L. Cohen or P. Simon, who is the better songwriter

It was a pun on "Songs From A Room" iirc

ok lol

I'm just thinking about how Simon's songs take place in various spaces and times and contain references to Places and Historical Occurrences, constantly referencing how the sight of the external causes his memory to recall the personal, he explicitly states this synapse all the time, i.e. "And in remembering a road sign / I am remembering a girl when I was young".

Leonard does something different, and I'd have to reread his oeuvre in order to really make any observations of any worth

Thankfully he only made like what 11 albums? brb

xxxp
That “child of my first marriage” line is super clunky to my ears, but cool if you guys like it

Was listening to the Graceland reissue, and a track is Simon talking about the title track. I've heard it a million times and a) never noticed its intentional echoes of Sun and b) never noticed the lyrics were inspired by and literally about driving from New Orleans to see Graceland. He sings it with the melancholy of metaphor.

xp (It also sort of weirdly depersonalizes his son, as “product of a marriage” — like, what does the narrator’s now-adult son think of that line? — but maybe he achieved what he was going for with that line.)

there are a bunch of asshole-parent lines on that album! (the worst is definitely being the narrator in That Was Your Mother)

the road trip in the song strikes me as Simon making a pilgrimage, sure, but also finding himself and trying to create a connection with his son who is at enough of a distance that he's a traveling companion and a product of marriage. It's a tiny bit lol, mostly sad.

this thread is making me want to re-watch One Trick Pony

fgti's post upthread is very on point imo, although I think it's a little harsh to overly judge Simon (and Mitchell) for pathologically tak(ing) scenario after scenario after scenario and overlay(ing) their own internal emotional world cuz I feel like this is a thing pretty much all of us do just by living our lives on a daily basis. The world and its events are out there, and we relate to it through this medium of our own perceptions.

this is called "songwriting" imo

songwrit(ing)

This thread is making me want to re-watch My Little Pony.

This thread is making me want to listen to My Pal Foot-Foot

michael hurley.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

let's take a pile of jokes and string them together

----honestly, what? This isn't so much a bad description of LC as a genuine "look if you've never heard the guy, it's ok" type one.

One thousand percent Paul Simon. Love the video for You Can Call Me, Al with Chase and him dancing.

:)

i guess it boils down to what you want from your songwriters.

I saw Simon's The Capeman on Broadway (gratis for professional reasons), and it was not terrible. What would a Cohen jukebox musical look like?

hafta say "I can't forget but I don't remember what" is something i find myself feeling almost every day now

I can't see that working in any way, shape or form without the man himself. xp

oh come on ILX can totally write this jukebox musical

<curtain rises on the Chelsea Hotel>....

Suzanne enters stage left, with a mesh shopping bag containing tea and oranges.

Backlit, behind the hotel set: a marble arch.

100% a Cohen musical or seven have played at a fringe festival in Brighton or Edinburgh

wins: yes, and everybody knows

Setting: a hair salon

Leonard's father, a hairdresser, discovers a young Leonard poring over a nudist magazine

A chorus comprised of Bob Dylan, Allan Ginsberg, and Phil Spector serenades the hair salon's clientele as Leonard's father chases him around the stage

"That a son of mine should come home with his hard-on, oy!"

Night Magic is a 1985 Canadian-French musical film written by Leonard Cohen and Lewis Furey and directed by Furey. The film stars Nick Mancuso as Michael, a down on his luck musician whose fantasies begin to come true after he meets an angel (Carole Laure).

yeah but which one of them has the bigger penis

...but you don't really care for what's between us
And even though it all went wrong, I'll stand before the holy dong
The Cohen or the Simon type of penis

I love Paul Simon, but I can't remember the last time I listened to one of his albums. I listen to a Leonard Cohen album once every week or two.

But my darling says
"Leonard, just let it go by
That old silhouette
On the great western sky"
So I pick out a tune
And they move right along
And they're gone like the smoke
And they're gone like this dong

Simon has more craft and greater range, but Cohen moves me far, far more.

And they're gone like this dong

I love Paul Simon, but I can't remember the last time I listened to one of his albums. I listen to a Leonard Cohen album once every week or two.

― Leaghaidh am brón an t-anam bochd (dowd), Tuesday, August 7, 2018 5:39 PM (fifty-four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I imagine this describes many of us, or many more of us than "I listen to Simon all the time and only occasionally break out some Leonard Cohen". But if we're still going to overwhelmingly nod to Simon as the better songwriter, I guess it's as simple as Cohen's lyrical themes speak to a lot of us a lot more.

Serious question: are we really counting "listening to an album" in 2018 instead of "I listened to a few Simon tracks in the last month on my phone/Spotify"?

i guess it boils down to what you want from your songwriters.

― a Mets fan who gave up on everything in the mid '80s (Dr Morbius), Tuesday, August 7, 2018 11:47 AM (seven hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, and Cohen gives me all I ever wanted from this type of music whereas Simon is 'just' great. Not denying Simon's talent but sometimes it just clicks with an artist and notion of talent are thrown out of the window.

To me the entity known as "Paul Simon" is at least five different guys. Chipper teenager, S&G dude, cocky 70s shrimp, wistful boomer, savvy but problematic world-music conduit, late tired sage, SNL presence, etc. Each of them requires a different mood to cause me to listen to him.

In contrast, I think I only know of two entities called "Leonard Cohen." I call them folky and spooky.

lol that is very otm.

Would vote in a poll of Simon personas (voting cocky 70s shrimp btw)

never really occurred to me til now that Cohen's voice took a pretty straight path from choirboy tenor to rumbling bass over the course of 50 years

Serious question: are we really counting "listening to an album" in 2018 instead of "I listened to a few Simon tracks in the last month on my phone/Spotify"?

― morning wood truancy (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, August 7, 2018 3:58 PM (thirty minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

idk these are both p album-oriented artists for me

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

nice

wow, nice

Cohen vs. Simon is more like a battle of theses rather than an competition between like songwriters. Cohen's style of "let's take a pile of jokes and string them together" is godfather to Morrissey, to Smog, to Xiu Xiu-- though Cohen sings more about his relationship to the infinite than the latter songwriters, who keep things strictly interpersonal or (regrettably) political.

Simon is more classical metaphorical misdirection-- a song about viewing architecture that is actually about childbirth, a song about driving that is actually about a divorce. His twin shadow is undoubtedly Joni Mitchell, both as a "cloaking a heavy feeling in descriptive tableaux" and also musical cultural tourism. It sometimes makes me curious about a kind of moral bankruptcy, from an artistic perspective-- that Mitchell and Simon would pathologically take scenario after scenario after scenario and overlay their own internal emotional world, just as they engage in genre-exercise to prolong their own creative streak. Cohen, in comparison, writes his songs in a room

― flamboyant goon tie included, Friday, July 27, 2018 1:37 PM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is such a great post.

N I C E

I know, I teared up a little bit knowing how pleased Lenny must be with these results

Haha did NOT expect that. Silent majority, you ppl rule