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

So far, all the songs are really really good. So far voted for: 1000 Kisses, Master Song, One Of Us, Nancy, Dance Me and Lover, Lover, Lover.

brad if you did not know this there are enough smooth-jazz covers of "In My Secret Life" to last you a lifetime

― a serious and fascinating fartist (Simon H.), Thursday, December 8, 2016 7:54 PM (forty-nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

good i would like a soundsystem installed in my headstone so they can play softly over my grave when i am dead

― who is extremely unqualified to review this pop album (BradNelson), Thursday, December 8, 2016

love you both lol

lol I just noticed brad and mine's #1s ended up placement neighbors

Spotify playlist for what we got so far: https://open.spotify.com/user/suckerblues/playlist/58W5K0QfbwWu3nbvaf009k

^^^^would make an excellent first disc for a 3CD best-of.

really enjoying the song and album blurbs

Gonna roll out some more tracks in a bit

26. Paper Thin Hotel (62 points, 4 votes, 1 #1 vote)
from Death of a Ladies' Man

Greg Dulli: https://goo.gl/5cxnXl

Neither bio mentions this song at all, so in place, as it's my #1, and my goddamn poll, I thought I would write a few words in humble tribute. Feel free to skip if TMI/tl;dr

"Paper Thin Hotel" is the reason I'm a Leonard Cohen fan. I mean, if he'd never written it, I'd still be a fan, but not to the same extent, and I almost certainly wouldn't be running this poll. (And you'd have been spared all this, har har.) As someone who experiences prolonged bouts of what one might call romantic, uh, invisibility, I am no stranger to jealousy, rage, self-doubt, and the sense that my profound, prolonged ineptitude in this area of life could be attributed to something on maybe a genetic or spiritual level, something I'll carry with me forever.

So when I first heard "Paper Thin Hotel" - god knows when - it was revelatory. What first struck me was the apparent equanimity of the sentiment - what Randy Newman is talking about when he mentions Cohen somewhat dismissively as being on a "higher plane." The notion of freedom from jealousy as a kind of religious conversion. Maybe it was the lapsed Catholic in me responding to that. 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. When you take in the lyric as a whole, you realize what so many of his critics and even some of his admirers miss: his admiration for the time before the enlightenment you may never even access. He spends his time equally divided between the gutter and the garden, and he takes in their sights with comparable reverence. His characters aim for divinity but are still human, and flawed, and damned, but still worthy to hole up in the tower of song forever. This is the duality that I see a lot of people miss when they dismiss him as a haughty poet or a zen kook.

I was reminded of "Paper Thin Hotel" when I listened to You Want It Darker for the first time, and heard that its concluding statement was: "I wish there was a treaty we could sign." Cohen longs for peace but knows war is endemic, and he manages to see humor and life and beauty in that even as he mourns it. In one of the bios, he even states that he seaw in men at war (in that case, the Israeli army) a kind of perfection, an existence without a wasted moment. Yet I have noticed that in the many songs he's written about specific women he experienced acrimony with, there is almost never a real sense of resentment towards them, only gratitude for the shared experience. I think this is what I was responding to, if subliminally, when I first heard "Paper Thin Hotel": the notion that even the most emasculating, the most debasing, the most demoralizing struggles contain an aspect of perfection. "You go to heaven once you've been to hell."

25. Memories (63 points, 6 votes - 1 for Field Commander Cohen version)
from Death of a Ladies' Man

Field Commander Cohen: https://goo.gl/UgjY04
The Last Shadow Puppets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ys7LTxPuMg

don't forget the extra glenns!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQTTRIG9-NY

Well put on paper thin hotel! It made my ballot as well.

24. Last Year's Man (66.5 points, 7 votes)
from Songs of Love and Hate

A YouTuber with a ukelele: https://goo.gl/1RsmOh

omg thanks for that brad!

ps my post was brought to you by bombay sapphire

23. Dress Rehearsal Rag (69 points, 4 votes, 1 #1 vote)
from Songs of Love and Hate

Judy Collins: https://goo.gl/p5Hc0W
Nick Cave: https://goo.gl/lg9U9s

I'm Your Man:

(Judy) Collins was "bowled over," she said, "particularly by ˜Dress Rehearsal Rag." Talk about dark: a song about suicide. I attempted suicide myself at fourteen, before I found folk music, so of course I loved it. We were desperately looking for something unusual for my album and when I heard ˜Dress Rehearsal Rag," that was it."

The critic, Nicolas Walter, was clearly no fan of Leonard"s music: "The impact on a young student of a song like ˜Dress Rehearsal Rag" must be overwhelming," he wrote, "but in fact the song is merely an abstraction of all currently fashionable moods of doom, and in any case, overwhelming art is the kind you grow out of."

Various Positions:

Cohen went to London to appear on BBC-TV, performing twelve songs on two of his own shows, both entitled Leonard Cohen Sings Leonard Cohen. The shows included "You Know Who I Am," "One of Us Cannot Be Wrong," and "Dress Rehearsal Rag." The introduction to the last song indicated Cohen's gloomy state. He talked about a Czechoslovakian singer who used to perform a song so depressing that afterwards people would leap out of windows. Cohen then reported that the singer himself had recently leapt to his death. "Dress Rehearsal Rag" was Cohen's equivalent song, and he performed it only when "the environment was buoyant enough to support its despair."

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