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

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

good i would like a soundsystem installed in my headstone so they can play softly over my grave when i am dead

re: above Harvey Milk cover, front-man Creston Spiers years back did an almost entire Leonard Cohen solo set years back if that's yr thing.

http://southernshelter.com/2008/06/southern-shelter-records-creston-spiers-7-5108/

Thanks for that! If nothing else, it plugs the "Master Song"-sized hole in our covers run.

Master Song was on my ballot. It's one of those songs where you can't help but sing along in harmony, all these possible accompaniments seem so clear, but somehow adding anything to the existing recording would be completely wrong.

it' the beautiful brass counterpoints (ie 1:30 in) that really make the song though

my no. 1!!!

― who is extremely unqualified to review this pop album (BradNelson), Thursday, December 8, 2016 7:47 PM (thirty-seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Awesome. I love the hell out of this song. Didn't end up voting in the poll because I was distracted, but would have ranked this one pretty high.

So far, all the songs are really really good. So far voted for: 1000 Kisses, Master Song, One Of Us, Nancy, Dance Me and Lover, Lover, Lover.

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

― a serious and fascinating fartist (Simon H.), Thursday, December 8, 2016 7:54 PM (forty-nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

good i would like a soundsystem installed in my headstone so they can play softly over my grave when i am dead

― who is extremely unqualified to review this pop album (BradNelson), Thursday, December 8, 2016

love you both lol

lol I just noticed brad and mine's #1s ended up placement neighbors

Spotify playlist for what we got so far: https://open.spotify.com/user/suckerblues/playlist/58W5K0QfbwWu3nbvaf009k

^^^^would make an excellent first disc for a 3CD best-of.

really enjoying the song and album blurbs

Gonna roll out some more tracks in a bit

26. Paper Thin Hotel (62 points, 4 votes, 1 #1 vote)
from Death of a Ladies' Man

Greg Dulli: https://goo.gl/5cxnXl

Neither bio mentions this song at all, so in place, as it's my #1, and my goddamn poll, I thought I would write a few words in humble tribute. Feel free to skip if TMI/tl;dr

"Paper Thin Hotel" is the reason I'm a Leonard Cohen fan. I mean, if he'd never written it, I'd still be a fan, but not to the same extent, and I almost certainly wouldn't be running this poll. (And you'd have been spared all this, har har.) As someone who experiences prolonged bouts of what one might call romantic, uh, invisibility, I am no stranger to jealousy, rage, self-doubt, and the sense that my profound, prolonged ineptitude in this area of life could be attributed to something on maybe a genetic or spiritual level, something I'll carry with me forever.

So when I first heard "Paper Thin Hotel" - god knows when - it was revelatory. What first struck me was the apparent equanimity of the sentiment - what Randy Newman is talking about when he mentions Cohen somewhat dismissively as being on a "higher plane." The notion of freedom from jealousy as a kind of religious conversion. Maybe it was the lapsed Catholic in me responding to that. When I listened to it I could briefly imagine being freed of guilt, obsession, inadequacy, myself. Of course, when you listen a little more closely, you notice other things. After the initial verses, the sentiment turns increasingly ambiguous, even bitter or maybe even hateful. When you take in the lyric as a whole, you realize what so many of his critics and even some of his admirers miss: his admiration for the time before the enlightenment you may never even access. He spends his time equally divided between the gutter and the garden, and he takes in their sights with comparable reverence. His characters aim for divinity but are still human, and flawed, and damned, but still worthy to hole up in the tower of song forever. This is the duality that I see a lot of people miss when they dismiss him as a haughty poet or a zen kook.

I was reminded of "Paper Thin Hotel" when I listened to You Want It Darker for the first time, and heard that its concluding statement was: "I wish there was a treaty we could sign." Cohen longs for peace but knows war is endemic, and he manages to see humor and life and beauty in that even as he mourns it. In one of the bios, he even states that he seaw in men at war (in that case, the Israeli army) a kind of perfection, an existence without a wasted moment. Yet I have noticed that in the many songs he's written about specific women he experienced acrimony with, there is almost never a real sense of resentment towards them, only gratitude for the shared experience. I think this is what I was responding to, if subliminally, when I first heard "Paper Thin Hotel": the notion that even the most emasculating, the most debasing, the most demoralizing struggles contain an aspect of perfection. "You go to heaven once you've been to hell."

25. Memories (63 points, 6 votes - 1 for Field Commander Cohen version)
from Death of a Ladies' Man

Field Commander Cohen: https://goo.gl/UgjY04
The Last Shadow Puppets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ys7LTxPuMg

don't forget the extra glenns!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQTTRIG9-NY

Well put on paper thin hotel! It made my ballot as well.

24. Last Year's Man (66.5 points, 7 votes)
from Songs of Love and Hate

A YouTuber with a ukelele: https://goo.gl/1RsmOh

omg thanks for that brad!

ps my post was brought to you by bombay sapphire

23. Dress Rehearsal Rag (69 points, 4 votes, 1 #1 vote)
from Songs of Love and Hate

Judy Collins: https://goo.gl/p5Hc0W
Nick Cave: https://goo.gl/lg9U9s

I'm Your Man:

(Judy) Collins was "bowled over," she said, "particularly by ˜Dress Rehearsal Rag." Talk about dark: a song about suicide. I attempted suicide myself at fourteen, before I found folk music, so of course I loved it. We were desperately looking for something unusual for my album and when I heard ˜Dress Rehearsal Rag," that was it."

The critic, Nicolas Walter, was clearly no fan of Leonard"s music: "The impact on a young student of a song like ˜Dress Rehearsal Rag" must be overwhelming," he wrote, "but in fact the song is merely an abstraction of all currently fashionable moods of doom, and in any case, overwhelming art is the kind you grow out of."

Various Positions:

Cohen went to London to appear on BBC-TV, performing twelve songs on two of his own shows, both entitled Leonard Cohen Sings Leonard Cohen. The shows included "You Know Who I Am," "One of Us Cannot Be Wrong," and "Dress Rehearsal Rag." The introduction to the last song indicated Cohen's gloomy state. He talked about a Czechoslovakian singer who used to perform a song so depressing that afterwards people would leap out of windows. Cohen then reported that the singer himself had recently leapt to his death. "Dress Rehearsal Rag" was Cohen's equivalent song, and he performed it only when "the environment was buoyant enough to support its despair."

22. Joan of Arc (72 points, 7 votes)
from Songs of Love and Hate

Jennifer Warnes: https://goo.gl/YZzd6n

I'm Your Man:

...But in 1967, feeling he had no skill and that he had forgotten how to court a lady, Leonard went back alone to his hotel room. His thoughts full of Nico, he wrote "The Jewels in Your Shoulder" and "Take This Longing," then titled "The Bells," both of which he later played and taught to Nico. She was both "the tallest" and "blondest" girl in the song "Memories" and the muse for "Joan of Arc" ("This song was written for a German girl I used to know. She's a great singer, I love her songs. I recently read an interview where she was asked about me and my work. And she said I was ˜completely unnecessary," he told a Paris audience in 1974).

Various Positions:

"Joan of Arc" was something of an experiment for Cohen, in that he both sings and speaks the lyrics on overlapping tracks. This technique was Cohen's idea, drawn from the literary form of the palimpsest: "I had, as the model, manuscripts that you'd see with lines written over lines. I just thought it was appropriate at that moment. It's like the line of a Larry Rivers painting, you see the variations."

Songs of Love and Hate was my number one and if I'd done the song ballot another day Joan of Arc may have topped it. Some of my favourite Cohen lines in this, of course his delivery is at least half the power of it ("If he was fire then she must be wood" just stops me in my tracks, not to mention the very final lines where his spoken counterpoint comes back in).

Great writing about Paper Thin Hotel by the way.

21. Sisters of Mercy (75.5 points, 8 votes)
from Songs of Leonard Cohen

Dion: https://goo.gl/zrMw2f
Beth Orton: https://goo.gl/xwYJgd
Judy Collins: https://goo.gl/tWVWaI
Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt: https://goo.gl/U1Rvmr

As recounted to Uncut's Nigel Williamson in 1997, "Sisters of Mercy" had been written "in Edmonton during a snow storm, and I took refuge in an office lobby. There were two young back-packers there, Barbara and Lorraine, and they had nowhere to go. I asked them back to my hotel room – they immediately got into the bed and crashed while I sat in the armchair watching them sleep. I knew they had given me something, and, by the time they woke up, I had finished the song and I played it to them.”

I'm Your Man:

The two women in "Sisters of Mercy," since they are not his lovers, are portrayed as nuns. (Leonard wrote the song during a blizzard in Edmonton, Canada, after encountering two young girl backpackers in a doorway. He offered them his hotel bed and, when they fell straight to sleep, watched them from an armchair, writing, and played them the song the next morning when they woke.) Yet, however pure and holy, a sense of romantic possibility remains for a man who, in The Favourite Game, described the woman making up the hotel bed in which they had just made love as having "the hands of a nun."

Various Positions:

...in the summer of 2005, there was the discovery by several energetic Edmonton Cohenites of new details concerning the origin of the song, "Sisters of Mercy," something I had got wrong in my original biographical account. I had claimed that in 1966 Cohen met two young women in a snowstorm and brought them back to his room as he described on The Best of Leonard Cohen: "This was written in a few hours one winter night in a hotel room in Edmonton, Alberta. Barbara and Lorraine were sleeping on the couch. The room was filled with moonlight reflected off the ice of the North Saskatchewan River. I had it ready for them when they woke up."

The full story was pulled together from formerly overlooked articles published in the University of Alberta student paper, Gateway, in anticipation of Cohen's visit there, and several recent interviews.

In the fall of 1966, Cohen was near the height of his notoriety, having already published three books of poetry and his first novel. He was receiving much attention as a Beat-styled Canadian poet in the mold of Allen Ginsberg, and he added to his mystique by living part of the year in Greece on the island of Hydra and projecting himself as the bohemian of Canadian letters in films such as the National Film Board's Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen (1965).

Excitement over his Edmonton visit was unrestrained, with Gateway publishing a piece four days before his November arrival describing him as the "present darling of the campus cognoscenti, the bohemian in-groups, the Toronto morality squad and lots of lovers of language." More to the point, it goes on, "he is probably the most exciting and likely the best writer in Canada right now." Anticipation drives the writer into a frenzy of Cohenesque prose: "He, LEONARD COHEN, shall from the skybird descend unto us and sing and speak and chant to beauty in Montreal, love in Toronto, harmony in Canada and other paradoxes and we shall be grateful. For Cohen comes and he shall say to Irving (Layton), behold Irving it is not entirely wrong to have been born in Westmount, for have I not traveled to Edmonton? And can I not roll craps with the best of them?"

(...)

Not surprisingly, every Edmonton venue and performance of Cohen's was packed, as was his room in the Hotel Macdonald's annex. Rocco Caratozzolo, an Edmonton photographer, captured the youthful Cohen in a set of photos, the young singer/writer wearing a black turtleneck and holding his guitar. And new information confirms that Cohen also befriended four women during his visit, which lasted nearly a week: Patricia, Anne, Barbara, and Lorraine. (His poem "I Met You" is about Anne.)

Barbara and Lorraine were undergraduates living in the basement of a philosophy professor's house on 89th Avenue. Leonard was invited to a faculty party there, and Barbara and Lorraine crashed it. He decided to leave and invited them back to his room. The two women fell asleep there and, moved by the evening and his "rescue" from the party, he wrote "Sisters of Mercy" about them. Some time later, when the two girls told their friend Patricia that Cohen had written a song about them, she couldn't believe it. To confirm their story, they called him in Montreal and he sang it to Patricia over the phone. "Sisters of Mercy," as Cohen explained, was unique: "it was the only time a song has ever been given to me without my having to sweat over every word. And when they awakened in the morning, I sang them the song exactly as it is, perfect completely formed, and they were & happy about it."