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

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.

Yeah, it's a bit wild that Nadel's book completely overlooks that.

28. Master Song (53 points, 5 votes)
from Songs of Leonard Cohen

Our last entry for tonight and our first to get a #1 vote:

27. In My Secret Life (61.5 points, 5 votes, 1 #1 vote)
from Ten New Songs

Till Bronner and Carla Bruni: https://goo.gl/IQY89O

my no. 1!!!

Just listened to Waiting for the Miracle, and there's some lines in there very inspired by Blonde on Blonde

"It must have hurt your pride
To have to stand beneath my window
With your bugle and your drum"

brad if you did not know this there are enough smooth-jazz covers of "In My Secret Life" to last you a lifetime