Leonard Cohen - Ten New Songs

In My Secret Life a good choice for an opener, but That Don't Make It Junk in the classic #3 position is my dark horse

I fought against the bottle
But I had to do it drunk
Took my diamond to the pawnshop
But that don't make it junk

maybe I should just have polled these couplets

"A Thousand Kisses Deep" used quite well in The Good Thief.

intrigued... is that a good movie? it is a very good song, has some of that mysterious/esoteric quality that I in part associate with Cohen's religious work

remember Dan Bejar mentioned it as a touchstone for a recent Destroyer record

Alexandra Leaving for me, one of his greatest ever songs.

OTM anagram

This is maybe my favorite album of his. Tough choice but I’d go for my secret life

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In streams of light I clearly saw
The dust you seldom see
Out of which the nameless makes
A name for one like me

I voted for "Love Itself" without a moment's thought.

Yes! The flecks they float and dance

'Alexandra Leaving' - I've very rarely had that experience where you hear a song you don't know on the radio and you are frozen & absolutely compelled to listen (despite what initially seemed a thin or cheesy arrangement). For one kind of literary songwriting, almost untouchable and it kills me whenever I come back to it. I want to quote lines - so much syntactic elegance - but the effect is really how they snake together and snap back to this moment of leaving/reality - what's in you, how do you face the world and your memories?

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More votes than post. This is nuILM

The opening couplet is such a gut punch. Reminds me of seeing an ex’s car drive by fresh off a break up

Referring to My Secret Life

yeah that's a great one

Alexandra Leaving is beautiful, somewhat mysterious too

love:

Do not say the moment was imagined,
Do not stoop to strategies like this.

did not realize this:

In December 5th, 2001, Cohen posted a message on French Leonard Cohen Site:

I am very sorry that I neglected to cite Constantine P. Cavafy, and his great poem, “The God Forsakes Anthony”, as the inspiration for my song “Alexandra Leaving”. Somehow the credit got left out of my liner notes, although I did make the connection clear in many interviews and on Jarkko’s site, The Leonard Cohen Files. The work of Cavafy has touched and influenced me for many years. Even as I write this, there is a picture of him above my desk. Please accept my apologies.
Sincerely, L. Cohen.

Cavafy’s poem from 1911:

When suddenly, at midnight, you hear
an invisible procession going by
with exquisite music, voices,
don’t mourn your luck that’s failing now,
work gone wrong, your plans
all proving deceptive—don’t mourn them uselessly.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving.
Above all, don’t fool yourself, don’t say
it was a dream, your ears deceived you:
don’t degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
as is right for you who proved worthy of this kind of city,
go firmly to the window
and listen with deep emotion, but not
with the whining, the pleas of a coward;
listen—your final delectation—to the voices,
to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.

Wow thanks for that