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

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Hello, friends.

Barring any last-minute morning entries, we have 20 ballots to draw from. The rollout starts Monday morning-ish in slightly unorthodox fashion, and will continue until Friday, or Saturday, depending on how things shake out.

For those of you who submitted cover rankings: I didn't get enough cover lists to merit their own rankings, so instead I'll be noting covers that were voted for along with their originals as they appear in the rollout. Sorry if any of you agonized over the particulars.

As for quotes, photos, etc that were sent in: I will be including those as we go.

As you will see, I have chosen to throw a certain degree of suspense out the window in favor of unadulterated celebration. It seemed the better way.

*21 lol

For today, I thought it would be a fitting exercise to spotlight the (mostly) deep cuts that got one vote each. They make up 29 of the 89 songs that received votes. There are a lot of seriously great songs in here, spread out over very nearly his whole discography.

Spotify playlist:
https://open.spotify.com/user/suckerblues/playlist/6I6lVTrm1lrplrGv39NT94

Slow
Here It Is
Love Calls You By Your Name
Always
Is This What You Wanted
A Street
Ain't No Cure For Love
Almost Like the Blues
Iodine
Lullaby
Our Lady of Solitude
Please Don't Pass Me By
The Lost Canadian (Un Canadian errant)
Death of a Ladies' Man
On the Level
That Don't Make It Junk
Light as the Breeze
Samson in New Orleans
Love Itself
Tonight Will Be Fine
Field Commander Cohen
Fingerprints
Jazz Police
Winter Lady
Heart With No Companion
Come Healing
Leaving Green Sleeves
Different Sides
Anyhow

just heard iodine for the first time, it's lovely

Earth 2 Essential Leonard Cohen

i voted for "on the level" (my fav off the new one) and "fingerprints"

You Want It Darker is probably the most consistent of his closing run - if nothing else, it has the best sonics.

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

Come Healing deserved more and I would have voted for it if I'd noticed this poll.

Would love to know who voted for Jazz Police though.

6 of these are mine lol

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.

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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

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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 ?

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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.

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thanks for including these blurbs, this is excellent

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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.")

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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.

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."

Oh this is just such a beautiful song. The cascades of chiming music boxes, the fairground organ sounding keyboards and his delicate, rippling finger picking. "We weren't lovers like that but besides it would still be alright" - the generosity of spirit in a lot of his songs defines them.

20. I'm Your Man (82.5 points, 6 votes)
from I'm Your Man

Nick Cave: https://goo.gl/dhCK3O
Michael Bublé: https://goo.gl/iKtA3j

no need for burble thx

is hallelujah gonna be shut out of this or is it gonna win?

Wow, "Sisters of Mercy" is so low, that would probably have been my no.1. I love the chord progression, you have the feeling it could go on forever.

Its use in McCabe and Mrs Miller is too perfect for words.

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

funny, this was the opposite of my interpretation! i always thought it was him starting out bitter and over the course of the song reaching some kind of sexual-spiritual enlightenment. "you go to heaven once you've been to hell". and that repeating mantra, "A heavy burden lifted from my soul/I heard that love was out of my control", so beautiful.

i think alot of it has to do with, is he being sincere in these lyrics? or is he trying to fool himself, pretending he is over this? "I felt so good I couldn't feel a thing". i always took it as he felt so good BECAUSE he couldn't feel a thing. that these were two ex-lovers, one is over it, and he was still pining, and he had finally gotten over it. he can't wait to tell her, to repay that sting of detachment. not with malice but with clarity.

it's definitely an ambiguous lyric, and insanely brilliant at that too.

so many startling backing vocal moments in the Cohen canon but among the most vertiginous is the children coming in for "the lovers will rise up" in "last year's man"

re: Paper Thin Hotel and its perspective, it feels to me like it moves from grace ("I heard that love was out of my control") to bitterness ("you are the oman with her legs apart") and then finds a...bitterly wizened middle ground ("you go to heaven..."). There's a lot going on.

anyway!

19. Who by Fire (83.5 points, 8 votes)
from New Skin for the Old Ceremony

Coil: https://goo.gl/3itv6s

“Who by Fire” had been directly inspired by a Hebrew prayer sung on the Day of Atonement when the Book of Life was opened and the names read aloud of who will die and how. Leonard said he had first heard it in the synagogue when he was five years old, "standing beside my uncles in their black suits." His own liturgy ended with a question that his elders had never answered and whose answer Leonard still sought: what unseen force controls these things and who the hell is in charge?

18. The Future (86.5 points, 9 votes)
from The Future

Teddy Thompson: https://goo.gl/oHbr76

Various Positions:

Leonard was in the studio, working on his new album The Future, when the L.A. riots broke out on April 29, 1992. Four white police officers had been acquitted of the beating of a black motorist”an incident that had been caught on video by an onlooker and was frequently aired on television”and South Central L.A., a predominantly African-American neighbourhood, erupted. Cars and buildings were set on fire and stores attacked and looted. A white man was dragged from his truck by a mob and severely beaten. 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 œtruly an apocalyptic landscape and a very appropriate landscape for my work.12 He had started writing the song “The Future” (then titled “If You Could See What’s Coming Next”) in 1989, when the Berlin Wall toppled, and just as he had predicted, it was all coming down.

17. Democracy (91 points, 7 votes)
from The Future

Judy Collins: https://goo.gl/jMKsSB

I'm Your Man:

In the lyrics of the stirring "Democracy," Leonard seems at his most sociopolitically direct. There are no Abrahams, Isaacs and butchers here(...)

In interviews at the time, Leonard referred to democracy as "the greatest religion the West has produced," adding, "(as) Chesterton said about religion, it"s a great idea, too bad nobody's tried it."

Various Positions:

"Democracy" was culled from more than eighty verses that had been written over the past several years. Don Henley performed the song at the MTV ball in Washington celebrating the January 1993 inauguration of President Bill Clinton.

16. Hallelujah (94 points, 7 votes)
from Various Positions

John Cale: https://goo.gl/N03bsO
Jeff Buckley: https://goo.gl/SoiWBt
Kate McKinnon: https://goo.gl/WIUBas

I'm Your Man:

“Hallelujah” took Leonard five years to write. When Larry Ratso Sloman interviewed him in 1984, Leonard showed him a pile of notebooks, book after book filled with verses for the song he then called ˜The Other Hallelujah."  Leonard kept around eighty of them and discarded many more. Even after the final edit, Leonard kept two different endings for “Hallelujah.” One of them was downbeat:

It’s not somebody who"s seen the light
It’s a cold and it"s a broken hallelujah

The other had an almost “My Way” bravado:

Even though it all went wrong
I"ll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but
Hallelujah

Bob Dylan said he preferred the second version, which was the one Leonard finally used on the album, although he would return to the darker ending at various concerts.

ha!

Coil's Who By Fire is enormous.

Collective sigh of relief there, I expect.

15. The Stranger Song (99.5 votes, 8 votes)
from Songs of Leonard Cohen

Emmylou Harris: https://goo.gl/mcFnxM

I'm Your Man:

Leonard himself said something once that suggested he wanted something more than just simple voice and guitar. "I was trying to find, I wanted a kind of ˜found sound" background to a lot of my tunes. What I wanted running through ˜The Stranger Song" was the sound of a tire on a wet pavement, a kind of harmonic hum. (Hammond) was almost ready to let me take a recording device into a car. He let me do the next best thing. I got in touch with mad scientists around New York who had devices that would create sounds." Unfortunately, he got sick in the middle of this operation.

Hallelujah's position is artificially degraded by an evil smear campaign. It is a brilliant song.

14. If It Be Your Will (100.5 points, 8 votes, 2 #1 votes)
from The Future

Live in Belfast with the Webb Sisters: https://goo.gl/lQ0D7t
Antony: https://goo.gl/ekqqIl
Max Richter and Robin Wright: https://goo.gl/bubEwu

I'm Your Man:

Dylan had told Leonard that he thought Leonard’s songs were becoming “like prayers,” and none more so than the album"s closing song, “If It Be Your Will.” It was, Leonard said, “an old prayer that it came to me to rewrite.” The first draft was written in the Algonquin Hotel in New York in December 1980, shortly after Hanukkah was over and his children had gone back to their mother.

(...)

It is an intensely moving song, intimate and fragile, and sung in a voice that had deepened with age. Lissauer noted that it had dropped four semitones since he and Leonard had last worked together. "It was a heavenly recording," Lissauer says. Jennifer Warnes came in and sang with him. Just one take. Leonard was very pleased with it. Asked in an interview in 1994 which song he wished he had written, Leonard answered, “‘If It Be Your Will.’ And I wrote it.”

the "Hallelujah" smear campaign was life itself, I think

sorry, that should have been Various Positions as the album

13. The Partisan (9 votes, 1 #1 vote)
from Songs from a Room

Joan Baez: https://goo.gl/3he3SE
Electrelane: https://goo.gl/qUxNdT

getting into some real heavyweights now

really like that antony version of "if it be your will"

Okay, now I want to rage. 13 better songs than If It Be Your Will? According to my ballot, there is only one song better.

12. Bird on the Wire (116.5 points, 8 votes)
from Songs from a Room
1 vote for Field Commander Cohen version: https://goo.gl/EkZNF1

Johnny Cash: https://goo.gl/Yaxv88
Willie Nelson: https://goo.gl/sESHlc
Tim Hardin: https://goo.gl/RULoKG
Dave Van Ronk: https://goo.gl/ni6TXP
Fairport Convention: https://goo.gl/GWvjPC
Neville Brothers: https://goo.gl/ByMEZQ
Joe Cocker: https://goo.gl/qy2EF7

Various Positions:

"Bird on the Wire" became an anthem and Cohen used it to open his concerts, explaining that it "seems to return me to my duties." Kris Kristofferson, who had begun selling his own songs, told Cohen at a Nashville party that Cohen had stolen part of the melody from Lefty Frizell's "Mom & Dad's Waltz." But Kristofferson admired the song and said that the first three lines - "Like a bird on the wire, / Like a drunk in a midnight choir / I have tried in my way to be free” - would be his epitaph.

"Bird on the Wire" began in Greece: when Cohen first arrived in Hydra, there were no wires on the island, no telephones, and no regular electricity. But soon telephone poles appeared, and then the wires: "I would stare out the window at these telephone wires and think how civilization had caught up with me and I wasn't going to be able to escape after all. I wasn't going to be able to live this eleventh-century life that I thought I had found for myself. So that was the beginning." Then he noticed that the birds came to the wires. The next line referred to the many evenings Cohen and friends climbed the endless stairs up from the port of Hydra, drunk and singing. "Often you'd see three guys with their arms around each other, stumbling up the stairs and singing these impeccable thirds." He finished the song in a Hollywood motel on Sunset Boulevard in 1969.

ok I was gonna let the joke stand but I hope no one seriously thinks I was gonna put a link the the McKinnon "Hallelujah"

Think I also voted for Jennifer Warnes' cover of Bird on the Wire.

you probably did! there are so goddamn many. I actually do like the Cocker version, which surprised me

Jennifer Warnes: https://goo.gl/h5Vd8B

If It Be Your Will was my #1. Ive always wondered why Hallelujah got all the covers and people have for the most part left it be. Maybe because there's nothing to add to it and nothing to subtract either. It's as close as you can get to perfect for me.

http://2gz2kk33tiykcztlb46pw3nv.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/webbdance2-from-eva-martonfxyixx.gif

My #1 too.

Mine too, tied with 19 others

Not to put too fine a point on it, I'd imagine the sentiment of the song would be anathema to most of the singers who might consider covering it

I've been listening to a shitload of Cohen recently so Spotify has recommended me the album of his songs by perla batalla, who was one of his backing singers on I think the future + tour. It's quite nice - she's Mexican-American & the best tracks are inflected to various extents by mex music. She does a credible "if it be your will" and her "ballad of the absent mare" is decent but doesn't come anywhere near Jenny's - but neither does lenny's

Like a beast with it's horn/I have torn everyone who reached out for me

this is a devastating lyric

I also think we need to talk about what an unusual and amazing song the stranger song is but I don't really have the vocab

His proto-pua interest in hypnotism seemed to influence his singing & picking style as much as any higher temper

Like a beast with it's horn/I have torn everyone who reached out for me

this is a devastating lyric

― AdamVania (Adam Bruneau), Sunday, December 11, 2016 10:52 AM (one hour ago

and the stanza starts out with "like a baby, stillborn" !! the song is amazing

Finishing the countdown shortly. One more quote re: BotW:

One song whose recording did not come easily was “Bird on the Wire.” Leonard tried it over and over, in countless different ways, but every time he listened back, he thought it sounded dishonest somehow. Finally he told Johnston he was done, and the musicians were sent home. “Bob said, okay, let"s forget it,” said Leonard. “I went back to my hotel to think matters over, but got more and more depressed.” He was determined to get this song right. It was as if the song, as well as being a letter to Marianne, were a personal treatise of sorts, a “My Way,” but without the braggadocio (Leonard was never a big fan of Sinatra; he did have a fondness for Dean Martin, though). “In a way the history of that song on the record is my whole history,” Leonard said. “I’d never sung the song true, never. I"d always had a kind of phony Nashville introduction that I was playing the song to, following a thousand models.”

Four days before his last recording session on November 25, 1968, Leonard asked everyone to leave except Zemel, McCoy and Johnston. “I just knew that at that moment something was going to take place. I just did the voice before I started the guitar and I heard myself sing that first phrase, ˜Like a bird," and I knew the song was going to be true and new. I listened to myself singing, and it was a surprise. Then I heard the replay and I knew it was right.

11. Take This Longing (123 points, 12 votes, 1 #1 vote)
from New Skin for the Old Ceremony

Judy Collins: https://goo.gl/hGhl6b
Hole: https://goo.gl/nIjHKQ

Various Positions:

The infatuated Cohen followed Nico around the city, but she was clearly not interested in him. He was madly in love with her though, and persisted: "I was lighting candles and praying and performing incantations and wearing amulets, anything to have her fall in love with me, but she never did." A journal entry from the Chelsea Hotel dated March 15, 1967, highlights Cohen's fascination with Nico, his entanglement with depression and his art: "Terrible day, hopeless thoughts of Nico. The guitar dead, voice dead, tunes old and fake, Nico in terrible mood. Tried to reach her, tried to make her stay beside me for a second, impossible." The journal that day also records a visit by Phil Ochs, Henry Moscovitch, a young Montreal poet, and the advice of a friend to see a psychiatrist, prompting this notation: "poet maudit ca. 1890. Cut the call short. Visited Judy Collins, taught her ˜Sisters of Mercy.'"

Overwhelmed by Nico's beauty - she had modeled in Paris and had had a bit part in Fellini's La Dolce Vita -Cohen wrote "Take This Longing" for her. She sang it to him several times but never recorded it. He also wrote a confessional prose piece about his longing for her...

This goes on a bit. He was fucking obsessed with Nico.

10. Anthem (125 points, 10 votes)
from The Future

Perla Batalla and Julie Christensen: https://goo.gl/czrHGr
Will Sheff: https://goo.gl/r9a7kW

Various Positions:

"Anthem" was borrowed from Kabbalistic sources, especially the sixteenth-century rabbi Isaac Luria. It was one of the most difficult songs Cohen had ever written, taking almost a decade to complete. He recorded it three times, with one version for Various Positions and another for I'm Your Man, mixed with strings, voices, and overdubs. It was finished, he explained, "but when I listened to it there was something wrong with the lyric, the tune, the tempo. There was a lie somewhere in there, there was a disclosure that I was refusing to make. There was a solemnity that I hadn't achieved." Only when he reworked it for The Future did he "nail it." Songwriting begins for him not in the form of an idea, but in the form of an image. He explained:

"...the way I do things is that I uncover the song and discern what it's about through the actual writing of it. Every song begins with that old urgency to rescue oneself, to save oneself. And it's quite a powerful gnawing at the spirit. It's not at all evident at the beginning of the process what it [the song] is about."

9. First We Take Manhattan (131 points, 11 votes)
from I'm Your Man

R.E.M: https://goo.gl/ikV9dr
Jennifer Warnes: https://goo.gl/rbzmCV

Various Positions:

The album opens with "First We Take Manhattan," originally called "In Old Berlin." It plays with certain geo-political ideas then in the air, he explained to an Oslo interviewer: "extremism, terrorism, fundamentalism. They are all attractive positions because they lack ambiguity; such dogmatism is always seductive," he added, "because of its total commitment to a position without any qualifications, without any conditions - there is some kind of secret life we lead in which we imagine ourselves changing things, not violently, maybe gracefully, maybe elegantly in a very imaginative way and with the shake of a hand. The song speaks of longing for change, impatience with the way things are, a longing for significance; we deal in the purest burning logic of longing." Two years later, he referred to the song as a "demented manifesto," although he also reported that it became so popular in Athens that people were greeting each other in Greek by saying, "First, we take Manhattan," the other person replying with "Then we take Berlin!"

I'm Your Man:

"First We Take Manhattan" is very likely the only Eurodisco song to reference the war between the sexes and the Holocaust.

Something almost Badalamenti like about the synths playing a similar melody line to that in I'm Your Man later in the album on First We Take Manhattan.
Has one of my favourite Cohen Moments: the way he sings the section starting "You loved me as a loser now you're worried that I just might win". The beautiful loser turned bad winner. His delivery sounds more unhinged than anywhere else in his back catalogue besides Songs of Love and Hate.

errr, whoops. that should be:
8. First We Take Manhattan (131 points, 11 votes)

========

9. Chelsea Hotel No. 2 (129.5 points, 10 votes)
from New Skin for the Old Ceremony

Rufus Wainwright: https://goo.gl/7yzr7n
Meshell Ndegeocello: https://goo.gl/7m9IBh
Carissa's Wierd: https://goo.gl/bONqDs
Lloyd Cole: https://goo.gl/4E3CXZ
Anonymous Choir: https://goo.gl/hVnxgW

I'm Your Man:

Leonard has claimed in several interviews, and confirmed it in the closing verse of "Chelsea Hotel #2,” that he is not a sentimental or a nostalgic man, that he does not look back. Religion would validate this as a healthy position: when Lot's wife looked back at Sodom she was turned into a pillar of salt. As a writer, although he tended to look inside himself or at his immediate environs, Leonard also looked back at lovers from whom he had parted. In The Favourite Game, Leonard's fictional alter ego writes to the girl he loved in fond anticipation of their separation: "Dearest Shell, if you let me I"d always keep you 400 miles away and write you pretty poems and letters. I'm afraid to live any place but in expectation." As a writer Leonard seemed to thrive on this paradox of distance and intimacy. As a man, it was more complicated. Often it seemed to make him wretched, and, as a wretch, he turned to God. But as Roshi told him, "You can"t live in God"s world. There are no restaurants or toilets."

Various Positions:

In his well-known concert introduction to the song, he outlines his first encounter with Janis Joplin:

"Once upon a time, there was a hotel in New York City. There was an elevator in that hotel. One evening, about three in the morning, I met a young woman in that hotel. I didn't know who she was. Turned out she was a very great singer. It was a very dismal evening in New York City. I'd been to the Bronco Burger; I had a cheeseburger; it didn't help at all. Went to the White Horse Tavern, looking for Dylan Thomas, but Dylan Thomas was dead. Dylan Thomas was dead. I got back in the elevator, and there she was. She wasn't looking for me either. She was looking for Kris Kristofferson. "Lay your head upon the pillow." I wasn't looking for her, I was looking for Lily Marlene. Forgive me for these circumlocutions. I later found out she was Janis Joplin and we fell into each other's arms through some divine process of elimination which makes a compassion out of indifference, and after she died, I wrote this song for her. It's called the Chelsea Hotel."

During a more recent performance in Norway, Cohen revised the story of the original meeting between Joplin and himself: in the elevator Cohen asks, "Are you looking for someone? "Yes,she replies, "I'm looking for Kris Kristofferson." "Little Lady, you're in luck. I'm Kris Kristofferson." He was significantly shorter than Kristofferson, but as he says, those were generous times. Yafa Lerner recalls that at the Chelsea it was common for women to offer themselves to Cohen as he rode the elevator. Cohen began writing "Chelsea Hotel #2"in a Polynesian bar in Miami in 1971 and finished it at the Imperial Hotel in Asmara, Ethiopia, in 1973.

To recap/correct this slightly confusing last stretch

10. Anthem (125 points, 10 votes)
9. Chelsea Hotel No. 2 (129.5 points, 10 votes)
8. First We Take Manhattan (131 points, 11 votes)

7. Everybody Knows (137.5 points, 11 votes)
from I'm Your Man

Rufus Wainwright: https://goo.gl/dj69Jt
Don Henley: https://goo.gl/Sp4BB4
Concrete Blonde: https://goo.gl/LnY0wS (<--hilariously overwrought video alert)

The rest will be up tonight. Sorry for the weird post timing and knuckle-dragging.

i'm enjoying it anyway!

"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."

======

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