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

Would love to know who voted for Jazz Police though.

I would never vote for it but I was delighted when it turned up.

i almost voted for "Is This What You Wanted", too

it's very death of a ladies' man-ny

Voted for "Love Calls You By Your Name". It's anonymity always confuses me.

it's melodically undistinguished but the lyric is a thing of beauty

I was the one who voted for Jazz Police. It makes me pretty happy.

Had I voted "Is This What You Wanted" would have been top 5.

Xp Yeah. I guess something has to be the deep cut on sol&h

Didn't vote for it but "love itself" is lovely

damn, i should have included Iodine on my ballot.

goes without saying but DoaLM is a fine album for self loathing solo drinking, like one of the best companions imaginable

xxp Huh, it's one of Cohen's most melodically distinguished songs to my ears? A rare Cohen song that is driven primarily by the melody.

I am amused that anyone missed this poll cause I bumped the thread way more times than I was comfortable with

"A Street" has some serious swagger despite the particularly tinny canned horns

"Love Calls You By Your Name" deserved better, it's a masterpiece

^^^^ But I didn't vote so I can't complain.

goes without saying but DoaLM is a fine album for self loathing solo drinking, like one of the best companions imaginable

also, it has one of the most insane personnel lists of any album ever

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_a_Ladies%27_Man_(album)#Personnel

I'm saving my "deserved better" complaints for songs I didn't vote for that got no votes

skip the redundancy if you wish

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Bo1Et7DCcAA3sHO.jpg

lol

I was the sole voter for 3 from that list. I can live with that, and I appreciate someone acknowledging Love Itself a few posts up. It's a wonderful song.

I'm most upset I didn't get to vote for "Un Canadien errant."

Aw crap, forgot to vote in this. Would've given Samson in New Orleans and Is This What You Wanted a second vote!

I like to think of "Death of a Ladies' Man" (the song), which I gave its sole vote, as his weird distended riff on the end of Dark Side of the Moon, though I know that's temporally impossible.

While I did vote in this, I really should have voted Tonight Will Be Fine. Surprised it only got the one vote.

Same, that and Winter Lady and Loves Call You and Leaving Green Sleeves and yeah Cohen has just too many good songs.

That live version of "Field Commander Cohen" (the specific version that got the vote) is so fucking good

i'm the only vote for "that don't make it junk" and "come healing" and that's a bummer

no one is allowed to be sad in the leonard cohen thread

I voted for "Iodine," "Un Canadian errant," and "Field Commander Cohen." And yeah, the live 1979 version of "FCC" totally smokes the New Skin for the Old Ceremony version.

I love his awkward vocal performance on "Canadian"

Albums list will roll out this evening (EST).

love the elaboration of the calypso interpolation on the live fcc

i never dug him much but never knew too much of his stuff either so i'm stoked for the roll out all the same.

excited for this rundown, even the albums portion of it.

i came to leonard cohen pretty late, like mid-2000s, and for a couple years all i had was a run of the mill compilation of his 60s/70s songs, along with Songs of Leonard Cohen. i really didn't introduce myself to his mid-period, starting with death of a ladies' man, until a few years ago, and even now albums like The Future are pretty much fresh and new to me. but it seems like other people know him primarily from his Various Positions and I'm Your Man era? i'm curious if the early stuff will dominate this poll or if it will be spread out.

Here we go!

Throughout this poll, I'll be including excerpts from Sylvie Simmons' I'm Your Man and Ira Bruce Nadel's Various Positions.

http://cdn-s3.allmusic.com/release-covers/500/0000/287/0000287593.jpg
10. Death of a Ladies' Man (21 points, 5 votes)
Released November 13th, 1977

Various Positions:

Stories differ as to how Cohen and Spector became partners. The liner notes on the album state that Marty Machat, who was Spector's lawyer as well as Cohen's, introduced them. According to Cohen, this occurred backstage after one of his performances at the Troubadour in L.A. Spector had uncharacteristically left his well-protected home to see Cohen, and at the show was strangely silent. Spector then invited Cohen back to his home, which, because of the air-conditioning, was very chilly, about "thirty-two degrees," Cohen recalled. Spector was also very loud, and the more people he had around him, the more wild and theatrical he became. Spector locked the door and Cohen reacted by saying, "As long as we are locked up, we might as well write some songs together." They went to the piano and started that night. For about a month they wrote (and drank) together and Cohen remembers it as a generous period, although he had to wear an overcoat almost constantly to work in Spector's freezing home.

Cohen accepted Spector's eccentricities, and found that period "very charming and hospitable." As for Spector's genius? "I thought the songs were excellent," Cohen said. In the studio, however, it was a nightmare. Spector was menacing and paranoid. "He kept a lot of guns around, armed bodyguards; bullets and wine bottles littered the floor." With Spector brandishing a bottle of wine in one hand and a .45 in the other, the atmosphere was tense. At one point Spector pointed the loaded pistol at Cohen's throat, cocked it, and said, "I love you, Leonard."

I’m Your Man:

The sun was starting to come up by the time the first recording session ended. The Kessels checked that the tapes had been correctly catalogued and oversaw the loading of them onto a dolly, which was wheeled out to Spector’s car after every session under armed guard. Phil always took his tapes home, says Dan Kessel. “He didn"t single Leonard out, that’s just the way Phil conducted his business. Studios don’t protect your tapes with the same stringency you do.” George, Phil’s bodyguard, was a retired U.S. federal marshal. Like Spector, he wore a gun in his shoulder holster. The difference, says Dan Kessel, was that “the bodyguard’s gun was always loaded. Phil"s never was.” Leonard joked about getting his own armed bodyguard and having a shoot-out on Sunset Boulevard. He asked Malka Marom, who was visiting him in L.A., to come to the studio with him. He told her that Spector was afraid of her because he thought she was an Israeli soldier. Marom agreed to go to the studio. She found the atmosphere œvery scary ”because Phil Spector was sitting there with bottles of Manischewitz wine and a gun on the table. I said to Leonard, ˜Why are you recording with this madman?" He said, ˜Because he"s really very good at what he does."

lol that second 'graph is also from VP, didn't take long for a formatting fuckup

incredible album, the only Leonard I own tbh

http://cdn-s3.allmusic.com/release-covers/500/0000/284/0000284376.jpg

9. Songs From a Room (23 points, 6 votes)
Released March 24th, 1969

Various Positions:

The recording of Songs from a Room went well. Bob Johnston understood the fragility of Cohen's songs and their blend of poetry with music and, like John Hammond, helped him to overcome his nervousness in working with other musicians. They worked in Columbia's large, new 16th Avenue studio, which Johnston had had refitted. Johnston chose the sidemen, including Charlie Daniels, an imposing Texan and a fiddle player who had worked with Dylan and would go on to his own successful career. The first session though, was unfocused. Cohen came in and asked, "What do you want to do?" Johnson said, "Let's get some hamburgers and beer." When they returned, Cohen again asked, "What do you want me to do?" Johnston replied, "Sing." After the first taping, Cohen came into the control room and asked, "Is that what I'm supposed to sound like?" "Yeah," said Johnston.

I’m Your Man:

The reviews in the U.S. were not good. Rolling Stone's Alec Dubro wrote, "In 'Story of Isaac,' he is matter of fact to the point of being dull. When he's not being matter of fact, but rather obscure, as he is in ˜A Bunch of Lonesome Heroes," he"s just irritating. Other singer-poets are obscure, but generally the feeling comes through that an attempt is being made to reach to a heart of meaning. But Cohen sings with such lack of energy that it"s pretty easy to conclude that if he"s not going to get worked up about it, why should we?’ The New York Times’ William Kloman was kinder, remarking that “as a story-teller Cohen is superb, even when he tacks self-effacing morals onto the end of his tales,” but he disliked the album"s more understated production and concluded, “Cohen"s new songs are short on beauty.”

what? ONLY 9TH ?

http://cdn-s3.allmusic.com/release-covers/500/0001/023/0001023250.jpg
8. Live In London (24 points, 4 votes, 2 #1 votes)
Released: March 31th, 2009
Recorded: July 17thh, 2008

7. Various Positions (24 points, 7 votes)
Released: December 11, 1984

Various Positions:

Until 1983, he could write more or less on the run, or at least on the tour buses, in the hotel rooms, in the airplanes, in bed. What altered his attitude from working hard to giving everything to his craft was a growing sense of mortality as he approached fifty. "I had no idea how hard the task was," he told an interviewer in 1993, "until I found myself in my underwear crawling along the carpet in a shabby room at the Royalton Hotel unable to nail a verse. And knowing that I had a recording session and knowing that I could get by with what I had but that I'm not going to be able to do it.”

He was broke, he had a lot of financial obligations, and he felt his career had more or less evaporated. But he persevered: "I bought my first synthesizer and I started working in a way that I have never worked before," Cohen said. "I had always worked hard, but I really threw myself into this. The work was very intense, very clear." In 1993 he explained this new intensity in a characteristically laconic, yet ironic manner: "I don't know why, but something happened to me ten years ago. When things got really desperate, I started to cheer up."

I’m Your Man:

Leonard named his seventh studio album Various Positions, a title suggestive of a Cohen Kama Sutra. But his aim with the album was to explore how things really operate, the mechanics of feeling, how the heart manifests itself, what love is.”I think people recognize that the spirit is a component of love,” he said, “it’s not all desire, there"s something else. Love is there to help your loneliness, prayer is to end your sense of separation with the source of things.”

Incidentally (at least at one time) Cohen's stated favourite of his albums.

http://cdn-s3.allmusic.com/release-covers/500/0000/980/0000980579.jpg

thanks for including these blurbs, this is excellent

http://cps-static.rovicorp.com/3/JPG_400/MI0003/540/MI0003540493.jpg
6. The Future (32 points, 8 votes, 1 #1 vote)

Various Positions:

In the Los Angeles Times, Cohen described himself as a committed songwriter who rarely ventured out into the maelstrom of the city, although he observed it constantly and found in it a healthy level of discomfort. He thought the incongruities of the city were fascinating: through Zen and the Cimarron center, L.A. was the source of his spiritual life; through the music and record business, it was the source of his popularity.

Geologically and politically unstable, Los Angeles was the harbinger of the next millennium, a perfect backdrop for his album The Future, Cohen's first in four years. Originally titled "Busted," the record was to be recorded in Montreal, but when he started to work in Los Angeles with Jennifer Warnes again as a backup vocalist for "Democracy," he saw the value of staying there to do the entire album.

re: Rebecca de Mornay, his partner during The Future's recording:

When Cohen was later asked about the contradictions of his brooding lifestyle and his involvement with a high-profile actress, he answered, "Solid-gold artists would kill for this kind of anguish."

I'm Your Man:

Leonard was in the studio, working on his new album The Future, when the L.A. riots broke out on April 29, 1992. [...] 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 "truly an apocalyptic landscape and a very appropriate landscape for my work."

http://cdn-s3.allmusic.com/release-covers/500/0000/346/0000346967.jpg
5. New Skin for the Old Ceremony (35 points, 10 votes, 1 #1 vote)
Released August 11th, 1974

New Skin For the Old Ceremony flops in North America and Britain, but sells 250,000 copies in Europe. When asked why, Cohen tells a journalist, "Maybe it's because they can't understand my lyrics."

Various Positions:

Cohen sought Roshi's counsel in all things, including his music. He invited his Zen master to a recording session of New Skin for the Old Ceremony. The next day at breakfast Roshi told Cohen, "You should sing sadder." Cohen felt that he lacked the courage or the ability to explore his malaise. "I need to go deeper, always deeper," he said in 1991. One of his attractions to Zen was that it forced him to go deeper and discover new truths about himself. It also allowed him to write with greater simplicity and purity. Although Cohen doubted the strength of his material, he did believe that from the mid-seventies through the early eighties at least his voice was true. Zen, he thought, would make his work accessible to himself.

I'm Your Man:

New Skin for the Old Ceremony was the first of Leonard"s five albums not to include the word “songs” in the title, nor to have a picture of him on the sleeve. Instead there was a drawing of a winged, naked couple copulating above the clouds. It was a woodcut from Rosarium philosophorum, the sixteenth-century alchemical text that had so fascinated Carl Jung, depicting the coniunctio spirituum, the holy union of the male-female principle.

lol I was looking at my spreadsheet wrong, so bump all those up a spot becaaaaaause

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/33/Field_Commander_Cohen.jpg
10. Field Commander Cohen: Tour of 1979 (16 points, 4 votes)
Released: February 20th, 2001
Recorded: December 4/5/6, 1979 at the Hammersmith Odeon, London and December 15, 1979 at the Dome Theatre, Brighton

For a while Various Positions was my favorite Cohen, despite That Song.

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3. I'm Your Man (58 points, 12 votes, 1 #1 vote)
Released: February 2nd, 1988

I'm Your Man:

...It even sold well in America. Leonard waggishly attributed this to the payola he sent the marketing department of Columbia in New York.

It was a scheme he hatched up with Sharon Weisz, whom he had asked to do publicity for the album. "He had kind of an odd relationship with the record label, since they had refused to put out his previous record, Various Positions, and he was very cynical about it," says Weisz. "So I was trying to figure out how he was going to work with these people and how receptive they were going to be to a new record by him." They did not appear overenthused, judging by the poor turnout of people from Columbia Records at a party in his honour in New York, where the international division presented him with a Crystal Globe award for sales of more than five million albums outside the U.S. "From that point on, it sort of became the two of us against the world," says Weisz. She came up with a list of names of the various Columbia promotion reps across the U.S., and Leonard sent each of them a hand-signed letter.

"Good morning," Leonard typed on a plain, grey sheet of paper, dated April 1, 1988. "I don"t quite know how this is done so please bear with me. I have a new record, I"M YOUR MAN, coming out next week. It is already a hit in Europe and I"m on my way there now for a major concert tour. I know I can count on your support for this new record in the U.S., and if you can make a couple of phone calls on my behalf, I would really appreciate it. I've enclosed a couple of bucks to cover the calls. Thank you in advance for your help," the letter concluded. "Regards, Leonard Cohen. PS. There"s more where this came from." ("We went back and forth on whether the dollar bills should be brand-new or really old," Weisz remembers, "and we settled for the kind that looked really mangy.")

http://cdn-s3.allmusic.com/release-covers/500/0000/096/0000096929.jpg
2. Songs of Leonard Cohen (58 points, 9 votes, 6 #1 votes)
Released: December 27th, 1967

I'm Your Man:

Leonard often said that Songs of Leonard Cohen was a hard album to make, and job sheets found in Columbia’s archives - handwritten cards that logged the dates, times and content of each recording session - back this up. Leonard recorded the album from May 19 until November 9, with two different producers in three different studios. For the fourth and fifth sessions in June, the operation shifted to Studio B, a penthouse in the old Columbia building on Seventh Avenue, where the elevators had operators who wore grey uniforms with brass buttons and piping. It was a smaller room at least, with a drab functional appearance that Leonard tried to alleviate with candles and incense. It made him no less uncomfortable.

“It’s never come easily. I've never been particularly confident about the process and I was never able to exactly get what I wanted. I always had that sense, if I can just finish the damn thing! And you keep notching your standards down, degree by degree, until finally you say, ‘I've finished, never mind.’ Not, ‘Is it going to be beautiful, is it going to be perfect, is it going to be immortal?’ ‘Can I finish?’ became the urgent question.”

Various Positions:

In advance of the album, the folk music magazine Sing Out published two articles on Cohen, the first a casual biographical piece by Ellen Sander, the second an analysis of his music by the Saskatchewan-born Cree singer Buffy Sainte-Marie. She criticized his lack of musical knowledge but celebrated his sometimes outrageous modulations, shifting keys within a song. His melodies, she wrote, were largely "unguessable," while his musical figures repeated themselves so gradually that a casual listener could miss the patterns. Yet he lifted one off "familiar musical ground." "It's like losing track of time," Sainte-Marie wrote, "or getting off at Times Square and walking into the Bronx Zoo; you don't know how it happened or who is wrong, but there you are."

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1. Songs of Love and Hate (75 points, 13 votes, 2 #1 votes)
Released March 19th, 1971

Running order on the back of my LP:

Love Calls You By Your Name
Dress Rehearsal Rag
Avalanche
Last Year’s Man

Diamonds in the Mine
Sing Another Song, Boys
Joan of Arc
Famous Blue Raincoat

I'm Your Man:

A month after the [Isle of Wight] festival, Leonard, Johnston and the Army were back in Nashville’s Columbia Studio A, recording Leonard’s third album, Songs of Love and Hate. Work began on September 22, 1970, four days after Jimi Hendrix died at the age of twenty-seven in London, and continued daily until the twenty-sixth, eight days before Janis Joplin died at the same age in a Los Angeles hotel. The break from recording was to play a handful of U.S. and Canadian shows in November and December. The first was an anti–Vietnam War concert at a university in Madison, Wisconsin; a homemade bomb had gone off there that summer and Leonard was offered protection by the White Panthers, which he declined. He began the show with a song he had learned at Socialist summer camp, “Solidarity,” and dedicated “Joan of Arc,” a song written to Nico, to the memory of another muse, Janis.

[...]
When Songs of Love and Hate was released in March 1971, an imaginary whistle blew and the U.S. and UK ran to opposite ends of the playground. In Britain the album was a Top 5 hit. In America, despite a promotional campaign, it was an abject failure, not even making it into the Top 100. Canada did not take to it as warmly as to his last album, but Dalhousie University in Halifax was moved to award Leonard an honorary doctorate in the month that it came out. The citation read: “For many young people on both sides of the Atlantic, Leonard Cohen has become a symbol of their own anguish, alienation and uncertainty.” It echoed the Columbia Records ad about there being millions of Leonard Cohens out there, disengaging themselves from life. “People were saying I was ˜depressing a generation,"  said Leonard, and ˜they should give away razor blades with Leonard Cohen albums because it"s music to slit your wrists by." The UK press had taken to calling him “Laughing Len.”

Various Positions:

Cohen was not entirely pleased with Songs of Love and Hate and later commented that "with each [of my first three] records I became progressively discouraged, although I was improving as a performer."

Franz Schubert had once noted that whenever he sought to write songs of love, he wrote songs of pain, and whenever he wrote songs of pain he wrote songs of love. Cohen found himself facing the same problem. Few people responded to the relentless despair of his songs. He had been celebrated for his melancholy, but he had crossed some commercial line into depression. Cohen's critique of the album was, "the same old droning work, an inch or two forward." He also thought his voice was "inauthentic," full of anxiety and conflict, and labeled his work the "European blues."

Critics warned listeners that it was impossible to listen to a Cohen album in the sunshine. In his unpublished novel Perennial Orgasm, Don Lowe details the adventures of a woman named Oressia who arrives on Hydra looking for Cohen but falls into the hands of an Irish poet. His attempted seduction is thwarted by the droning of a Leonard Cohen album in the background which deflates the desire of both parties.

Shed a tear for Dear Heather:

1. Songs of Love and Hate (75 points, 13 votes, 2 #1 votes)
2. Songs of Leonard Cohen (58 points, 9 votes, 6 #1 votes)
3. I'm Your Man (58 points, 12 votes, 1 #1 vote)
4. New Skin for the Old Ceremony (35 points, 10 votes, 1 #1 vote)
5. The Future (32 points, 8 votes, 1 #1 vote)
6. Various Positions (24 points, 7 votes)
7. Live In London (24 points, 4 votes, 2 #1 votes)
8. Songs From a Room (23 points, 6 votes)
9. Death of a Ladies' Man (21 points, 5 votes)
10. Field Commander Cohen: Tour of 1979 (16 points, 4 votes)
11. Ten New Songs (16 points, 4 votes, 1 #1 vote)
12. Recent Songs (12 points, 4 votes)
13. Old Ideas (7 points, 3 votes)
14. Live In Dublin (7 points, 1 vote, 1 #1 vote)
15. The Best of Leonard Cohen (4 points, 1 vote)
16. Popular Problems (2 points, 1 vote)
17. You Want It Darker (1 point, 1 vote)

"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."

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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

listening to "Field Commander Cohen" rn. weird that he mentions Fidel Castro in this song. he's the only named person in the song other than Cohen. they both died Nov 2016.

man, the title track of Death of a Ladies' Man got robbed in this one

It's a strange song, with a kind of off-putting, aloof quality... The lyric is wonderful (though I don't know whether it would stand on its own as poetry), & kinda reminds me of some early mock-ballads of T.S. Eliot (the line about the "working-class mustache" in particular... I couldn't say why)

But the production job -- striking though it is -- seems to lack some necessary dynamic or textural variation, with the result that listening to it just wears me out.

Karl otm

love that drums-less ending that just stretches on, twinkling in the heavens.

haha yeah the coda just goes ooooonnnnnnnnn

Spector's penchant for leaving in drumming mistakes is sort of endearing, shows up most prominently on this song and Dion's "Born to Be With You"

i think about Dion and Cohen's albums all the time. 70s Phil Spector is an odd beast, lots of string synths, leaving in mistakes, etc. DOALM is pretty much an unfinished record, using rough vocals cos the tapes were basically taken at ransom (???) and Cohen never got to finish the record on his terms. from what i have read, Cohen never really hated this album or cursed Spector for doing that. it was a totally unique experience for him, which is a big part of why he wanted them to work together in the first place.

so we have live bands and endless rehearsal replaced by...ethereal multi-track symphonies? it used to be teenage symphonies, now it's middle aged symphonies, fat and bloated, drunk, still lusting after young women and pining over lost loves, trying to deconstruct your persona or fall in love yet again after failing at both so many times. a pop Dark Night of the Soul. fwiw i feel like The Beach Boys "Love You" fits neatly into this category. another attempt at synthesized studio pastiches of 60s doo wop.

love in space. it is not simply a wall of sound anymore, it is a swirling, churning galaxy. in the 70s Spector sort of got into space rock. the lilting keyboards on the intro to "Paper Thin Hotel" is very Spacemen 3. (also see Dion's phaser-drenched cover of "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands".)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rN6H3B42j1k

Jason Pierce loves BTBWY iirc. You can def hear 70s Spector in the S3/Spiritualized stuff.

George Harrison's "Let It Down" also belongs on a Phil Spector-Spiritualized mixtape

Excellent posts.

nah the whole DOalM album is horrible, by some way LC's worst album

challops

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/24/drank-a-lot