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

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

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m8o32o7T5Q1qfirpxo1_500.gif

Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That's how it goes
Everybody knows

6. Suzanne (145 points, 12 votes, 2 #1 votes)
from Songs of Leonard Cohen

Nina Simone: https://goo.gl/VHdgZi
Roberta Flack: https://goo.gl/1TvLu2
Francoise Hardy: https://goo.gl/3V1UAh
Jorane: https://goo.gl/hYhsJY
Nick Cave: https://goo.gl/8cmqwt
Judy Collins: https://goo.gl/7EK5DO
Fairport Convention: https://goo.gl/lpw50y
Nana Mouskori: https://goo.gl/qiQOML
Fabrizio de Andre: https://goo.gl/G27qPM
Pearls Before Swine: https://goo.gl/g788ef

Various Positions:

While in Montreal, Cohen met Suzanne Verdal, a dancer who was one of the inspirations for two poems that would appear in Parasites of Heaven in 1966. He first saw her dancing flamboyantly with her husband, sculptor Armand Vaillancourt, at a place in Montreal called Le Vieux Moulin. The first poem, beginning "Suzanne wears a leather coat, celebrates her dangerous beauty." The second, better-known poem is a version of his well-known song "Suzanne," from his first album, Songs of Leonard Cohen. He wrote the poem in the summer of 1965, although it lacked focus until Suzanne took Cohen to her loft near the St. Lawrence river. She remembered that they would spend hours talking by candlelight. Cohen maintained that they "were never lovers, but she gave me Constant Comment tea in a small moment of magic."

Images in the song were drawn from a visit to the seventeenth-century La Chapelle de Bonsecours, the mariner's church in old Montreal with the figure of the golden virgin at the top with her body turned away from the city to bless the departing mariners. Inside the sanctuary, hanging from the ceiling of the triple-steepled church, are votive lights suspended in model ships. Yafa Lerner can remember walking with Cohen in September 1965 and his excitement about the poem.

I wanted to link the Young Galaxy cover(!) but it's not on YouTube.

5. So Long, Marianne (146 points, 13 votes)
from Songs of Leonard Cohen

Bill Callahan: https://goo.gl/einRtz
Straitjacket Fits: https://goo.gl/HdThC0
scoring Werner Herzog's Fata Morgana: https://goo.gl/OJEDnV

Well, Marianne, it’s come to this time when we are really so old and our bodies are falling apart, and I think I will follow you very soon. Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine.

And you know that I’ve always loved you for your beauty and your wisdom, but I don’t need to say anything more about that because you know all about that. But now, I just want to wish you a very good journey. Goodbye old friend. Endless love, see you down the road.

4. Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye (159.5 points, 13 votes, 1 #1 vote)
from Songs of Leonard Cohen

Lianne La Havas w/ Chilly Gonzales: https://goo.gl/SmoU1K
Judy Collins: https://goo.gl/4ObX5y
Roberta Flack: https://goo.gl/xRp9WI

^ my #1. I hadn't listened to LC in eons, but on November 7th I woke up with "Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye" in my head and I spent all that morning playing his albums on Spotify. As we found out later that week, November 7th was the day LC died.

3. Avalanche (167 points, 13 votes, 1 #1 vote)
from Songs of Love and Hate

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds: https://goo.gl/iJgjMz
Nick Cave, mk ii (2015): https://goo.gl/vDkXiA

"hey, that's no way to say goodbye" would have been mu #1 had i voted

If anyone hasn't heard those Roberta Flack versions, they're really something

i don't really have the musical vocabulary to describe this intelligently but there's something jarring, surprising about the refrain every time, like the way the pitch undulates makes it seem like there's at least one more line before the refrain comes but it just jumps right out at you

(talking about HTNWTSG)

“It’s best to have your eyes open – and to lighten up. I think that’s what enlightenment means: you’ve lightened up.”

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CeJPzh2XIAE2KCm.jpg

Thanks to all who commented, voted, and played along.

2. Tower of Song (171 points, 15 votes, 1 #1 vote)
from I'm Your Man

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds: https://goo.gl/nBDBb0
Tom Jones: https://goo.gl/o1TkBj
The Jesus and Mary Chain: https://goo.gl/C6dPV8
Ofer Golany (in Hebrew): https://goo.gl/DVTmec

I'm Your Man:

"Tower of Song" is about the hard, solitary, captive life of a writer (going so far as to evoke a concentration camp in the line "They"re moving us tomorrow to that tower down the track") but substitutes self-mockery for the usual self-indulgence of this type of song: he was still "crazy for love" but now he ached "in the places where (he) used to play" and in spite of all his hard work, none of it was of any significance to women, to God or even to pop-music posterity; his writing room was still a hundred floors below Hank Williams'.

Various Positions:

"Tower of Song" is the keynote work on I'm Your Man. With it Cohen wanted to "make a definitive statement about this heroic enterprise of the craft of songwriting." In the early eighties he called the work "Raise My Voice in Song." His concern was with the aging songwriter, and the "necessity to transcend one's own failure by manifesting as the singer, as the songwriter." He had abandoned the song, but one night in Montreal he finished the lyrics and called an engineer and recorded it in one take with a toy synthesizer. Jennifer Warnes added some vocals and Cohen attempted some "repairs," which was difficult since there were only two tracks. It was initially felt that the quality was too poor and the musicality too thin. Warnes, however, "really placed it, putting it in the ironic perspective it needed; she was a real collaborator on it more than anything she ever did, and she's done wonderful things for me but this was the most wonderous thing she ever did for me...this doo-wop kind of perspective; she really illuminated the song with that contribution," Cohen said.

(...)

When he had written the song and completed the album, Cohen realized for the first time that he was an entertainer: "I never thought I was in showbiz. Until then, he had held on to the notion of being a writer. Now I know what I am. I'm not a novelist. I'm not the light of my generation. I'm not the spokesman for a new sensibility. I'm a songwriter living in L.A. and this is my record."

1. Famous Blue Raincoat (275 points, 18 votes, 7 #1 votes)
from Songs of Love and Hate

Jennifer Warnes: https://goo.gl/avceB2
Marissa Nadler: https://goo.gl/gyRZME
The Handsome Family: https://goo.gl/mDHCNi

Various Positions:

On the day he arrived in London, Cohen bought a typewriter, a green Olivetti 22, for £40, which would remain with him for years. He also acquired his "famous blue raincoat," a Burberry with epaulets. That, too, remained with him until it was stolen from a New York loft in 1968. In London, these objects acted as amulets, arming him to combat the world. His Olivetti broke only once in twenty-six years, when he threw the machine against the wall of his Montreal apartment after an unsuccessful attempt to type underwater. It was eventually repaired, and he used that Olivetti to type most of his best-known songs and novels.

His raincoat was memorialized in the song "Famous Blue Raincoat," recorded on Songs of Love and Hate, his third album... The song has become a signature of sorts, the raincoat embodying Cohen's early image of mystery, travel, and adventure.

I'm Your Man (in reference to a concert at a mental hospital):

There appeared to be quite a few Leonard Cohen fans in the audience. One called out a request for "Famous Blue Raincoat," a song, he said, "that I didn't know anybody knew about, that we have only sung in concerts. It's a song that I wrote in New York when I was living on the east side of the East Side, and it"s about sharing women, sharing men, and the idea that if you hold on to somebody..." Leonard let the conclusion drift away. During the songs, the audience was silent, entranced. When the band stopped, the applause was loud and rapturous. "I really wanted to say that this is the audience that we've been looking for," said Leonard, who sounded moved and happy. "I've never felt so good playing before people." People who were mentally damaged seemed to make Leonard and his songs feel at home. They performed other mental hospital concerts later that year, "and those shows were one of the best things about the whole tour, every one of them," said Donovan, "just the way the audience locked in on what Leonard was doing and how he just interacted with them."

======

FULL RANKINGS:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1W8U7zi4jcHzL0IxEyzoeSfmOZisCOz0ZKdRMGMW1m00/edit?usp=sharing

Thanks for doing this! R.I.P. LC

I feel a bit dopey for suggesting this poll and then not voting in it (life got in the way). Would have had "Joan of Arc" as a #1 and would also have boosted some of those one-voters ("Fingerprints" and "Tonight Will Be Fine" come to mind).

Anyway, fantastic rollout, and here's something else special, The Vogues (yes, the "Five-O-Clock World" dudes) in their waning days addressing "Hey, That's No Way To Say Goodbye": https://youtu.be/BBO2AMMnhOQ

That's a good one - I spotted it, but I was cover'd out by "Suzanne" (for which I easily could have posted another 10)

Also, did the gap between the stuff from the debut and the title track You Want It Darker make this the widest spanning artist poll, placement-wise? Dylan had it before, but IIRC his newest countdown track was from the 00s vs. Freewheelin' in '63.

Not sure, but it's a mighty impressive span, especially when you consider that he released Songs of Leonard Cohen at 33, whereas Dylan was 21/22 in the Freewheelin' era.

I forgot to vote, but thanks to everyone who did - only surprise to me was 'Closing Time' missing out on the top 40 altogether.

I was a little surprised that "I Can't Forget" didn't place, but I suppose the version on I'm Your Man is one of the synthiest on a very synthy album (which I like, but I get that not everyone does). The one I hear in my head is probably spliced with the great Pixies version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEIwADZQN_o

So is it OK to post our ballots now? That's normally a thing on ILM polls, right?

seems ok to me! here's mine (non-placers in bold)

The Partisan
Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye
Paper Thin Hotel
First We Take Manhattan
Hallelujah
Suzanne
Who by Fire
Famous Blue Raincoat
The Master
Waiting for the Miracle
Ballad of the Absent Mare
On the Level
The Law
Lover, Lover, Lover
So Long, Marianne
Fingerprints
You Want It Darker
Story of Isaac
I Can’t Forget
Lady Midnight

Here's mine then, bold didn't place. Interestingly (or maybe not), all four of my non-placers are from Recent Songs.

1. Famous Blue Raincoat
2. Joan of Arc
3. Suzanne
4. Take This Longing
5. The Window
6. So Long Marianne
7. Bird on the Wire
8. The Guests
9. Hey That's No Way To Say Goodbye
10. Chelsea Hotel #2
11. The Traitor
12. Alexandra Leaving
13. One of Us Cannot Be Wrong
14. Sisters of Mercy
15. Take This Waltz
16. Stranger Song
17. Avalanche
18. Ballad of the Absent Mare
19. Anthem
20. If It Be Your Will

a very enjoyable poll, great blurbs

your mini-essay on Paper Thin Hotel made me listen to that song anew and the Dulli rendition is too beautiful

did not vote, had I voted there is a chance that "Darkness" had been my #1 (surely top 3)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Bxbw0wfDOI

no grand statement on life, but a HELLA cool blues

weirdly I am not a huge fan of the Dulli PTH, I had to include it tho obviously

playlist finally updated with the entire top 40:
https://open.spotify.com/user/suckerblues/playlist/58W5K0QfbwWu3nbvaf009k