Thanks for the dance – posthumous Leonard Cohen songs
Somehow I missed the fact that a while back Leonard Cohen’s son and some other musicians and technicians put out a recording of posthumous new songs by Cohen, who had recorded the bare bones of them when he was near death. All they had to do was add the arrangements.
They also put out some gorgeous and mysterious videos. Here’s one:
Here’s how the songs were transformed into finished products:
And here’s Cohen’s son Adam, who looks somewhat like him at the same age and sounds even more like him but different, with a different emotional tone:
And by the time-travel magic of YouTube, here’s his dad at around the same age, same song, performing live:
Thanks, Leonard. And thanks, Adam.
Thanks Neo…a great respite by a great artist.
An interesting anecdote about L Cohen.
http://www.barrelstrength.com/2014/11/08/jian-ghomeshi-versus-leonard-cohen/
This is a special treat, thanks. Cohen was a giant. Adam has some of his father in his voice. I wonder if he has father’s magic touch when it comes to songwriting.
Cohen aficionados will recognize that initial room shot as the “Room” on the back cover of “Songs from a Room,” Cohen’s second album, with Marianne seated with a mysterious smile, almost naked in a towel, at Cohen’s typewriter in their house on Hydra, Greece.
https://smartcdn.prod.postmedia.digital/montrealgazette/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/the-back-cover-of-leonard-cohens-songs-from-a-room-features.jpeg
That’s also the house where Cohen wrote his immortal “Bird on the Wire.” Cohen bought that house and never sold it. I’ve no doubt it will become, if it is not already, a “Leonard Cohen lived here” place of historical interest in Hydra.
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Like a bird on the wire
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free
–Leonard Cohen, “Bird on the Wire (Official Audio)”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqGArXHDOKY
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Kris Kristofferson once said he wanted those lines from “Bird” as his epitaph.
I wonder if he has father’s magic touch when it comes to songwriting. –parker
Turns out Cohen’s secret was that he cheated — he virtually never stopped working on the songs he was writing.
I can’t find the quote at the moment, but Cohen spoke of his writing process as having “no dignity,” as worse than “scraping the bottom of the barrel” or “farming in sand.”
He filled entire notebooks with possible lyrics for a song. While he was a Zen monk at Mt. Baldy, he had a special dispensation from the roshi to meditate on his songs during formal zazen and to have instruments and recording equipment in his monk’s room.
While working on one famous song, he found himself one early morning, after going days without sleep, weeping and pounding his fists on the hotel carpet, ready to check himself into a monastery or sanitarium.
Cohen was not above criticism, but he was never an amateur or a punk when it came to his art.
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How do you work on a song?
— I write in tall ledger books over a long period of time. In fact, “composing hardly begins to describe what the process is. It’s something like scavenging, something like farming in sand, something like scraping the bottom of the barrel. the process doesn’t have any dignity. It is a work of extreme poverty” (Pearson 76). “The whole affair is detailed and intense; the standards are severe. I wish I could be one of those guys who write good songs in the back of cabs . . . When young writers ask me all about writing, the one thing I tell them is that a song will yield itself if you stick with it long enough, but long enough is far beyond any reasonable idea of what long enough might be”
–Ira Nadel, “Ten or More Questions I Should Have Asked Leonard Cohen”
http://canadianpoetry.org/volumes/vol33/nadel.html
huxley:
I once read somewhere that Cohen wrote something like 40 verses for Hallelujah, and only used a few of them. That’s one of the reasons there are different versions, though. He had verses to spare.
neo: True! Likewise compare Leonard Cohen’s and Jennifer Warnes’s versions of “First We Take Manhattan.”
I confess I prefer Warnes’s — maybe because I heard hers first, maybe because the arrangement (Stevie Ray Vaughan on the guitar!) and her voice are simply magnificent.
–Jennifer Warnes, “First We Take Manhattan (Digitally Remastered)”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNYiMxHbcE4
Always had a soft spot for “So Long, Marianne”.
A very, very soft spot….
Thanks!
To the end of love.
I’ve long liked “First We Take Manhattan”, especially since it’s in my singing range (Leonard’s). But I do have a soft spot for Stevie Ray Vaughan, and he’s great.
(I recently saw how Stevie Ray was also on Bowie’s “Let’s Dance”.)
Cohen came a couple of times to Bratislava, but I’m out of the concert going habit. Was sorry to miss him, tho (great reviews!).
Thanks, Neo!
Alas, I’m without broadband internet now and can’t watch these. But a couple of remarks:
“Hallelujah” is a great song, but it’s been spoiled for me by overexposure to overly dramatic performances.
I’ve often wondered whether any of our post-1965 popular music will still be listened to a hundred years or more past its time. But if I were to bet on one artist going the distance it would be Cohen.
Gee, Adam Cohen does sound like his father. But not in an imitative way. This is quite wonderful. Thanks for posting it.
I’ve been meaning to ask this for several days, but hesitated because I was unable to formulate what I wanted to ask precisely enough, or with enough sensitivity with regard to what are obviously deeply felt connections.
So, let me just ask plainly. As fans – many of you are deeply attracted to and moved by Cohen’s work – what is it exactly that resonates with you?
For example, if I were to ask someone regarding Debussy, or Tchaikovsky, they would undoubtedly be able to say something about melody and mood.
What are you listening for, when you listen to Cohen?
DNW:
I’ve written many many posts on Cohen. I think a couple that might answer your question are this one and this one.
….and thank you Greece….where things move on but remain forever in the memory…..
Thaks Neo. I’ve read both postings in the reverse order to which they were written. And I see that your affinity for Cohen and his music largely developed between your rediscovery of him in 2007 (wherein you described the “natural man’s” likely reaction to him – one which you apparently once shared ), and the more fully blossomed enthusiasm of 2009.
I dont believe I ever heard anyone I know mention Cohen, or his music. And on encountering references to “Suzanne” here or there, I was always thinking of an offbeat and somewhat melodramatic 70s ballad about a woman who lived in a meadow by a pond. Though, I think that now, after looking it up on wiki I do recall hearing a “droning” song, or part of one, that included a line about a river and eating oranges from China.
Emotional resonance is a tricky thing, and talking about specific instances of it, i.e., referencing the particular wavelengths and sensitivities of specific individuals, is fraught with potentially dire and unintended consequences.
We dont know really, the experiences of others; which, combined with inherent dispositions, serve to form their musical tastes … much less what it is that they, at a more conscious level, seek from music in the first place.
It is probably only the artfulness, constructive techniques and execution – perhaps along with originality and historical/developmental context – which can be objectively evaluated.
I had an aunt who married a guy who worked as a machinist in a shop that did a lot of prototype and development work. He was a kind of finnicky and somewhat shallow seeming guy, who surprisingly, had a fairly large collection of music. But it was the most abominable (from my perspective) music. Greatest instrumental renditions of pop hits and stuff like that. It is one thing to listen to some of those tunes that were designed as instrumental performances (and the 50s and 60s had lots of them) but “Norwegian Wood”? Anyway we kids would go into their Danish modern living room ( which was seldom used in a house with a family room and entertainment sized kitchen area) and kind of quietly smirk at the titles.
But now, I don’t think we should have. He probably listened to the stuff to quiet his mind, instead of knocking down 4 beers or a couple of highballs.
You never really know what people are getting out of music … at least you don’t if you don’t ask.