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

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

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