Leonard Cohen: Album by Album Thread

Cohen has been pretty consistently on record about his having first written the song during the time he spent entertaining Israeli troops during the 1973 war, and for several years--as far as I can tell, he played the song throughout the 1974, '75, '79, '80, and '85 tours--he introduced it in concert as a song written at that time for the soldiers on both sides of that conflict. That intro remark seems to have become less common as the years went by--especially with the introduction of the opening oud and later archilaud taksim at the beginning of the song starting in '79. After combing though the bootleg recordings available on youtube and sugarmegs, I've gathered that Cohen stopped playing the song for a long time after the 1985, except for an occasional encore or one-off here and there. It got revived for a string of shows in the late summer and early fall of 2009, including the wonderful version that leads off the Songs from the Road set, played at Ramat Gan Stadium in Tel Aviv. Then it drops out of the regular rotation again (I found just one rendition from an encore in Berlin, August 8, 2010) until December 2012. Then it stayed in the set though the end of the 2013 tour (including show we have on Live in Dublin).

I don't know how consistent it's possible to make the lyric fit with some kind of direct reference to the plight of Israeli soldiers, although as I tried to say in my long post, their plight is as addressable by the song as any number of human plights, both personal and collective. There may be a way that on a psychological level Cohen as the artist who created the song might have been expressing or working from a yearning to "change his name" or "start again" by losing his personal "fear and filth and cowardice and shame" in solidarity with the Zionist cause and his people more widely. On the other hand, he may be expressing a kind of penitence over not having done that enough until that point. 1973, although historians will tell you there was no real existential threat to Israel, didn't seem that way at the time to many, given how taken by surprise the Israeli military was by the Syrian and Egyptian attacks--and how far into Israeli held territory they got before being turned back--especially in Sinai. A lot of Jews at the time, both in Israel and elsewhere, experienced the threat as existential, and Cohen seems to have been no exception. He has expressed a mixture of motives for his going over there at the beginning of the wart Some were a matter of Jewish solidarity, some more personal, having to do with his complicating domestic life and it's pressures.

So, the long and the short of it is that the song is rooted--as many songs are--a complex of motives, intentions, and circumstances, but I think the final versions of it (we don't know what that original Sinai version was like, exactly) are clearly designed to address something wider than just those matters. This is especially true of the versions that use the verse added in 1979--even more so the ones that use that instead of the original fifth verse.

L.

 

Sorry for the typos, above. Especially for "beginning of the wart" at the end of the second paragraph! I should finish my coffee before typing....

In the above quotation of the original post, I've corrected them--or at least the ones I caught).

PhantonStranger: thanks for posting that early version of "Suzanne." It's like something out of an archeological dig!

L.

 

In case anyone is interested, here's another version of "Lover Lover Lover." This one comes from Melbourne in 1980 (there were 2 short tours in 1980, one of Australia in March and another of Europe and Israel in October and November). This one is neither a great recording or a particularly outstanding performance, but it does include yet another lyrical variation. Here, the 1979 5th verse ("you may come to me...") replaces "May the spirit of this song," but then a new verse is added. Listen at about 4:50 into the stream:



I wish I could make out the words, but it's clearly a new verse. There's a slightly clearer version on the Melbourne March 8, 1980 boot on the sugarmegs site, but it's not that much clearer. I think the first lines are something like, "Ah, you may trust my holy one/ or the wonders you have seen...." The rest I can't make out, and I'm even not sure of those first two lines. In the 3rd verse, Cohen also sings "I want my eyes to be clear this time" instead of "I want a face that is fair this time."

The recording of the song from the night before at the same venue includes an introduction in which Cohen says, and I'm paraphrasing, that it was seven years ago he had found himself in the Sinai in the midst of a war and that at some point during that experience he felt any feelings of partisanship he had had about the conflict dissolve into a feeling of shame over the nature of the war (or of war itself--it's not easy to make out everything he says clearly). He calls the song a sort of dialogue between a man and his maker or between a man and his lover (he says both, that's not a pair of alternative transcriptions). He sings the new verse and the "eyes to be clear" version of the 3rd verse, but I still can't make out what the last two lines of the new verse say, maybe something about an angel and about heaven and greed?

There's a nice radio broadcast recording from Amsterdam from several months later (October of 1980), but it goes back to "face that is fair" and drops the new verse, as do the rest of the recordings I've heard from that fall, including the November 24th show in Tel Aviv, which I think was the last one on that tour, and at which he introduced the song like this:

"Back in 1973, I had the opportunity to observe the grace and the bravery of many Israeli soldiers at the front, in [?], in the Sahara Desert, and in the Suez. After I came back from that invigorating and depressing experience, I wrote this song called "Lover, Lover, Lover, Lover, Lover, Lover, Lover, come back to me.”

But no "May the spirit of this song" verse.

Anyone know of any other--and better--recordings of the version with the Melbourne verse?

L.

 

While I my brain soaks in these great reads and drip dries into a bucket for later, here is a brief digression. Think of it as a mirror under my nose.

With the recent discussions of Cohen & Dylan's tinkering with their works*, it got me thinking tangentially about which songs by each I'd love to hear the other cover. Here are five (vaguely-coordinated and mostly "late" career) for each. I'm certainly curious what others would want (whether when the thread is lulling or going full bore as it is now or whether you're active or lurking).

Dylan covering Cohen:

1. Everybody Knows
2. Tower of Song
3. Anthem
4. In My Secret Life
5. Democracy
6. Closing Time

Cohen covering Dylan:

1. Things Have Changed
2. When the Deal Goes Down **
   
3. Every Grain of Sand
   
4. What Good Am I
5. Workingman's Blues #2 **
6. Desolation Row

• Bonus: Dignity

* Also, another vote for "on the docks that night."
** I'll admit that these are ringers in my mind; somehow I think there's something better.

 

http://1heckofaguy.com/2014/07/23/bob-dylans-1988-covers-of-leonard-cohens-hallelujah/

Dylan covered Hallelujah twice on his 1988 tour. Here is the audio for his first known performance of it in Montreal.

 

I think it would be remiss of me if I didn't share the oft-told anecdote concerning an exchange between Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan. I should have pointed out this Leonard Cohen interview earlier, taken from Paul Zollo's From Songwriters On Songwriting. It is easily the most direct, lucid account of Leonard's musical process I've ever read and worth the fifteen minutes of your time. Many of the songs already covered in this thread are mentioned. What follows are brief excerpts related to Leonard's thoughts on Dylan.

http://www.leonardcohenfiles.com/zollo.html

Is there much concealing?

Unless you want to present the piece with the axe-marks on it, which is legitimate, [to show] where the construction or the carving is. I like the polished stuff too.

At a certain point, when the Jews were first commanded to raise an altar, the commandment was on unhewn stone. Apparently the god that wanted that particular altar didn’t want slick, didn't want smooth. He wanted an unhewn stone placed on another unhewn stone. Maybe then you go looking for stones that fit. Maybe that was the process that God wanted the makers of this altar to undergo.

Now I think Dylan has lines, hundreds of great lines that have the feel of unhewn stone. But they really fit in there. But they’re not smoothed out. It’s inspired but not polished.

That is not to say that he doesn’t have lyrics of great polish. That kind of genius can manifest all the forms and all the styles.

"Hallelujah."

That was a song that took me a long time to write. Dylan and I were having coffee the day after his concert in Paris a few years ago and he was doing that song in concert. And he asked me how long it took to write it. And I told him a couple of years. I lied actually. It was more than a couple of years.

Then I praised a song of his, "I and I," and asked him how long it had taken and he said, "Fifteen minutes." [Laughter]

Dylan said, around the time that "Hallelujah" came out, that your songs were almost like prayers.

I didn’t hear that but I know he does take some interest in my songs. We have a mutual interest. Everybody’s interested in Dylan but it’s pleasant to have Dylan interested in me.

 

What an incredible read. In it, he mentions sixty verses written for "Democracy" and it makes me long to hear just a few of them; certainly most were left out for good reason. He's given a similar account to "Hallelujah" and probably many other songs.

Along those lines, what interests me most in in that interview is the following exchange. While I'm sure from a very early period there were many discarded verses -- a necessity of craft -- I suspect it has grown more common over time and may become more of our conversation as we get into the upcoming albums, including @lschwart's vaunted Ten New Songs, which I recently began revisiting and, based on his opinion, re-assessing.

Jumping way too far ahead but his discussions of "Anthem" and "Democracy" in this article are fascinating.

 

That's an important interview. I've always found the following remark, quoted above by David, particularly telling:

So you’re not a writer for whom ideas simply appear?

I haven’t had an idea in a long long time. And I’m not sure I ever had one.

Now my friend Irving Layton, the great Canadian writer, said, "Leonard’s mind is unpolluted by a single idea." And he meant it as a kind of compliment. He’s a close friend and he knows me, and it’s true. I don’t have ideas. I don’t really speculate on things. I get opinions but I’m not really attached to them. Most of them are tiresome. I have to trot them out in conversations from time to time just to cooperate in the social adventure. But I have a kind of amnesia and my ideas just kind of float above this profound disinterest in myself and other people. So to find something that really touches and addresses my attention, I have to do a lot of hard, manual work.

It's not, of course, that Cohen isn't an intellectual writer, but that as an artist he deals in images that suggest ideas and feelings, which is different than presenting actual arguments that articulate and defend particular ideas. But even more interesting is the way he describes his working methods here and throughout the interview: a constant working at the verbal and musical material until it "yields" itself, becomes something that "really touches and addresses [his] attention." This image of a man who floats in a kind of boredom, searching for--and having to make--things that snap him out of it and into real engagement is fascinating, and unlike most other accounts I've heard artists give over the years. It almost seems true to me--I'm never sure how much of the con Cohen is working in these interviews, even--or especially--when he claims he's dropping it. But this self-characterization is a key part of the persona he's created, and the ideas about art it suggests without arguing or articulating them are central to many of the songs. They make particular sense of the moment at which he said these words (in the aftermath of having written and recorded the songs on The Future), but the moment we're dealing with right now, the creation of the songs on New Skin, was a similar moment, I think, so this remark makes for an interesting gloss for the first verse of "Field Commander Cohen:"

Field Commander Cohen, he was our most important spy.
Wounded in the line of duty,
parachuting acid into diplomatic cocktail parties,
urging Fidel Castro to abandon fields and castles.
Leave it all and like a man,
come back to nothing special,
such as waiting rooms and ticket lines,
silver bullet suicides,
and messianic ocean tides,
and racial roller-coaster rides
and other forms of boredom advertised as poetry.

Here's a guy--a version of "The Artist"--who will do anything to engage himself and rise above the boredom of the nothing special, but all the grand political gestures (Cuba, later Sinai) lead nowhere, or only engage for a while before they, too, become boring or exhaustingly unproductive. Nor does writing songs as if they were "love for the workers in song," when they're really just a bid for money and flesh (the second verse is a version of that line from "Chelsea Hotel #2").

So that leaves just the boredom--except, as the final verse shows, for what's offered by love:

Ah, lover come and lie with me, if my lover is who you are,
and be your sweetest self awhile until I ask for more, my child.
Then let the other selves be wrong, yeah, let them manifest and come
till every taste is on the tongue,
till love is pierced and love is hung,
and every kind of freedom done, then oh,
oh my love, oh my love, oh my love,
oh my love, oh my love, oh my love.

Now that's interesting to this guy, that's what the maze of the process of working the work leads the persona to at this particular point in the game. That promises to lift the boredom (and notice the religious element of the passion that bleeds though the image of piercing and hanging).

The other thing I think is really interesting about that interview is the way he talks about wanting one day to write from a place of calm ("I want a spirit that is calm"), but that he hasn't been able to reach that place yet. The songs of New Skin and The Future are among his least calm (they share that position in the uneasiness sweepstakes with with SOLAH, and DOALM ). This is interesting because, as he reveals in much later interviews, he later did find that calm, and the songs changed as a result.

This comes to mind for me because I was listening to the new Dublin set yesterday, after listening to far too many earlier live versions of "Lover Lover Lover," and I was struck by how different, and how much calmer the song feels in this most recent version--despite it's relatively fast and urgent tempo. This version of the song uses the '79 "You may come to me..." verse as verse 5, with no "May this song..." verse, and it changes the opening of the choruses to "And he said, lover...," these lyric choices, and the fact that in concert it followed a particularly lovely and calm version of "Come Healing" (a song Cohen could never have finished and sung with conviction in 1973 or 1992--who knows when he started it? maybe in the early '80s?), gave it a striking calm--and that's despite his choice to end it with a repetition of the first verse. The return to the perturbed first verse, a recollection, after all, simply shoves that terrible day of pleading back into the deep past. The song has become a valediction to all that. It may not be a conventionally religious song, not exactly, but it does realize itself in this performance as a committed act of devotion and thanks to whatever power sponsored and welcomed the singer's arrival at that calm. I suppose that has something to do with no longer having a "face that is fair," but also with no longer caring, but more on that later....

L.

 

I've always liked "Bird on a Wire" since first hearing it by Joe Cocker who did a very nice version, but the lyrics never fully resonated with me until I heard Johnny Cash sing it. That's when it hit me. This song is a prayer!

 

Why exactly is "Please Don't Pass Me By" subtitled "A disgrace?"

 

I assume because the fact that people pass by the blind man and all the other sufferers the song tries to include is a disgrace. The very fact that the sufferer even has to ask is a disgrace. The song pleas with everyone for a radical kind of empathy. It seeks grace out of disgrace.

L.

 

Those are interesting points you have raised. I have picked up from reading Leonard's interviews that some of his public persona is deliberate stagecraft. It possibly goes back to his days dealing with the literary press in Canada, when a mysterious author and poet might draw a bigger audience. I am not sure the Rock press really ever caught on in the 1970s.

Some of his half-answers to the press are versions of his truth. Are they the full answer? I wager not. What I have always liked about Leonard Cohen's music is that it seems too important to deal with mere political sentiments, like he's already considered them as ideas and casually discarded them.

 

In honor of his recent passing:



L.

 

It might be time to cover Leonard's next album, Death of a Ladies' Man. Produced by Wall of Sound mastermind Phil Spector, we should have fun recounting the anecdotes that came out of these sessions. Leonard Cohen is only the second most famous person to be held at gunpoint by Phil Spector.

http://mentalfloss.com/article/28392/5-artists-reportedly-held-gunpoint-phil-spector

This thread has incorporated a number of references to Leonard's concert performances across the decade. I thought some might be interested in tracking them down in more complete quality:

http://www.guitars101.com/forums/tags.php?tag=leonard+cohen

 

I still have a few more comments to make on the songs of New Skin, but if people want to begin to move on to the next record, that's fine.

L.

 

Go ahead, your posts continue to inform and enlighten. If I were a betting man, I don't believe the next album will receive such support and attention.

 

There's a lot of put on in his early interviews, but even in later ones like this one it never goes away completely. Part of it is the way he recycles those very polished set piece stories about this or that event or this or that issue or the way he writes or thinks or doesn't. That business about not having ideas is an old one, for example, not a new "revelation" of some kind. And there's something arch, a kind of nod and wink, in the way he says things like "I get opinions but I’m not really attached to them. Most of them are tiresome. I have to trot them out in conversations from time to time just to cooperate in the social adventure." You have to laugh a little when you reflect that this would then be exactly what he was doing right then. It reminds me of the moment in the Ladies and Gentlemen, Leonard Cohen documentary from 1965, where he lets the camera crew film him taking a bath and writing in his notebook while in the bath. The set up is that we're being allowed to see something private, real, personal, but then he takes his pen and writes "caveat emptor" on the wall above the bath--and we're watching all of this with Cohen as he watches a screening of a this stretch of film, and he calls it a moment when he felt the need to warn the audience that even this moment was not "entirely devoid of the con." It's revelation and confidence (several senses) and a distancing, one within the other within the other. How do we know there's not con in the warning, too, and in his calling it that? We don't, of course.

I'm not saying that Cohen is being dishonest--just the opposite, actually. The whole self-presentation is part of the art, or the life as art. Which then lends art to life. Even self-revelation is a figure, but a very productive, even generous one, especially in it's later versions.

L.
.

 

I agree that Cash's take in particular evokes a prayer-like quality.

Roll with this extemporaneous stream of thought...

I think that your view of "Bird on the Wire" becomes more resonant through the lens of later songs; especially "Anthem," which itself has a strong sense of prayer. I take it as a pure coincidence (by result of a shared poetic trope) that "Anthem" begins with the image of birds singing at the break of day. While the rest of the song doesn't harken back to "Bird on the Wire," looking at "Anthem"'s lyrics now, it feels to me in this moment like a natural successor to the earlier song. The singer is now in the role of the beggar who through experience knows not to ask for so much. He's learned that those parts will not yield the expected sum.

 

I also think it's possible that Cohen considers the whole performance "a disgrace," i.e. an experiment in abjection for the performer (and the listener identifying with him).

 

Yes. To invite the necessary radical empathy, the singer has to make himself as abject as he felt the blind man was. He's trying to make the concert (or this part of it) a ritual, more than an entertainment.

L.

 

Operating strictly from the lyrics, this comment reminds me of these lines from New Skin:

"A singer must die for the lie in his voice.

And I thank you, I thank you for doing your duty,
you keepers of truth, you guardians of beauty.
Your vision is right, my vision is wrong,
I'm sorry for smudging the air with my song.

The night is thick, my defenses are hid"

Despite the strong sense of autobiography I get from many of his songs, the nakedness of this lyric's dejection comes across as more naked than I generally expect. Sure, especially later in life he tweaks his persona with its heavy lyrics and increasingly heavy voice, but those come across as self-effacing echoes of this which feels more eviscerating. And also like a more direct swipe back at critics who do their duty and defend art against his artistic failures that "smudge the air." I can't escape the self-loathing and the sense that the real smudge is between external and self-assessment.

The first excerpted line's internal rhyme is the sort of poetically criminal wording that reminds me of a neophyte's nightstand journals but, as is generally the case, for Cohen it is a moment of directness that can provide an entry point into something denser and darker. In this case -- and sticking solely to these lines -- I'm reminded of his recent song "Almost Like the Blues," where he sings about "all my bad reviews." Where in that song he's being wryly self-deprecating, here he seems simply raw. To my mind, the last line I quoted signals a shift in the song; the lyric shifts after this point where the "you" shifts to a figurative (or literal) lover that fits within his poetic milieu. While the song remains thematically consistent, it seems that shifting to this narrative right after references "hidden defenses" itself is a deflection and he is attempting to hide behind his craft by writing a "Leonard Cohen" song.

Feel free to disagree; this song is new to me. I was tempted to read about it online but I prefer the discussion.

Was this written while living on Hydra in his sort of self-exile with his family?

 

I take some of A Singer Must Die as sarcasm from Leonard directed at music reviewers. By this album, Cohen had read and heard many things about his limitations as a singer and musician from critics. Almost every critical review from this early period repeated the same tired critiques, his critics were often missing the forest for the trees.

Here is an interesting transcription of a BBC radio interview from 1994, where Leonard addresses some of his more popular hits.

http://www.webheights.net/speakingcohen/bbctrans.htm

I guess it's legitimate not to like someone's work, but somehow those descriptions of my work got into the computer, you know, there was "suicide", or "bedsit", or "gloom", "depressive", "melancholy", and every time they'd tap out my name those descriptions would come up. You know, as though seriousness had no place in song. The songs we love best are the sad songs.

 

The following performance from the Olympia Theatre in Paris on June 5, 1976 is probably my favorite live version for Is This What You Wanted. I think this more Pop-sounding arrangement might have been influenced by the exposure to Phil Spector and recording the next album.

 

“Who By Fire”

Sorry this has taken so long, but between grading, a set of MS reviews that had to be finished, and family obligations over the holidays, I’ve had my hands full and haven’t had a lot of time to expand on the notes I had been taking about the remaining songs on New Skin. But here goes with some reflections on the song I had originally paired with “Lover Lover Lover:”

Compared with the other “religious” song on the album there isn’t a lot to say about “Who By Fire” by way of interpretation. It doesn’t ask for interpretation the way the other song does. In fact, it’s remarkably straight forward, working primarily by anachronism and ironic juxtaposition. The anachronism is, first of all, a matter of Cohen’s adaptation of a key passage from the U'Netaneh Tokef, a “piyyut” or liturgical poem or set-piece that has been a part of the Jewish High Holiday liturgy for centuries (parts of it date back to the 8th Century and may in fact be older than that). There’s also anachronism at work in the song’s litany of kinds of death: some come right out of the piyyut itself or sound suitably ancient (as though they came from the piyyut), but these are juxtaposed with very contemporary types of death (barbiturates, etc.), and also sharply ironic ones like “your merry merry month of May,” and the rhymes and the anaphora fusing all of that in a way that makes the ancient and the modern themselves fuse, but in a way that preserves a key ironic tension. Nothing, in a sense, has or ever will change when it comes to the blunt fact of death, although now have some new ways to die, and the way in which we understand (or fail to understand) our mortality has changed, even as it continues to include the old ways. The effect is by turns ruefully funny, chilling, and poignant. Here’s the lyric as it appears on the official site:

And who by fire, who by water,
who in the sunshine, who in the night time,
who by high ordeal, who by common trial,
who in your merry merry month of may,
who by very slow decay,
and who shall I say is calling?

And who in her lonely slip, who by barbiturate,
who in these realms of love, who by something blunt,
and who by avalanche, who by powder,
who for his greed, who for his hunger,
and who shall I say is calling?

And who by brave assent, who by accident,
who in solitude, who in this mirror,
who by his lady's command, who by his own hand,
who in mortal chains, who in power,
and who shall I say is calling?

Particular moments that never fail to get to me, even after all the years I’ve known the song, are: “Who in their lonely slip” (makes me think of poor Nancy), juxtaposed and linked by rhyme with “who by barbiturate;” “Merry merry month of May” / “Slow decay” (an irony borrowed, with it’s own jagged modern edge added, from the final couplet of Robert Herrick’s “Corinna’s Gone a’Maying”); the deliberately blunt assonant rhyme of “love” and “blunt;” the ascending tension of “who for his greed, who for his hunger,” which is lent that tension in part by the consonant rhyme of “hunger” with “powder;” and the way “Brave ascent” meets “accident,” and “mortal chains” rattle against “power.”

It’s very strong stuff and carefully organized for effect, just as the original passage was, although to different effect and for different purposes. In fact, that’s the other major effect of Cohen’s use of anachronism and juxtaposition. The echo of the piyyut (or at least, as Maggie noted a few weeks back, the way was probably translated and recited in English in Canadian synagogues in the mid-20th Century) suggests we should compare the two, and when we do, it becomes clear that Cohen pointedly left out two things in making his adaptation. It’s not the particular deaths, old ones and new ones, that matter so much as the wider liturgical frame. The piyyut, like most of the rest of the Rosh HaShannah and Yom Kippur liturgy is concerned with praise of God—especially his attribute of mercy—and with repentance for sin. It is usually inserted into what’s called the repetition of the Amidah, during the musaf service (a service added to the regular liturgy on major holidays and the Sabbath that stands-in for the extra sacrifice that was offered in the Temple on those days). It usually comes just before the recitation of a prayer of praise called the Kedushah, which is itself built around a quotation from Isaiah’s vision of God’s throne (Isaiah 6, the prophet’s story of how he became a prophet—it’s worth looking at the poem “Isaiah,” which Cohen published in his second book, The Spice Box of Earth in 1961).

In the song, of course, Cohen has deliberately shaved off all direct reference to God, and more strikingly left out the “punch line,” as it were of the original litany passage. Here’s a translation of that original passage (with instructions for how and by whom the passage is/was usually chanted—a “chazzan” is a cantor, who chants formal parts of the liturgy and passages from scripture, often in a call and response with the congregation):

Congregation, then chazzan [in some congregations this is recited only by the chazzan]:
On Rosh Hashanah will be inscribed and on Yom Kippur will be sealed: how many will pass from the earth, and how many will be created; who will live and who will die; who will die at his predestined time and who before his time; who by water and who by fire, who by sword, who by beast, who by famine, who by thirst, who by storm, who by plague, who by strangulation, and who by stoning. Who will rest and who will wander, who will live in harmony and who will be harried, who will enjoy tranquility and who will suffer, who will be impoverished and who will be enriched, who will be degraded and who will be exalted.

Congregation aloud, then chazzan:
But REPENTANCE, PRAYER and CHARITY remove the evil decree!

So all that listing of deaths leads somewhere in the original text. The point is that God is going to be making decisions about the fates of all his creatures (according to other parts of the piyyut, even the angels are judged), but that any creature, by acts of prayer, acts of kindness, and by sincere repentance for sin, can avoid negative judgment and the punishment that comes with it (death, restlessness, degradation, poverty, etc.). The passages before this one proclaim the holiness of the day (the period of judgment) and God’s role as recorder and enumerator of all creation (down to the last fallen robin). Nothing escapes his knowledge or His judgment. The passages that follow discuss His mercy in providing us all with a way out of our own imperfections. You don’t have to be perfect. Just be kind, pray, and repent of your sins sincerely, and all will be well. These passages spend a fair amount of time juxtaposing the eternity of the divine with the transience of his creatures, which just sharpens the sense of God’s merciful understanding of the nature of his creatures, the way his love reaches across the chasm between his nature and theirs (a kind of happy irony, that He should care at all). And it ends with a remarkable and typically Jewish sense of human and divine communion or incorporation:

Congregation and chazzan:
For Your Name signifies Your praise: hard to anger and easy to appease, for You do not wish the death even of one deserving death, but instead that he repent from his way and live. Until the day of his death You await him; if he repents You will accept him immediately.

Chazzan:
It is true that You are their Creator and You know their inclination, for they are flesh and blood. A man's origin is from dust and his destiny is back to dust, at risk of his life he earns his bread; he is likened to a broken shard, withering grass, a fading flower, a passing shade, a dissipating cloud, a blowing wind, flying dust, and a fleeting dream.

Congregation aloud, then chazzan:
But You are the King, the Living and Enduring G-d.

THE ARK IS CLOSED

Congregation then chazzan:
There is no set span to Your years, and there is no end to the length of Your days. It is impossible to estimate the angelic chariots of Your glory and to elucidate Your Name's inscrutability. Your Name is worthy of You and You are worthy of Your Name, and You have included Your Name in our name.

That inclusion of God’s name in the human name, here in particular the name “Israel,” the last syllable of which is “El” the basic Semitic morpheme for “God” (the first part of the name, according to Genesis 32, derives from the word for “to wrestle,” so the name means something like “wrestler with God”—a tense, but also redemptive naming—Jacob, after all, is given the name after he wins his wrestling match with the angel, not after he has been defeated or subdued—“father, please change my name”), is a reminder of divine and human incorporation despite the divide that separates their orders of being. In evoking the name, Israel, a corporate name, it suggests the cooperation and the struggle within the covenant between God and humankind, with repentance and divine mercy operating as a regulative principle, maintaining the relationship between two orders of being.

But all of that, of course, is missing in the song, replaced by the question, “and who shall I say is calling?” This is the new punch line of this new litany, and it’s the only part of the song open to poetic ambiguity. Its most basic and pointed meaning is something like: and which one are you? The singer asks us each to think about our own particular deaths: how will we each go? We know there’s no way out, etc. But it can also reflect back on the distance between the song and the piyyut: who calls us to death, does death have a meaning? Does it have a meaning any more? Did it ever? The singer is a porter who has answered the door at our knocking (are we at the door of the house of honesty? Of mystery? Or is it God’s mansion? Is he home, was he ever? Will he answer?). Or we sing that line asking who has come to our door (again is it God, or is it a stranger? Should be let him in? should we be kind? Will he kill us? Make us a wanderer?). We hope to be a guest or welcome one, but who knows who is actually there…and at this time of night? Or is the sun shining?

So the song calls us to a question, to our own particular places of judgment, at the door and knocking to come in or have someone come out, opening the door and acting the porter, or back in some back room waiting to entertain a guest or be robbed or beaten or invited to leave, come out to play. In the recording and in most performances of the song, that very open complex of questions hangs heavily at the end and remains unanswered, with tense modern strings and that eastern and classical sounding soft staccato tiptoeing around in the dark, the blowing wind, flying dust, the fleeting dream.

Great song. And it’s been a pretty consistent ritual set-piece in Cohen’s repertoire with the basics of Lissaeur’s original arrangement more or less intact (the most important addition has been—as with “Lover Lover Lover”—an oud or archlaud taksim—sometimes guitar—or sometimes, as in the video Maggie posted a while back, an eli, eli lamma lamma saxophone cry that could shiver the city down to the last radio—takiah gedolah, indeed).

L.

 

Louis, you have left us with very little to say about Who By Fire. I agree with practically every word you wrote about the song. Over the years, I don't think I've ever heard a bad version of this song in concert. The lyrics provide such a firm structure for the instrumentation, that all the various musical refinements have their equal merits.

I will add that I have always loved the verses in Who By Fire, their internal rhythm has a sing-song quality that begs to be chanted. Many critics have bandied this song about as Cohen's fascination with suicide, though I think that is far off the mark. Your breakdown comes far closer to its essence. This was a period when Leonard was supposedly struggling with depression, which unfortunately framed the critical conversation around his music.

On a more personal level, this is the song that made me take Leonard Cohen seriously as a singer, whose music I wanted to explore in more depth. The first two songs I ever heard by him were Everybody Knows and Waiting For The Miracle, which I liked a great deal. They deviated widely enough from a mainstream Pop sound to get me interested in Leonard's music. Who By Fire was the first song I heard after those two hits that told me I had to hear everything this man had done, instantly hooking me. There were other songs from his first greatest hits LP I loved, but nothing that connected so quickly. I still consider it one of his most powerful songs in concert.