DB's Song of the Day (day 328): "YOU GOT ME SINGING" (2014) Leonard Cohen

I’m reading another Leonard Cohen biography currently: Ira B. Nadel’s Various Positions: A Life of Leonard Cohen, so I’m thinking about the man and his work yet again. The difference between now and when I read I’m Your Man is that I’ve heard a few times Cohen’s most recent album, Popular Problems, released just after his 80th birthday back in September.

I would’ve been content, I thought, for a last glimpse of Leonard in this series, to pick one of the tracks I admire on Old Ideas (2012), like “Darkness” or “Banjo,” but, since Cohen’s is likely to be the most recent release I’ll hear enough to make some comment before this year and this series is done, why not go with something from the new one? It was a hard choice to make because I haven’t actually lived with any of the songs long enough, and because the album’s lyrics seem to be more ambitious than Old Ideas. A song like “Born in Chains” seems to me a major statement of faith by the always slippery Cohen, who is, in his way and more than just about anyone else you’d care to name (of like celebrity, certainly), a true seeker. Cohen has long been an acolyte of Kyozan Joshu Sasaki Roshi, his teacher in Zen Buddhism to whom the album is dedicated and who passed away in 2014 at age 97. It no doubt was a landmark event for Cohen who now might be hard-pressed to find someone he can be “junior” to.

Other songs, like “Nevermind” and “Samson in New Orleans” show Cohen to be in a fighting mood, referencing much that is amiss in our general cultural climate, but with an eye to how distorted most of our truths are: “This was your heart / This swarm of flies / This was once your mouth / This bowl of lies” sums it up well, and adding, with resignation more than cynicism, “You own the world / So never mind.” Or: “So gather up the killers / Get everyone in town / Stand me by those pillars / Let me take this temple down.” Elsewhere, Cohen brings his usual wry perspective to bear on themes like aging (“I’m just trying to slow it down”) and the heartbreaking tales of our times (“There’s torture and there’s killing / There’s all my bad reviews / The war, the children missing / It’s almost like the blues”).

The music on the album is surprisingly varied, even surreptitiously so. And though we might think Cohen’s deep, croaky voice can’t alter much any more, we can be impressed by how he can still find different voices for different songs. “A Street” is a great case in point which is almost “a reading” but with very tight pacing, and very precise intonation. It’s like that throughout the album, such as the overly gruff vocal on “Did I Ever Love You,” married to uptempo restatements in a kind of processed Country vibe. Cohen uses his usual artificial sweetener—female backup singers—well, most of the time, since their treatment of the melody, most composed by Cohen’s new collaborator Patrick Leonard, lets Cohen minimize the songs' lyricism in his own vocals.

Cohen has always had a great way with a lyric. “Deceptively simple” is a phrase that comes to mind often, and “surprisingly profound” might be another. Few people can comprise the sanctity of a hymn and the cool bathos of a blues tune in the same song. Cohen can.

For my choice today I went with the final track on the album. In part because I appreciate the violin every time it’s used on this record and “You Got Me Singing” starts with a nice passage from violinist Alexandru Bublitchi. And since my choice of these Songs of the Day has largely been based on what a song means to me, I’ll set aside the songs that I will have to ponder awhile for what they mean to Cohen and what it is he’s saying. Today’s song is one that I can say does speak for me, at the moment.

And, like I said, it’s here instead of the song I quoted at the beginning of this year in a New Year’s response to the question “Quote a song lyric that sums up your year,” Cohen’s “I thought the past would last me / But the darkness got that too.” Maybe nearly a year of these posts gives the lie to that. The past is still there, and I’ve dragged some of it into the light. So that maybe a lyric that I’d quote now would be: “You got me wishing / Our little love would last / You got me thinking / Like those people of the past”—though I’d want to alter the last line to “Of those people in the past.” That’s who I’ve spent a good part of this year thinking about, after all, particularly the makers of song.

Cohen’s song for today is resilient, its attitude best summed up by: “You got me singing / Even tho’ it all looks grim / You got me singing / The Hallelujah hymn.” It’s a reference to Cohen’s best-known song, which says, in a similar vein: “Even though it all went wrong / I’ll stand before the Lord of Song / With nothing on my tongue / But hallelujah.” Fitting enough as we wind down to the final month and change of this trek through the days, to indicate, again, that we’re worshiping at the shrine of song.

As with most of Cohen’s LPs, he tends to end on a lighter note, no matter how intense other songs on the album have been, and I don’t offer today’s song as one of the best Cohen has written, thinking I would like to take on the intricacies of “The Master Song,” “The Traitor,” “Death of a Ladies Man,” “Coming Back to You,” “Closing Time,” at some point (and maybe there’s a project forming in my mind on that score). In any case, I’m with Leonard on this one:

You got me singing

Even though the world is gone

You got me thinking

I’d like to carry on

DB's Song of the Day (day 263): "PUSH THE SKY AWAY" (2013) Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

Today’s almost birthday boy (the 22nd) is Nick Cave. I’ve already posted on three Cave songs—one from early in my listening to him—1986’s “Sad Waters”—and two from the two albums of his I still like best: “Brompton Oratory” from The Boatman’s Call (1997) and “There She Goes, My Beautiful World” from Abbatoir Blues (2004)—so I feel I should do something from his most recent album, particularly as I caught him over the summer on tour for Push the Sky Away (2013).

I went with the title track which had become the “can’t get it out of my head” song by the time I saw him in Philly in July. It’s a song that’s suitable to the moment on this blog because it’s following Leonard Cohen’s “Tower of Song.” Cave covered that song in a raucous, shambolic, irreverent version on 1991’s I’m Your Fan, a tribute album to Cohen with a great range of contributors and songs chosen. Cave also covered “Avalanche,” a fearsome and uncompromising Cohen song from his fiercely uncompromising album Songs of Love and Hate (1971) which Cave has called a longtime favorite.

So, in a way, any Cave song would be fitting due to his acknowledged admiration for Cohen—in Cave’s version of “Tower” he says, “I said to Lenny Cohen ‘how lonely does it get?’ Lenny Cohen hasn’t answered me yet—a million floors above me, in the Tower of Song.” Today’s song, with its very lowkey approach and those background girls that almost equal or dominate the lead vocal in the mix, is very Cohenesque in its approach, its sound, in Cave's almost spoken intoning, and in the simplicity of its lyrics. Very direct, very deliberate.

From a vision of the sun rising over a field while “riding, riding,” Cave chooses not to take away the hopefulness of the first rays of the new rising sun, but rather seems to see it as a breaking light suggesting time is nearly up. The refrain “you’ve got it, just keep on pushing, keep on pushing, push the sky away” is a way of saying you want to remain earthbound for the near future, not go rapturing your way to heaven any time soon.

“They don’t let a woman kill you, not in the tower of song,” Cohen says in “Tower,” and Cave seems to be meditating on the other things that might make you want to say the jig is up. “If you feel you got everything you came for / If you got everything and you don’t want no more.” That’s the sort of surfeit that suggests “I’ve had enough.” Not so much a plea for something else or better, just a “no more of this, please” vibe. Something to hold at bay with that sky, Cave says.

Likewise if your friends say you should do it different or if they say you should do it the same. No offense to your friends, but . . . what the fuck do they know? It’s not so much that they’re wrong but that they just always have some comment, so if you can let those comments fall about you like the inevitable descent of leaves then . . . maybe, you can push the sky away. Otherwise, it might become a consummation devoutly to be wished.

And some people say it’s just rock and roll / Aww, but it gets you right down to your soul.  Ay, there’s the rub that makes calamity of such long life, for who would bear the whips and scorns of time if not for the fact of . . . rock’n’roll.

Happy birthday, Nick, keep on pushing.

DB's Song of the Day (day 262): "TOWER OF SONG" (1988) Leonard Cohen

There’s a jamming of birthdays coming up with a few notables sharing the same date of birth. So we’re getting to Leonard a little bit shy of his 80 birthday on the 21st.

I’ve just finished reading I'm Your Man, Sylvie Simmon’s biography of L. Cohen, so he’s on my mind more than a bit. The problem with the bio, which is very readable, isn’t that it’s very affectionate toward and perhaps even protective of Leonard—who is named by his first name throughout—but that it really has almost nothing to say about what the man writes. We get info on the writing of his books and the making of his albums—and a tale does lie therein on some of them—but the contents of each album is dispensed with in about a paragraph or two at most. Which is barely enough space to remind the reader which songs are on the record and to maybe drop a telling line from a song or three.

There’s no close reading at all, in short.

And Cohen, more than most of his contemporaries, writes lyrics that can hold up to close reading. He’s a poet, for heavens sake. To undertake being his biographer without much grasp of poetry seems a bit presumptuous, and that’s my main dissatisfaction with Simmons. She seems good at determining what material is germane and she doesn’t sensationalize. It’s sort of a “let’s all remain friends” biography. Even Kelly Lynch, the manager/assistant/financial overseer who embezzled Cohen’s funds, doesn’t get a rough treatment. One suspects that—between the lines—there are many more psychic meltdowns and deep dissatisfactions than ever surfaces in Simmons' breezy account. You need only consider the content of Cohen’s songs. But that she rarely stops to do. Even when candidly assessing how poorly some of his records sold, there’s not much attempt to tie that fact into any kind of critical context. Sure, Cohen got into making records to make a living (writing books of poetry and experimental novels wasn’t doing it for him), but he still approached that task as a poet would—with his albums’ content determined by what he wanted to say rather than what might best sell.

It’s almost as if Simmons assumes that anyone reading the book already knows why they listen to Leonard and so his rather unique take on things goes without saying. But, given that much of his recent huge popularity comes from the fact that his song “Hallelujah” has been covered on American Idol and used in films and sung by Jeff Buckley and tons of others and seems to strike a big collective chord, it might be easily supposed that many people picking up the bio have no clue what most of Cohen’s albums or songs are like.

Anyway, how about I’m Your Man, the album? I really didn’t like Cohen’s synth-casio arrangements much on that record, but, hey, it was a big seller whereas the album I liked better, 1986’s Various Positions (the one with “Hallelujah”) was rejected by Columbia. When you hear me inveighing against the Eighties, that’s the kind of thing I mean. I know the young of that time might be fine with synth pop (almost wrote "poop") out the wazoo but for elderly ears (I was pushing 30) it’s a lot of kiddie-tinny dreck.

But Cohen, God love him, was cool with it. And that’s how he wrote the album, on casio. On the cheap, which is the best way for him. And, to match “Hallelujah,” he came up with a song just as great for that album. Today’s song.

Well my friends are gone and my hair is gray / I ache in the places where I used to play / And I’m crazy for love but I’m not coming on / I’m just paying my rent everyday in the tower of song. Words to retire on, I’d say. Listen to how he draws that breath before the line about paying his rent everyday. It speaks volumes, as does his thorazine-drenched croak.

Here is the song of the attenuated poet, the attenuated rock star, the attenuated lover. Just getting by in that fusty old tower where Hank Williams—asked “how lonely does it get”—doesn’t answer, 100 floors above. Interesting to imagine all the songwriters of all times in a big tower, with their floor location determined by—what? Number of hits? Nah, then Len would be closer to the basement (he only had hit albums in UK and Europe, the States …. Well, you know)—so let’s say, determined by dues paid.

Cohen pays his dues, and he pays it out on this song. “They don’t let a woman kill you, not in the tower of song.” Amen, padre. And there’s gem after gem in this song—the channels the rich have got in the bedrooms of the poor, the mighty judgment coming (“but I may be wrong”), and that great bridge, which is even about a bridge, sorta:

I see you standing on the other side / I don’t know how the river got so wide / I loved you, baby, way back when / And all the bridges are burning that we might have crossed / And I feel so close to everything that we lost / We’ll never, we’ll never have to lose it again.  This is a man facing the rueful truth of the attenuated situation, but who keeps that life-torch lit. Which is what I like about Cohen even at his most despairing. He somehow believes that the fact that woman are beautiful makes a difference. Not just as “eye candy,” but at a deeply spiritual level. Let’s just say that his belief in a beneficent God—not just some demon who is jerking us around—starts right there. And listen to the soul-bearing gravitas with which he says “I loved you, baby, way back when.” It takes heart to admit that, and it takes guts to put it in the past tense.

And so, the kiss-off—and it’s one of the best anyone has ever delivered. A few years ago Tom Jones covered this song, and you can believe him when he sings it too. I don’t know how it is that any singer worth his salt wouldn’t want to sing this one. Let’s call it the fully secular flip side of “Hallelujah”:

Now I bid you farewell, I don’t know when I’ll be back / They’re moving us tomorrow to that tower down the track / But you’ll be hearing from me, baby, long after I’m gone / I’ll be speaking to you sweetly from a window in the tower of song.

I’d like to dedicate today’s post to someone I put this song on a tape for back in 1993. I don’t know if she still has that tape or ever listens to it, but I like to think that, if she did, she’d think of me, via Leonard Cohen, speaking to her sweetly from the tower of song. It’s a great ending because it puts us in the moment—Cohen is speaking to us sweetly as he sings that—but he’s projecting it into the future, that day when he’ll be long gone and we’ll still be able to hear him. What is lost is lost but we never have to lose it again, so long as we can preserve it in the memory, in the song, in the tower of song.

It seems to me that these posts are my own version of the tower of song, and maybe, in a sense, I’ll be speaking in them after I’m gone. At least I’m still speaking of times that are gone.

I was born like this / I had no choice / I was born with the gift / Of a golden voice

(Later note: and speaking of Leonard after he's gone: arrivederci, maestro: Leonard Cohen, September 21, 1934-November 7, 2016)