Leonard Cohen: Album by Album Thread

Very good news!!

L.

 

Hello? Anybody in the tower of song?

 

Stages-Leonard Cohen

Y’know I was talking with some of the guys . . . some of the guys in the band are kind of over the hill. And they were talking about the various stages that a man goes through in relation to his allure to the opposite sex. It was not a scientific evaluation . . . just something that arose over a cup of coffee.

It went something like this: You start off irresistible. And, then you become resistible. And then you become transparent – not exactly invisible but as if you are seen through old plastic. Then you actually do become invisible. And then — and this is the most amazing transformation — you become repulsive. But that’s not the end of the story. After repulsive then you become cute – and that’s where I am.

 

So now I'm supposed to go out and have a happy-go-lucky day after THIS?

 

I told my entire family about that monologue and they loved it.

 

Well, if everybody else is anything like me, the regulars in this thread just don't listen to Leonard during the summer!

 

Fair enough. September sounds good?

 

I am loving the new Grand Tour album. Absolutely transcends its patchwork genesis.

 

Hey, that's the good part. It gets worse from there.

 

A chart with ages would be helpful. Not sure I've moved from transparent to invisible just yet.

 

Let's just say 'cute' is in my rear-view. You don't wanna know what follows that one...

 

Standing outside the supermarket screaming at the pigeons?

 

More like being one of the pigeons.

 

Or being eaten by the pigeons...

L.

 

Which strikes me as being right up there with being nibbled to death by ducks (an experience that those with any age on them know all too well).

 

I discovered Leonard Cohen in 1993 when I was 18 years old. That first listen began a 20+ year love affair with his music for me. In fact, I think his last two studio albums, Old Ideas and Popular Problems are some of his best work. I am still listening to them a couple of times each month. From what I read on his official forums he is working on yet another studio record! It's amazing how hard this man works considering his age...

 

This was/is a very cool thread. I think, though, that it was getting to be a bit onerous for @lschwart to keep up and so we stopped at Recent Songs (which I have finally heard but am still formulating an opinion about ... get back to me in a couple of weeks!). This is a pity, because we were on the cusp of some of his most popular titles.

 

Hi Maggie! Good to hear you've gotten to the record. I'd hoped to finally get back to this and write another post on Recent Songs during this semester break, but things keep getting in the way! Maybe I can make it coincide with your formulating.....

There are a few things that I think need to be discussed about this important, but also flawed and transitional, album and about the tour that followed it--during which some of the best songs on the album were better realized--before we move on to Various Positions and Cohen's later work and revived career.

The album marks the conclusion of the "marriage cycle" of songs and poems Cohen created through the course of the '70s and the start of something new, a new way of approaching religious or spiritual matters--not that the erotic goes away, of course--which will come to more realized form on the next album (a return to collaboration with Lissauer) and in the book of poems that would be released at around the same time, Book of Mercy. More soon!

L.

 

I've always wondered why Recent Songs doesn't get a lot more attention from Cohen fans. To me, it represents a vital stage in Cohen's career. His writing remained as strong as ever, but musically I felt Cohen was at his strongest. The 1979 tour, for instance, is Cohen's best in my opinion. His voice was at it's best, the band always seemed to play their hearts out...What I wouldn't give to have been there and seen him perform instead of having to rely on videos and bootlegs of the shows!

The individual songs on Recent Songs are fantastic too. I was always perplexed as to why Leonard only played "The Gypsy's Wife" on his most recent tours - the only song chosen from this album. Songs like The Traitor, The Window and Ballad of the Absent Mare are some of Leonard's most beautiful works - they deserve much more attention than they receive.

Here is a wonderful video of Leonard reciting Slowly I Married Her along with a live performance of The Gypsy's Wife.

 

I wish that film would get released again in its entirety. It documents a key moment in the career.

L.

 

Recent Songs is my least listened to LC album and I'm not sure why. All of his other albums are in my cd player almost daily but I rarely play Recent Songs.

 

I think Recent Songs is generally an overlooked masterpiece. The album has a smoky, rich vibe to its musical textures. It seems to have struck more of a chord with his European fans than in North America. The tour for Recent Songs was splendid from what I've heard of it.

 

I'm looking over these views on Recent Songs as I try to process it. I've spent a few weeks with it and I think I understand why it's the least-discussed of his albums and the only one of his pre-'90s albums not to produce a "standard" in the Cohen repertoire. Set against the penetrating self-exposure of his '70s live performances and albums, Recent Songs sounds enervated and almost prissily intellectualized. The lyrical emphasis seems to be on allegories that nonetheless take every opportunity to indulge the more puerile aspects of Cohen's art: whatever the abstract object of songs like "The Window," "Our Lady of Solitude," "Came So Far for Beauty" or "Absent Mare," Cohen (with an unusual degree -- or lack? -- of self-consciousness) never lets us forget that he's banged a lot of chicks. To me, such songs sound less like songs and more like "settings" than most of New Skin or Death of a Ladies' Man, which is a problem both for how they function as music and because of the emphasis they throw on the words. Robert Christgau certainly had his reasons when he held his nose at passages about "rages of fragrance," "rags of remorse" and a rhyme of "chosen love" and "frozen love." Elsewhere I can't shake the feeling that Cohen is retreading familiar territory, most obviously on "The Gypsy's Wife," which musically recapitulates "Lover Lover Lover" almost exactly.

All that said, I do enjoy most of these tracks to some degree, especially the beautiful "The Traitor," the most nakedly Dylanesque of Cohen songs -- an almost completely abstract allegory full of suggestive figures on the margins (Cohen's "judges" being a more explicitly Judaic counterpart to Dylan's clowns and jokers) and an ambiguous resolution. Even the setting is Dylanesque, a simple, wistful major air reminiscent of "I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine." And there are interesting musical elements throughout, even if they are let down by the flatness of Cohen's own performances.

Special mention has to be made of "Un Canadien errant," easily the most obnoxious Cohen recording this side of "Jazz Police," a seemingly deliberate effort to come up with a joke track as protracted and stupid as possible -- another Dylanesque gesture, perhaps?

 

Thoughtful post, as usual, Maggie. I tilt a little more toward the positive on this one, in part because of my sense that despite its flaws it was an important record for what was to follow. But I do think that you're right about why the album remains stubbornly under the radar for all but the most engaged Cohen fans. A large part of what's here treads over some pretty well-trod ground for Cohen--especially songs like "The Smokey Life," "Came So Far For Beauty," "Our Lady of Solitude," "The Gypsy's Wife," which are all rooted in the "pre-Spector" collaboration with Lissauer, but all of which have a more studied, even slightly chilly emotional feel to them than any of the thematically similar songs on New Skin for the Old Ceremony. There's none of the rawness of the earlier record--and of course it all makes me wonder what Songs for Rebecca would have been like had Cohen not been prodded or drawn into the collaboration with Spector. I do like the vocal duet between Cohen and Jennifer Warnes on "Smokey Life" very much. It's one of those perfectly poised and tender meshings of their timbers and sensibilities. Light as air and bottomless. The ground gives way and you find yourself still somehow walking suspended up there by God knows what. Insubstantial pageant faded. Everything merely lent by a moment. Is it a lie or is it true that no one is waiting?

You're right to single out "The Traitor," which is musically different drawing on British folk elements, and has that elaborate apparatus of figures (again strangely British for a writer who's imagination usually tilts toward France or eastern or southern Europe--or Canadian cold or the pages of pleasant or unpleasant bibles). And it dips into some grotesquery that's different from anything else I can think of in Cohen (the mechanical masturbatory images of a wind-up doll beloved's body in the last two verses).

I think the doo wop feel of "Humbled in Love" makes it distinctive, too, although it has nothing of the wildness of the Spector songs' engagement with early rock and roll.

I've never really found a way into "The Absent Mare," at lest not a comfortable--or productively discomforting--way. It feels both over obvious and overwrought to me (without the overwrought emotion that Cohen summoned on Songs of Love and Hate, New Skin, and amid the clangor of Death of a Ladies' Man). It's one of three songs that Cohen identifies in his liner note as deriving from eastern religious texts (here's the whole note):

“I owe my thanks to Joshu Sasaki, upon whose exposition of an early Chinese text I based Ballad of the Absent Mare; to the later Robert Hershorn, who, many years ago, put into my hand the books of the old Persian poets Attar and Rumi, whose imagery influenced several songs, especially The Guests and The Window; to John Lissauer with whom I worked on earlier versions of The Traitor and The Smoky Life; to Nancy Bacal, who rescued The Lost Canadian from the out-takes; to Stu Brotman, who introduced me to the work of John Bilezikjian and Raffi Hakopian; to Jules Chakin, who brought to our sessions the finest players in the city; to Peter Karpin of CBS, for his attention, professional and personal, to this project; to Sal Monte and Charlie Lowery for their hospitality at A&M; to my mother, Masha Cohen, who reminded me, shortly before she died, of the kind of music she liked.”

I've taken a look at the "Chinese text" he mentions. It's a 12th-century Japanese Zen Buddhist work called the Ten Bulls, a series of allegorical drawings and poems that track the process leading to Zen enlightenment. The ten stages covered in the work are usually listed as:

1. In Search of the Bull (aimless searching, only the sound of cicadas)
2. Discovery of the Footprints (a path to follow)
3. Perceiving the Bull (but only its rear, not its head)
4. Catching the Bull (a great struggle, the bull repeatedly escapes, discipline required)
5. Taming the Bull (less straying, less discipline, bull becomes gentle and obedient)
6. Riding the Bull Home (great joy)
7. The Bull Transcended (once home, the bull is forgotten, discipline's whip is idle; stillness)
8. Both Bull and Self Transcended (all forgotten and empty)
9. Reaching the Source (unconcerned with or without; the sound of cicadas)
10. Return to Society (crowded marketplace; spreading enlightenment by mingling with
humankind)

See: http://www.expressionsofspirit.com/10bulls/tenbulls.htm and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Bulls

Cohen seems to have adapted the sequence in order to tell, in terms drawn from the traditions of the U.S. “western,” his story of the progress and final breakdown of a romantic relationship. I can't say the adaptation is itself enlightening to me. The spiritual aspects of the original allegory feel swamped to me by the erotic subject and by the "war between the sexes" aspect of Cohen's treatment, which for me has none of the raw surprise of earlier treatments like "There is a War" or "Is This What you Wanted?" or the earned wisdom of later ones like "Different Sides." It's extravagant in it's way, but not in the fascinating way of the Spector songs.

The other two songs mentioned in the notes as connected to devotional writings, "The Window" and "The Guests" are a different matter. I agree with Maggie that "The Window" is weakened by those lines Christgau singles out in the first verse. I disagree, however, about "O chosen love, o frozen love," which I think is rescued by the strength of the music and the language of the rest of the chorus--especially "tangle of matter and ghost"). I also think that the weakness of the first verse is redeemed by the imagery of the second and third, which feel very strong for me and full of the promise of the steadier spiritual purpose that would emerge in songs like "If It Be Your Will" on the next record. The live version of the song on Field Commander Cohen does the song better justice than the studio version. More than an engagement with Persian devotional poetry (although it is that, too), I think the song is a first go at a new and more serious engagement with key images of Christian mysticism. The second verse alludes to a 14th Century Christian mystical work called, in English, The Cloud of Unknowing. I don't know much about this work, but here's an interesting passage from a recent English translation of it:

“For He can well be loved, but he cannot be thought. By love he can be grasped and held, but by thought, neither grasped nor held. And therefore, though it may be good at times to think specifically of the kindness and excellence of God, and though this may be a light and a part of contemplation, all the same, in the work of contemplation itself, it must be cast down and covered with a cloud of forgetting. And you must step above it stoutly but deftly, with a devout and delightful stirring of love, and struggle to pierce that darkness above you; and beat on that thick cloud of unknowing with a sharp dart of longing love, and do not give up, whatever happens.” from The Cloud of Unknowing and Other Works, translated by A. C. Spearing. Penguin Classics. 2001.

Cohen said the following about the chorus of "The Window" to Harry Rasky in one of the conversations recorded in The Song of Leonard Cohen, his memoir about his relationship with Cohen and the making of the documentary that's come up a few times in this discussion:

“So, 'darling of angels, demons and saints, and the whole broken hearted host' means that one which is beloved and cherished by the whole, all the inhabitants of the whole cosmos, that is the arisen one. That is the Christ, or that is the Messiah, or that is the Redeemer, that is that highest aspect of one's own being that has the regenerative capacity" (p. 94).

I'm not sure how fully successful it is, but there's more compression of religious/devotional images with erotic ones going on here than Cohen had ever attempted in the past. It seems different from, say, the way Cohen drew matter and ghost together in "Suzanne." It has something to do with this interest in what he calls in the Rasky interview "regenerative capacity," the "continuous stutter/ Of the Word being made into flesh." And remade.

That's enough for now! More soon on "The Guests" and my sense of Cohen's interest in what he comes to call later a form of radical "hospitality."

L.