them when they woke up."

The full story was pulled together from formerly overlooked articles published in the University of Alberta student paper, Gateway, in anticipation of Cohen's visit there, and several recent interviews.

In the fall of 1966, Cohen was near the height of his notoriety, having already published three books of poetry and his first novel. He was receiving much attention as a Beat-styled Canadian poet in the mold of Allen Ginsberg, and he added to his mystique by living part of the year in Greece on the island of Hydra and projecting himself as the bohemian of Canadian letters in films such as the National Film Board's Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen (1965).

Excitement over his Edmonton visit was unrestrained, with Gateway publishing a piece four days before his November arrival describing him as the "present darling of the campus cognoscenti, the bohemian in-groups, the Toronto morality squad and lots of lovers of language." More to the point, it goes on, "he is probably the most exciting and likely the best writer in Canada right now." Anticipation drives the writer into a frenzy of Cohenesque prose: "He, LEONARD COHEN, shall from the skybird descend unto us and sing and speak and chant to beauty in Montreal, love in Toronto, harmony in Canada and other paradoxes and we shall be grateful. For Cohen comes and he shall say to Irving (Layton), behold Irving it is not entirely wrong to have been born in Westmount, for have I not traveled to Edmonton? And can I not roll craps with the best of them?"

(...)

Not surprisingly, every Edmonton venue and performance of Cohen's was packed, as was his room in the Hotel Macdonald's annex. Rocco Caratozzolo, an Edmonton photographer, captured the youthful Cohen in a set of photos, the young singer/writer wearing a black turtleneck and holding his guitar. And new information confirms that Cohen also befriended four women during his visit, which lasted nearly a week: Patricia, Anne, Barbara, and Lorraine. (His poem "I Met You" is about Anne.)

Barbara and Lorraine were undergraduates living in the basement of a philosophy professor's house on 89th Avenue. Leonard was invited to a faculty party there, and Barbara and Lorraine crashed it. He decided to leave and invited them back to his room. The two women fell asleep there and, moved by the evening and his "rescue" from the party, he wrote "Sisters of Mercy" about them. Some time later, when the two girls told their friend Patricia that Cohen had written a song about them, she couldn't believe it. To confirm their story, they called him in Montreal and he sang it to Patricia over the phone. "Sisters of Mercy," as Cohen explained, was unique: "it was the only time a song has ever been given to me without my having to sweat over every word. And when they awakened in the morning, I sang them the song exactly as it is, perfect completely formed, and they were & happy about it."

Oh this is just such a beautiful song. The cascades of chiming music boxes, the fairground organ sounding keyboards and his delicate, rippling finger picking. "We weren't lovers like that but besides it would still be alright" - the generosity of spirit in a lot of his songs defines them.

20. I'm Your Man (82.5 points, 6 votes)
from I'm Your Man

Nick Cave: https://goo.gl/dhCK3O
Michael Bublé: https://goo.gl/iKtA3j

no need for burble thx

is hallelujah gonna be shut out of this or is it gonna win?

Wow, "Sisters of Mercy" is so low, that would probably have been my no.1. I love the chord progression, you have the feeling it could go on forever.

Its use in McCabe and Mrs Miller is too perfect for words.

When I listened to it I could briefly imagine being freed of guilt, obsession, inadequacy, myself. Of course, when you listen a little more closely, you notice other things. After the initial verses, the sentiment turns increasingly ambiguous, even bitter or maybe even hateful

funny, this was the opposite of my interpretation! i always thought it was him starting out bitter and over the course of the song reaching some kind of sexual-spiritual enlightenment. "you go to heaven once you've been to hell". and that repeating mantra, "A heavy burden lifted from my soul/I heard that love was out of my control", so beautiful.

i think alot of it has to do with, is he being sincere in these lyrics? or is he trying to fool himself, pretending he is over this? "I felt so good I couldn't feel a thing". i always took it as he felt so good BECAUSE he couldn't feel a thing. that these were two ex-lovers, one is over it, and he was still pining, and he had finally gotten over it. he can't wait to tell her, to repay that sting of detachment. not with malice but with clarity.

it's definitely an ambiguous lyric, and insanely brilliant at that too.

so many startling backing vocal moments in the Cohen canon but among the most vertiginous is the children coming in for "the lovers will rise up" in "last year's man"

re: Paper Thin Hotel and its perspective, it feels to me like it moves from grace ("I heard that love was out of my control") to bitterness ("you are the oman with her legs apart") and then finds a...bitterly wizened middle ground ("you go to heaven..."). There's a lot going on.

anyway!

19. Who by Fire (83.5 points, 8 votes)
from New Skin for the Old Ceremony

Coil: https://goo.gl/3itv6s

“Who by Fire” had been directly inspired by a Hebrew prayer sung on the Day of Atonement when the Book of Life was opened and the names read aloud of who will die and how. Leonard said he had first heard it in the synagogue when he was five years old, "standing beside my uncles in their black suits." His own liturgy ended with a question that his elders had never answered and whose answer Leonard still sought: what unseen force controls these things and who the hell is in charge?

18. The Future (86.5 points, 9 votes)
from The Future

Teddy Thompson: https://goo.gl/oHbr76

Various Positions:

Leonard was in the studio, working on his new album The Future, when the L.A. riots broke out on April 29, 1992. Four white police officers had been acquitted of the beating of a black motorist”an incident that had been caught on video by an onlooker and was frequently aired on television”and South Central L.A., a predominantly African-American neighbourhood, erupted. Cars and buildings were set on fire and stores attacked and looted. A white man was dragged from his truck by a mob and severely beaten. As the violence spread, the dinner-party conversation in affluent white neighbourhoods turned to buying guns. By the fourth day, the government sent in the marines. There had been fifty-three deaths, hundreds of buildings destroyed and around four thousand fires. Leonard could see them burning from his window. There was a layer of soot on his front lawn. His home was not far from South Central. The Zen Center was closer still. He had become used to hearing gunshots on his way to the zendo in the early hours of morning and to stepping over syringes to get through the gate. Now from his car he could see boarded-up stores and the charred remains of a gas station. It was œtruly an apocalyptic landscape and a very appropriate landscape for my work.12 He had started writing the song “The Future” (then titled “If You Could See What’s Coming Next”) in 1989, when the Berlin Wall toppled, and just as he had predicted, it was all coming down.

17. Democracy (91 points, 7 votes)
from The Future

Judy Collins: https://goo.gl/jMKsSB

I'm Your Man:

In the lyrics of the stirring "Democracy," Leonard seems at his most sociopolitically direct. There are no Abrahams, Isaacs and butchers here(...)

In interviews at the time, Leonard referred to democracy as "the greatest religion the West has produced," adding, "(as) Chesterton said about religion, it"s a great idea, too bad nobody's tried it."

Various Positions:

"Democracy" was culled from more than eighty verses that had been written over the past several years. Don Henley performed the song at the MTV ball in Washington celebrating the January 1993 inauguration of President Bill Clinton.

16. Hallelujah (94 points, 7 votes)
from Various Positions

John Cale: https://goo.gl/N03bsO
Jeff Buckley: https://goo.gl/SoiWBt
Kate McKinnon: https://goo.gl/WIUBas

I'm Your Man:

“Hallelujah” took Leonard five years to write. When Larry Ratso Sloman interviewed him in 1984, Leonard showed him a pile of notebooks, book after book filled with verses for the song he then called ˜The Other Hallelujah."  Leonard kept around eighty of them and discarded many more. Even after the final edit, Leonard kept two different endings for “Hallelujah.” One of them was downbeat:

It’s not somebody who"s seen the light
It’s a cold and it"s a broken hallelujah

The other had an almost “My Way” bravado:

Even though it all went wrong
I"ll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but
Hallelujah

Bob Dylan said he preferred the second version, which was the one Leonard finally used on the album, although he would return to the darker ending at various concerts.

ha!

Coil's Who By Fire is enormous.

Collective sigh of relief there, I expect.

15. The Stranger Song (99.5 votes, 8 votes)
from Songs of Leonard Cohen

Emmylou Harris: https://goo.gl/mcFnxM

I'm Your Man:

Leonard himself said something once that suggested he wanted something more than just simple voice and guitar. "I was trying to find, I wanted a kind of ˜found sound" background to a lot of my tunes. What I wanted running through ˜The Stranger Song" was the sound of a tire on a wet pavement, a kind of harmonic hum. (Hammond) was almost ready to let me take a recording device into a car. He let me do the next best thing. I got in touch with mad scientists around New York who had devices that would create sounds." Unfortunately, he got sick in the middle of this operation.

Hallelujah's position is artificially degraded by an evil smear campaign. It is a brilliant song.

14. If It Be Your Will (100.5 points, 8 votes, 2 #1 votes)
from The Future

Live in Belfast with the Webb Sisters: https://goo.gl/lQ0D7t
Antony: https://goo.gl/ekqqIl
Max Richter and Robin Wright: https://goo.gl/bubEwu

I'm Your Man:

Dylan had told Leonard that he thought Leonard’s songs were becoming “like prayers,” and none more so than the album"s closing song, “If It Be Your Will.” It was, Leonard said, “an old prayer that it came to me to rewrite.” The first draft was written in the Algonquin Hotel in New York in December 1980, shortly after Hanukkah was over and his children had gone back to their mother.

(...)

It is an intensely moving song, intimate and fragile, and sung in a voice that had deepened with age. Lissauer noted that it had dropped four semitones since he and Leonard had last worked together. "It was a heavenly recording," Lissauer says. Jennifer Warnes came in and sang with him. Just one take. Leonard was very pleased with it. Asked in an interview in 1994 which song he wished he had written, Leonard answered, “‘If It Be Your Will.’ And I wrote it.”

the "Hallelujah" smear campaign was life itself, I think

sorry, that should have been Various Positions as the album

13. The Partisan (9 votes, 1 #1 vote)
from Songs from a Room

Joan Baez: https://goo.gl/3he3SE
Electrelane: https://goo.gl/qUxNdT

getting into some real heavyweights now

really like that antony version of "if it be your will"

Okay, now I want to rage. 13 better songs than If It Be Your Will? According to my ballot, there is only one song better.

12. Bird on the Wire (116.5 points, 8 votes)
from Songs from a Room
1 vote for Field Commander Cohen version: https://goo.gl/EkZNF1

Johnny Cash: https://goo.gl/Yaxv88
Willie Nelson: https://goo.gl/sESHlc
Tim Hardin: https://goo.gl/RULoKG
Dave Van Ronk: https://goo.gl/ni6TXP
Fairport Convention: https://goo.gl/GWvjPC
Neville Brothers: https://goo.gl/ByMEZQ
Joe Cocker: https://goo.gl/qy2EF7

Various Positions:

"Bird on the Wire" became an anthem and Cohen used it to open his concerts, explaining that it "seems to return me to my duties." Kris Kristofferson, who had begun selling his own songs, told Cohen at a Nashville party that Cohen had stolen part of the melody from Lefty Frizell's "Mom & Dad's Waltz." But Kristofferson admired the song and said that the first three lines - "Like a bird on the wire, / Like a drunk in a midnight choir / I have tried in my way to be free” - would be his epitaph.

"Bird on the Wire" began in Greece: when Cohen first arrived in Hydra, there were no wires on the island, no telephones, and no regular electricity. But soon telephone poles appeared, and then the wires: "I would stare out the window at these telephone wires and think how civilization had caught up with me and I wasn't going to be able to escape after all. I wasn't going to be able to live this eleventh-century life that I thought I had found for myself. So that was the beginning." Then he noticed that the birds came to the wires. The next line referred to the many evenings Cohen and friends climbed the endless stairs up from the port of Hydra, drunk and singing. "Often you'd see three guys with their arms around each other, stumbling up the stairs and singing these impeccable thirds." He finished the song in a Hollywood motel on Sunset Boulevard in 1969.

ok I was gonna let the joke stand but I hope no one seriously thinks I was gonna put a link the the McKinnon "Hallelujah"

Think I also voted for Jennifer Warnes' cover of Bird on the Wire.

you probably did! there are so goddamn many. I actually do like the Cocker version, which surprised me

Jennifer Warnes: https://goo.gl/h5Vd8B

If It Be Your Will was my #1. Ive always wondered why Hallelujah got all the covers and people have for the most part left it be. Maybe because there's nothing to add to it and nothing to subtract either. It's as close as you can get to perfect for me.

http://2gz2kk33tiykcztlb46pw3nv.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/webbdance2-from-eva-martonfxyixx.gif

My #1 too.

Mine too, tied with 19 others

Not to put too fine a point on it, I'd imagine the sentiment of the song would be anathema to most of the singers who might consider covering it

I've been listening to a shitload of Cohen recently so Spotify has recommended me the album of his songs by perla batalla, who was one of his backing singers on I think the future + tour. It's quite nice - she's Mexican-American & the best tracks are inflected to various extents by mex music. She does a credible "if it be your will" and her "ballad of the absent mare" is decent but doesn't come anywhere near Jenny's - but neither does lenny's

Like a beast with it's horn/I have torn everyone who reached out for me

this is a devastating lyric

I also think we need to talk about what an unusual and amazing song the stranger song is but I don't really have the vocab

His proto-pua interest in hypnotism seemed to influence his singing & picking style as much as any higher temper

Like a beast with it's horn/I have torn everyone who reached out for me

this is a devastating lyric

― AdamVania (Adam Bruneau), Sunday, December 11, 2016 10:52 AM (one hour ago

and the stanza starts out with "like a baby, stillborn" !! the song is amazing

Finishing the countdown shortly. One more quote re: BotW:

One song whose recording did not come easily was “Bird on the Wire.” Leonard tried it over and over, in countless different ways, but every time he listened back, he thought it sounded dishonest somehow. Finally he told Johnston he was done, and the musicians were sent home. “Bob said, okay, let"s forget it,” said Leonard. “I went back to my hotel to think matters over, but got more and more depressed.” He was determined to get this song right. It was as if the song, as well as being a letter to Marianne, were a personal treatise of sorts, a “My Way,” but without the braggadocio (Leonard was never a big fan of Sinatra; he did have a fondness for Dean Martin, though). “In a way the history of that song on the record is my whole history,” Leonard said. “I’d never sung the song true, never. I"d always had a kind of phony Nashville introduction that I was playing the song to, following a thousand models.”

Four days before his last recording session on November 25, 1968, Leonard asked everyone to leave except Zemel, McCoy and Johnston. “I just knew that at that moment something was going to take place. I just did the voice before I started the guitar and I heard myself sing that first phrase, ˜Like a bird," and I knew the song was going to be true and new. I listened to myself singing, and it was a surprise. Then I heard the replay and I knew it was right.

11. Take This Longing (123 points, 12 votes, 1 #1 vote)
from New Skin for the Old Ceremony

Judy Collins: https://goo.gl/hGhl6b
Hole: https://goo.gl/nIjHKQ

Various Positions:

The infatuated Cohen followed Nico around the city, but she was clearly not interested in him. He was madly in love with her though, and persisted: "I was lighting candles and praying and performing incantations and wearing amulets, anything to have her fall in love with me, but she never did." A journal entry from the Chelsea Hotel dated March 15, 1967, highlights Cohen's fascination with Nico, his entanglement with depression and his art: "Terrible day, hopeless thoughts of Nico. The guitar dead, voice dead, tunes old and fake, Nico in terrible mood. Tried to reach her, tried to make her stay beside me for a second, impossible." The journal that day also records a visit by Phil Ochs, Henry Moscovitch, a young Montreal poet, and the advice of a friend to see a psychiatrist, prompting this notation: "poet maudit ca. 1890. Cut the call short. Visited Judy Collins, taught her ˜Sisters of Mercy.'"

Overwhelmed by Nico's beauty - she had modeled in Paris and had had a bit part in Fellini's La Dolce Vita -Cohen wrote "Take This Longing" for her. She sang it to him several times but never recorded it. He also wrote a confessional prose piece about his longing for her...

This goes on a bit. He was fucking obsessed with Nico.

10. Anthem (125 points, 10 votes)
from The Future

Perla Batalla and Julie Christensen: https://goo.gl/czrHGr
Will Sheff: https://goo.gl/r9a7kW

Various Positions:

"Anthem" was borrowed from Kabbalistic sources, especially the sixteenth-century rabbi Isaac Luria. It was one of the most difficult songs Cohen had ever written, taking almost a decade to complete. He recorded it three times, with one version for Various Positions and another for I'm Your Man, mixed with strings, voices, and overdubs. It was finished, he explained, "but when I listened to it there was something wrong with the lyric, the tune, the tempo. There was a lie somewhere in there, there was a disclosure that I was refusing to make. There was a solemnity that I hadn't achieved." Only when he reworked it for The Future did he "nail it." Songwriting begins for him not in the form of an idea, but in the form of an image. He explained:

"...the way I do things is that I uncover the song and discern what it's about through the actual writing of it. Every song begins with that old urgency to rescue oneself, to save oneself. And it's quite a powerful gnawing at the spirit. It's not at all evident at the beginning of the process what it [the song] is about."

9. First We Take Manhattan (131 points, 11 votes)
from I'm Your Man

R.E.M: https://goo.gl/ikV9dr
Jennifer Warnes: https://goo.gl/rbzmCV

Various Positions:

The album opens with "First We Take Manhattan," originally called "In Old Berlin." It plays with certain geo-political ideas then in the air, he explained to an Oslo interviewer: "extremism, terrorism, fundamentalism. They are all attractive positions because they lack ambiguity; such dogmatism is always seductive," he added, "because of its total commitment to a position without any qualifications, without any conditions - there is some kind of secret life we lead in which we imagine ourselves changing things, not violently, maybe gracefully, maybe elegantly in a very imaginative way and with the shake of a hand. The song speaks of longing for change, impatience with the way things are, a longing for significance; we deal in the purest burning logic of longing." Two years later, he referred to the song as a "demented manifesto," although he also reported that it became so popular in Athens that people were greeting each other in Greek by saying, "First, we take Manhattan," the other person replying with "Then we take Berlin!"

I'm Your Man:

"First We Take Manhattan" is very likely the only Eurodisco song to reference the war between the sexes and the Holocaust.

Something almost Badalamenti like about the synths playing a similar melody line to that in I'm Your Man later in the album on First We Take Manhattan.
Has one of my favourite Cohen Moments: the way he sings the section starting "You loved me as a loser now you're worried that I just might win". The beautiful loser turned bad winner. His delivery sounds more unhinged than anywhere else in his back catalogue besides Songs of Love and Hate.

errr, whoops. that should be:
8. First We Take Manhattan (131 points, 11 votes)

========

9. Chelsea Hotel No. 2 (129.5 points, 10 votes)
from New Skin for the Old Ceremony

Rufus Wainwright: https://goo.gl/7yzr7n
Meshell Ndegeocello: https://goo.gl/7m9IBh
Carissa's Wierd: https://goo.gl/bONqDs
Lloyd Cole: https://goo.gl/4E3CXZ
Anonymous Choir: https://goo.gl/hVnxgW

I'm Your Man:

Leonard has claimed in several interviews, and confirmed it in the closing verse of "Chelsea Hotel #2,” that he is not a sentimental or a nostalgic man, that he does not look back. Religion would validate this as a healthy position: when Lot's wife looked back at Sodom she was turned into a pillar of salt. As a writer, although he tended to look inside himself or at his immediate environs, Leonard also looked back at lovers from whom he had parted. In The Favourite Game, Leonard's fictional alter ego writes to the girl he loved in fond anticipation of their separation: "Dearest Shell, if you let me I"d always keep you 400 miles away and write you pretty poems and letters. I'm afraid to live any place but in expectation." As a writer Leonard seemed to thrive on this paradox of distance and intimacy. As a man, it was more complicated. Often it seemed to make him wretched, and, as a wretch, he turned to God. But as Roshi told him, "You can"t live in God"s world. There are no restaurants or toilets."

Various Positions:

In his well-known concert introduction to the song, he outlines his first encounter with Janis Joplin:

"Once upon a time, there was a hotel in New York City. There was an elevator in that hotel. One evening, about three in the morning, I met a young woman in that hotel. I didn't know who she was. Turned out she was a very great singer. It was a very dismal evening in New York City. I'd been to the Bronco Burger; I had a cheeseburger; it didn't help at all. Went to the White Horse Tavern, looking for Dylan Thomas, but Dylan Thomas was dead. Dylan Thomas was dead. I got back in the elevator, and there she was. She wasn't looking for me either. She was looking for Kris Kristofferson. "Lay your head upon the pillow." I wasn't looking for her, I was looking for Lily Marlene. Forgive me for these circumlocutions. I later found out she was Janis Joplin and we fell into each other's arms through some divine process of elimination which makes a compassion out of indifference, and after she died, I wrote this song for her. It's called the Chelsea Hotel."

During a more recent performance in Norway, Cohen revised the story of the original meeting between Joplin and himself: in the elevator Cohen asks, "Are you looking for someone? "Yes,she replies, "I'm looking for Kris Kristofferson." "Little Lady, you're in luck. I'm Kris Kristofferson." He was significantly shorter than Kristofferson, but as he says, those were generous times. Yafa Lerner recalls that at the Chelsea it was common for women to offer themselves to Cohen as he rode the elevator. Cohen began writing "Chelsea Hotel #2"in a Polynesian bar in Miami in 1971 and finished it at the Imperial Hotel in Asmara, Ethiopia, in 1973.

To recap/correct this slightly confusing last stretch

10. Anthem (125 points, 10 votes)
9. Chelsea Hotel No. 2 (129.5 points, 10 votes)
8. First We Take Manhattan (131 points, 11 votes)

7. Everybody Knows (137.5 points, 11 votes)
from I'm Your Man

Rufus Wainwright: https://goo.gl/dj69Jt
Don Henley: https://goo.gl/Sp4BB4
Concrete Blonde: https://goo.gl/LnY0wS (<--hilariously overwrought video alert)

The rest will be up tonight. Sorry for the weird post timing and knuckle-dragging.

i'm enjoying it anyway!

"everybody knows" contains at least like five perfect stanzas