Leonard Cohen: Classic or Dud

all-time classic, no doubt.

The ladyfriend is watching The Backwoods on TV now, which features a number of songs by Leonard (also features Gary Oldman...).

Got me back in the mood for him again.

I had the honor of interviewing him many years ago and what stuck out beyond his modesty was how when I transcribed the tape it read like third draft English. He spoke so eloquently and with a natural poetry. It didn't feel like a put on. He wasn't trying to be something or putting on airs (is that the right use of that word?). He was generous and really made it hard for me to interview a 20-something year old hipster after that without thinking, "listen, dude, you can't be giving me this much attitude if a man of LC's accomplishment can treat people with greater respect."

jazz police amazing

I had the honor of interviewing him many years ago and what stuck out beyond his modesty was how when I transcribed the tape it read like third draft English. He spoke so eloquently and with a natural poetry.

When I see questions like this I always think of the Steve Wright gag: 'I got a tape for my car, Best of Music. I only like the first side.'
Is there really anyone out there for whom Len is on side 2 of that tape?

he just played a 3 1/2 hour show, pretty epic

Love his music but it always bums me out when smart people fall for gurus.

He's a Buddhist monk. That hardly makes him the follower of some wacky new age guru.

Classic, of course. I'm Your Man is my favourite. I think Jazz Police is really funny. Great Thelonius Monk as derange cocktail bar pianist solo too.

Beautiful Losers is far and away the best novel ever written by a rock musician. Granted, the competition isn't exactly fierce, so let's put it another way: it's one of the best transgressive novels of the 1960s, up there with Burroughs, Trocchi, Baldwin et al and a great piece of postmodern fiction too.

This thread SUCKS

uh, yeah.

leonard cohen is basically god. so there.

oh man, confession time...i've tried really hard, but makes my skin crawl....someone direct me to something to change my mind

iago how much do you care about lyrics? I can't imagine anybody feeling more than "that's pleasant" about any LC unless they are very into lyrics.

yeah, i haven't sit down and focused, just put it on and did other stuff...always figured the way in was the words.

is it early stuff you've heard or later stuff? because I always kinda liked his so-called classic early stuff, but it wasn't til I dug into the 80s albums that I became convinced of his genius.

yeah I mean Leonard Cohen is specifically for people who are listening for the lyrics. The music can be quite compelling but it's only in the context of the lyrics.

iago how much do you care about lyrics? I can't imagine anybody feeling more than "that's pleasant" about any LC unless they are very into lyrics.

― gross rainbow of haerosmith (underrated aerosmith albums I have loved), Friday, July 30, 2010 9:03 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i fucking hate this notion. lyrics and music ARE NOT TWO SEPARATE THINGS. they are fundamentally intertwined.

also the idea of people being uniquely "into lyrics" seems kind of absurd to me.

there's lots of ppl who dont care abt lyrics?

all i wanna say is that they don't really care about lyrics

naw some of the music's great - fuck it, all of the music's great; the arrangements on the first record are other worldly, the mellotron-rising strings, the jankity faraway fairground sounds, etc; there's a sensitivity and detail akin to the first nico record maybe. they're all such closely recorded, imtimate records, like it's a man's world or something. and there's such gallop to some of them - the partisan, fingerprints, the rowdy ones on love and hate.

anyway: thought this might've been bumped re: bird on a wire, the little seen thought-lost documentary that just got found and is showing again in a couple of weeks (dvd forthcoming etc). my mom saw it at the cinema in the seventies and - i forget whether this is from the docu or from something someone who saw him in concert said - still laughs at the memory of leonard's singers coming on stage to their 'ooooo's, and then leaving the stage until the next oooos.

oooh sweet didn't even know about that, thanks.

also, best comment on leonard's appeal came from the singer out of lamb, appearing in some documentary: "he's like isaac hayes, for poetry girls"

i fucking hate this notion. lyrics and music ARE NOT TWO SEPARATE THINGS. they are fundamentally intertwined.

that's a nice opinion, but it's not true; one can reproduce the lyrics of a song on paper, and there you go, the lyrics, all by their lonesome; one can do an instrumental version of a song, and what do you know, the music, a totally separate thing. you can argue that they're best together but your present argument is that there's no such thing as a hot dog or mustard, just a dog with mustard because the flavors intertwine

of course you could always say "for me, the two are fundamentally intertwined, and it's hard for me to imagine how people don't think of it that way," and who could argue with you there?

Of course most people don't care about lyrics. Consider the fact that the hot new thing is Best Coast, while Simon Joyner probably couldn't sell out an in-store. Even (relatively) popular artists who happen to be excellent lyricists - like Bill Callahan, Will Sheff, Sam Beam, etc - are celebrated more for their eccentricities, their 'style,' or the fact that this song or that song features a harpsichord or, God forbid, has good 'production' (which I'm still convinced most indie fans don't know from 'engineering' anyway).

Sorry for the rant. Leonard Cohen rules, duh.

Melody is where they intertwine. But Cohen is such a formal poet (other than his actual poetry, which is often free verse) that the lyrics aren't dependent on the specific melody. Never Any Good has great lyrics, is a great "song" from the lyrics alone, but has a crazy arrangement that doesn't serve it well. "A Thousand Kisses Deep" has an identical meter to "Coming Back to You," and so the melodies could be switched on them as well. Once you get into free verse, harder to impose a melody on individual lyrics without changing the "song."

Consider the fact that the hot new thing is Best Coast, while Simon Joyner probably couldn't sell out an in-store.

these aren't really an ideal comparison, though; simon joyner is not jumpin' electric guitar music excised of the woos and wailing. arguments that discount the lyrical value of 'simple' lyrics blow, ignoring the poetry and articulacy of chuck berry. i think equating 'don't care about lyrics' with 'eschew bill callahan's meditations on faith' is wrong - people get a lot of wisdom and communion out of shangri-las records. if it's that leonard cohen is a guy who writes esoteric meandering verses and doesn't throw a lot of bones to foot-tapping hip-swingers, maybe that's so.

You raise some very good points. I didn't say lyrics need to be meaningful or 'deep' to resonate - "She loves you, yeah yeah yeah' is as good a pop lyric as any, I reckon. My issue is that a lot of contemporary bands barely try, and worse, no one seems to mind. The new Black Keys album would be terrific if it were instrumental, but as it is I can barely enjoy it because it sounds like the lyrics were improvised on the spot. You'll say lyrics aren't the point of Black Keys's specific brand of juke garage blues, and fair enough, but, I mean, these make your average Fat Possum also-ran sound like Balzac.

I guess I just don't see why a band like Best Coast, with all their bone-throwing to foot-tapping hip swingers (who prefer their vocals obscured by cowardly reverb, anyway) can't ALSO feature lyrics as devastatingly great as Simon Joyner's.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIR5ps8usuo

does anyone not want to grow up and be leonard cohen

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_223jKXKgQ

p.s. new album is predictably dope as hell.

Meantime:

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-0413-cohen-verdict-20120413,0,3990744.story

oh no biggie, my manager threatens to kill me all the time! come on, leonard.

she looks like a GOP lawyer.

Also: this man is an asshole:

http://www.lowtimespodcast.com/the-insufferable-adam-cohen/

Which man, the author or the subject?

This is brilliant:

http://www.rte.ie/podcasts/2012/pc/pod-v-29031207m26stjmsquiz2-pid0-446376_audio.mp3

It's a clip from an LC competition ("Knowin' your Cohen") held on Ireland's RTE 1. The contestants are hopeless.

Hey how's that Isle of Wight reissue thingy with the DVD? Want it but it's 'spensive

The cd is good - you get the concert in full, with great sound.

The dvd - not so much... It's a standard Murray Lerner botch job. Most of the songs don't appear and those that do are edited down. Instead you get a few dull interview clips (Joan Baez...) and some footage of the festival

Thanks dude. That sounds about right.

seeing leonard tonight at home.

You paid the Kickstarter to get him to play your living room?

Stone cold "Famous Blue Raincoat"---this live rendition, from Living (1971), has been stuck in my head for most of my life, and will see me out, no doubt

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

Damn, sorry!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mE6e9n1HuuM

classic voice, classic diction
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVp8JlT1oo0

this Blue Note tribute looks promising
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaKR_4S5O7U

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugh8Xe6hX7U

2009 interview so good