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

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.

http://cdn-s3.allmusic.com/release-covers/500/0000/980/0000980581.jpg
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.")

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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)

10. Field Commander Cohen: Tour of 1979 (16 points, 4 votes)
11. Ten New Songs (16 points, 4 votes, 1 #1 vote)

no big deal but wouldn't Ten New Songs come out at #10, if it had the same # of points and votes, but also a #1 vote?

probably! I was focusing on the blurbs lol

These blurbs are great

Shed a tear for Dear Heather

I've since gotten into Leonard Cohen, but not in any hurry to revisit this LP.

Y'all robbed Recent Songs.

Tracks rollout starts tonight

I've only just discovered Recent Songs. Great midlife crisis music.

I voted for "Recent Songs" but I should have ranked it higher

Sorry y'all, I am stuck at a work thing tonight, proper tracks rollout will have to wait till tomorrow.

ooooooooook

40. You Want It Darker (28 points, 5 votes)
from You Want It Darker

I'm ready

oh good, i wanted it darker

*Grip tightens on the armrest*

My other choice from the new one

39. Seems So Long Ago, Nancy (31 points, 2 votes)
from Songs From a Room

Bradford Cox: https://goo.gl/guC6S6

Various Positions:

One of the most important songs on the album, "Seems So Long Ago, Nancy," continues the focus on death and despair and, as the liner notes explain, is about a suicidal woman from Montreal whom Cohen knew in 1961. The daughter of a judge, she had had a reckless life, sleeping with everyone and eventually giving birth to a child, who was then taken away from her. She shot herself in her bathroom. As he wrote, "In the House of Honesty / Her father was on trial / In the House of Mystery / There was no one at all."

i don't think i voted for this one but it Crushes me

I just found that Cox cover and it's surprisingly reverent (a good thing)

i don't think i voted for this one but it Crushes me

repeat for every song i didn't vote for

38. Show me the Place (34.5 points, 4 votes)
from Old Ideas

First live performance (Montreal, 2012): https://goo.gl/CHf2cA

Who was the other vote for Nancy? One of my favorites. Really believed it would be higher.

37. Take This Waltz (36.5 points, 4 votes)
from I'm Your Man

Ebba Forsberg: https://goo.gl/dL6jUl

I'm Your Man:

In September 1986, while in Paris visiting Dominique Issermann, Leonard recorded a new song called "Take This Waltz." The lyrics were Leonard's English adaptation (assisted by a Spanish-speaking Costa Rican girlfriend) of a poem by Federico Garcia Lorca. It was for a compilation album, Poetas en Nueva York, that would mark the fiftieth anniversary of Lorca's death. "It had been hard work - it took a hundred and fifty hours," Leonard said, but it was more than a translation, it was a poem in itself, and one that seemed to reflect Leonard as much as Lorca. For example, Leonard rendered Lorca"s macabre image of a forest of dried pigeons as "a tree where doves go to die." After recording the song, Leonard flew to Granada to attend a gala in Lorca's honour. Then he flew back to the U.S. to take a role in the TV detective series Miami Vice. Over the years the program had invited an eclectic list of guest stars, such as Frank Zappa and James Brown, to make cameo appearances. Leonard's character, the French head of Interpol, was on screen for barely a minute, murmuring in a dark, French manner into a telephone, but it had the effect that Leonard desired when he took it on: it impressed his now-teenage offspring.

"take this waltz" too low, perfect song

http://www.chrisflannery.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/07/cohen3.jpg

jumping straight from adapting Lorca in Paris to filming a Miami Vice cameo to impress your kids = people who have figured out how to live

(assisted by a Spanish-speaking Costa Rican girlfriend)

Jenny is so good on this

I believe these are the only ties.

36/35/34.

One of Us Cannot be Wrong (38 points, 4 votes)
from Songs of Leonard Cohen

J. Tillman: https://goo.gl/e4maUv
Harvey Milk: https://goo.gl/aUEpek

I'm Your Man:

...(Nico) also inspired "One of Us Cannot Be Wrong." After one of the occasions on which Nico spurned him, Leonard went back to his room "and indulged (himself) in the black magic of candles,” the green candles he bought at a magic and voodoo shop, and, he says, "I married these two wax candles, and I married the smoke of two cones of sandalwood, and I did many bizarre and occult practices that resulted in nothing at all, except an enduring friendship."

Alexandra Leaving (38 points, 4 votes)
from Ten New Songs

Sharon Robinson: https://goo.gl/bEvv3u

Coming Back To You (38 points, 3 votes)
from Various Positions

Jennifer Warnes: https://goo.gl/GdQxLP

33. Waiting for the Miracle (42.5 points, 5 votes)
from The Future

Sophie Zelmani: https://goo.gl/qTtMMw
Scoring the opening to Natural Born Killers: https://goo.gl/ELbQwz

Wow low

i voted for "alexandra leaving" which has basically 100 percent of my favorite lc lines

Upheld by the simplicities of pleasure,
they gain the light, they formlessly entwine;
and radiant beyond your widest measure
they fall among the voices and the wine.

it's not a translation like "take this waltz" but it's based on "the god abandons antony" by c.p. cavafy

When suddenly, at midnight, you hear
an invisible procession going by
with exquisite music, voices,
don’t mourn your luck that’s failing now,
work gone wrong, your plans
all proving deceptive—don’t mourn them uselessly.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving.
Above all, don’t fool yourself, don’t say
it was a dream, your ears deceived you:
don’t degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
as is right for you who proved worthy of this kind of city,
go firmly to the window
and listen with deep emotion, but not
with the whining, the pleas of a coward;
listen—your final delectation—to the voices,
to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.

One of Us Cannot Be Wrong made my ballot and it's one of the ones that first made me really question that whole lazy "balladeer of doom" thing he used to get tagged with: it's particularly nonsensical on the first album, but even if you don't pick up on the generosity of spirit of Sisters of Mercy ("We weren't lovers like that but besides it would still be alright") or the bits on So Long, Marianne where he joyously aims for high notes he's never going to hit in a million years One Of Us Cannot Be Wrong is still this almost vaudevillian, bawdy thing. That ends with some strangulated whistling, bad flute playing and Leonard screaming his lungs out.

32. The Smokey Life (44.5 points, 4 votes)
from Recent Songs

The Mountain Goats: https://goo.gl/I0wMLB

Various Positions:

In Los Angeles Cohen, began to work with Henry Lewy on another album, tentatively titled The Smokey Life. Cohen first conceived of the album as representing the kind of life which had "the quality of smoke: fragile, and not attached to anything, but still the only one we've got."

Thanks for sharing the "Alexandra Leaving" inspiration, brad!

What am I on about: One Of Us Cannot Be Wrong didn't make my ballot after all I just looked at it again. Strange. That's the problem though when dealing with a body of work like this.

31. A Thousand Kisses Deep
from Ten New Songs

Jackson Browne: https://goo.gl/FzDPQe
Judy Collins: https://goo.gl/VNe0tc

Recitation (live in London): https://goo.gl/ldWMnb

I'm Your Man:

The dazzling "A Thousand Kisses Deep" has multiple layers of meaning, among them holding, letting go, creating and surrendering to the Creator. This song too had been through numerous incarnations, melodically and lyrically. Rebecca De Mornay remembers hearing various versions of it in the early nineties; in 1995 Leonard told the New York Times that he wanted it to feel like "an old folk song."

waiting for the miracle rises up in my own list every time i listen to it. i might have put it top 3 if i were making the ballot today. i have never seen natural born killers! i should watch that.

"the smokey life" was my no. 2, it is perfect

I had not previously heard the Darnielle cover, it is predictably impeccable

apologies - Kisses had: 46 points, 7 votes.

30. Lover, Lover, Lover (46.5 points, 6 votes)
from New Skin for the Old Ceremony

Ian McCulloch: https://goo.gl/3PfJza

I'm Your Man:

In the notebook Leonard always carried with him, he made notes of what he had seen in Israel, the beauty of the desert, the kinship of the soldiers, the dead and wounded who had made him weep. As he had in Cuba, he also wrote fantasies of glorious escapades, such as stealing a gun and killing the officer who bugged him with relentless requests to sing ˜Suzanne." He wrote a song in Israel "miraculously quickly" called "Lover Lover Lover." Caspi remembered Leonard improvising it in front of the soldiers during their second performance:

May the spirit of this song
May it rise up pure and free
May it be a shield for you
A shield against the enemy

On his 1974 tour, Leonard would introduce it as a song "written in the Sinai desert for soldiers of both sides."

I think the Field Commander Cohen version of Lover Lover Lover is one of my favourite Cohen vocals: equal parts that keening wail Dylan did all over Desire and chansonnier.

29. Dance Me to the End of Love (52 points, 6 votes)
from Various Positions

Mistress Barbara: https://goo.gl/SZq3dK
The Civil Wars: https://goo.gl/w9hudd
Jorge Drexler: https://goo.gl/QeUEwp

I'm Your Man:

The first song to feature Leonard playing his Casio was the new album's opening track, "Dance Me to the End of Love." The seed of the song was something Leonard had read about an orchestra of inmates in a concentration camp, who were forced by the Nazis to play as their fellow prisoners were marched off to the gas chambers. As a testimonial to Leonard's way with words and a romantic melody, it would go on to become a popular song at weddings.

Various Positions:

"Dance Me to the End of Love" marks his return to love from hate, from the breakup with Suzanne to the new joy with Dominique.

Various positions, indeed.

("Dominique" refers to fashion photographer Dominique Isserman.)

Recently, I was listening to Dance Me To The End of Love and found myself completely overcome: I'd only recently read about the seed of the song coming from accounts of the concentration camps and knowing this turned the synthesized klezmer setting from something incongruous into something heartbreaking. Particularly that queasy flute sounding synth line halfway in. Typical Cohen: writing a beautiful love song that's really about the Holocaust.