There was a child named Bernadette
I heard the story long ago
she saw the queen of heaven once
and kept the vision in her soul

No one believed what she had seen
no one believed what she heard
that there were sorrows to be healed
and mercy, mercy in this world

So many hearts I find
broke like yours and mine
torn by what we've done and can't undo
I just want to hold you
won't you let me hold you
like Bernadette would do

                 Song of Bernadette
                                  (written by Jennifer Warnes 
                     and Leonard Cohen)
                                           performed by Jennifer Warnes on
                       Famous Blue Raincoat

Jenny Sings Lenny

By Steve Pond

Eighteen years ago, when Jennifer Warnes sang Leonard Cohen's darkest, gloomiest songs at the Troubadour, in L.A., her manager would come backstage and say, "Everything went well -- just don't ever sing those songs again." Fifteen years ago, when she turned down a chance to open for Neil Diamond because she wanted to sing backup on a Cohen tour, her record company dropped her. Ten years ago, when she told the executives at her label that what she really wanted to do was record Cohen's songs, they laughed.

But a year ago, Jennifer Warnes finally found somebody who wanted her to record Cohen's songs. "I thought, 'Oh my God, no one has ever said that to me as long as I've lived,'" says Warnes of the go-ahead she got from Craig Sussman, head of Cypress Records. "And I've been around long enough to know that I'd better grab that guy, fool or not, if he was putting up the dough, I was gonna make the record."

The record is Famous Blue Raincoat, a collection of some of the finest versions ever of Cohen's songs. Warnes may be best known for pop confections like "Right Time of the Night" and her duet with Joe Cocker, "Up Where We Belong," but with this album she tackles one of music's knottiest, most emotionally complex composers, and her canny arrangements and vibrant readings make for resonant and often stirring adult pop music. The album has already sold nearly 250,000 copies, and such mainstream publications as People and USA Today included it on their lists of 1986's top LP's.

The album's exultant spirit might surprise those who've pigeonholed Cohen as a master of gloom, and some observers figure Warnes's fascination with him is a case of "opposites attract": a romantic, weathered Montreal-based novelist-poet-songwriter and a fresh-faced, sweet-voiced California girl.

"Joe Cocker and I were opposites," says Warnes, laughing. "I don't think Leonard and I are opposites. He's Jewish, raised in Montreal by Catholic nannies, so he has all that spiritual stuff in his background. And I joined the convent right out of high school. A repressive Catholic upbringing so separates the body from the spirit that any artist who unites an intense love of God with our sexual side is attractive to me. Because all I yearn for, for the whole rest of my life, is to find that amalgamation. So when I discovered Leonard Cohen singing about Joan of Arc dying in the flames of passion, of course it made sense to me. And then, over twenty years I've just come to adore the man more than I could ever possibly imagine."

Warnes became acquainted with Cohen in the early Seventies and sang in his backup band on several tours. "The first thing that you notice is that he doesn't sleep," she says of life on the road with Cohen. "I don't know what he does to preserve his energy, but he doesn't sleep. And there are a hundred girls in every port. I mean, 150 million girls, all who seem to know him as deeply as the others. And they're not all that jealous of each other, because he does tend to make people feel like they're very special. The men, too, feel like they're his deepest buddies, comrades in the trenches."

"So it causes this immense intimacy. And then there's this thing he does with the audience. He seems to understand, in every city, what they need, to suss out the audience and how far he can push them." In Israel, she recalls, Cohen got sad in the middle of a show, decided he needed a shave and left the stage; while he was gone, the audience sang to him.

Warnes and Cohen remained friends even when they weren't working together. Her career, meanwhile, varied between the adventurous (an album produced by Velvet Underground member John Cale) and the tame (seven years with Arista Records, which expected her to sing Linda Ronstadt-style country crossovers). In recent years, she worked without much luck in Nashville and Los Angeles until Cypress Records, a new label that's targeting the baby-boom generation, bought her Cohen idea.

"I believed in her passion for recording the LP," says Sussman. "I thought there was an audience for a record that communicates an emotion. There was a void that this could fill."

"She's been talking about recording an album of my songs for years," says Cohen, "but I thought it was just an expression of our friendship. Of course, it's a sweet thing to say, but you know, people often say they like your songs or they'd like to do them. But Jennifer meant it."

Cohen sat in on many of the sessions, revised some lyrics, griped when he thought the arrangements were too offbeat and, he says with a grin, "learned to keep my mouth shut. Because when I did challenge her, it turned out she was completely right." Take her African-influenced version of "Bird on a Wire": "I always thought it was a country song," Cohen says, "and when I heard the track without her vocal, I couldn't see it at all. But she was right: it is really, I think, a stunning treatment of the song."

The songs on Famous Blue Raincoat -- or Jenny Sings Lenny, a working title Cohen and Warnes seem to prefer -- range from a chamber-jazz treatment of the title track to a Warnes-Cohen duet of "Joan of Arc." There's also a song they wrote together, "Song of Bernadette," and the soaring, dark-hued "First We Take Manhattan," with guitar by Stevie Ray Vaughan, a Texas pal of coproducer C. Roscoe Beck.

Cohen has cut his own lengthy, sinister version of "First We Take Manhattan" for an album he's now recording for Columbia Records. Meanwhile, Warnes wants to record her own songs, but she's still enough of a Cohen fan that she's willing to talk about a second outing.

"It's such a great relief to get songs like these," she says. "A couple of times [while making the record], I just walked out of the vocal booth and said to Roscoe, 'My God, these songs pry your heart open with a damn crowbar.' The complexity of his work, and the perfection of some of those lines...his songs aren't at all what you usually hear. I mean, you can't hear Don Johnson or Johnny Mathis singing those songs. You can't."

Jenny Sings Lenny
[article about Jennifer Warnes]

By Alan Jackson

Few singers of uncertain commercial standing would put their own career on hold in order to act as cheerleader for an artist as resolutely unfashionable as Leonard Cohen. When Jennifer Warnes put the idea of an album covering Cohen's work to executives at all of America's major labels, door after door was shut in her face.

"Nobody, but nobody, wanted to touch it," she recalls. "During the late '70s music here took a very light-hearted turn and there was much less patience for Leonard's work than during more contemplative times. When I'd sing his songs in concert, audiences would react in the same way they might if you started discussing funerals over dinner. America doesn't want to get heavy, doesn't want to get complex. 'Let's keep things light' has been the prevailing mood."

Fortunately for Cohen, Warnes' torchbearing has bordered on the obsessional. A stunningly original solo artist, she sang with the gravel-voiced troubadour on tours as long ago as 1973 and harmonised on the Cohen albums Recent Songs (1979) and Various Positions (1984). This close exposure to the charisma of an artist she first discovered by reading The Spice-Box of Earth in the '60s fuelled an unshakable desire to record his work and bring it to a wider audience.

The rapport between the two singers made her the ideal candidate to do so. Her own pop credentials helped too--after a first album produced by John Cale in the early '70s, Warnes enjoyed several US hits from subsequent sets and, when her career hit a turbulent patch in the Pat Benatar era of women singers, she entered the world of film scores, earning three Oscar nominations (and one actual gold statuette) and a Grammy for her work on Ragtime, Norma Rae and An Officer and a Gentleman.

"Although Leonard's songs have always been available in Europe, they've been hidden out of sight of most Americans in recent years. I've always found his material to have a certain transformational effect on me, and it's something I wanted other people to feel too. I hoped that if an American pop voice, which is what I am, recorded the songs, more people might find them accessible.  It was a way of bringing his magic to a wider audience."

The result is the album Famous Blue Raincoat, produced by Warnes with Roscoe Beck, and of necessity put out as the first release on a new American independent label, Cypress. It is the singer's first album in seven years yet is currently climbing the US charts with speed -- a deserved (if surprising) reward for her perseverance.

The nine songs therein mix familiar Cohen material with new and less well-known songs. Lyrically they cover emotional territory rarely explored by mainstream artists -- sexual and emotional obsession, frustration, jealousy, pain...

"I've been made to realise just how much resistance Americans have to the full expression of sorrow in their music," says Warnes. "Writers are encouraged to deal with sex and happiness, but nothing more complex emotionally."

While Famous Blue Raincoat renews interest in Warnes' own earlier recordings, it is also achieving what she most wanted and what American record companies thought was impossible -- US stores are now bowing to a new demand for the Leonard Cohen back catalogue.

Famous Blue Raincoatby Jennifer Warnes (Cypress) is available on import in Virgin, Tower and other record stores. (A UK release is currently being negotiated.)

Jenny Sings Lenny
[article about Leonard Cohen]

By Biba Kopf

A Leonard Cohen song is the dark disaster that brings on the light. A slow and irresistible force, the rich laval flow of his voice burns onto the listener's own experiences, illuminating them with the recognition that he or she is not alone.

With Cohen, song and voice seem inseparable. Not only are writer and subject matter intimately entwined -- the musicality of his language rhymes perfectly with the undervalued musicality of his vocal's blackened volcanic power. These songs of his cut deep, and the intricacies of their composition, mapping rivulets of love, hurt and hate, present a challenge only taken up by more adventurous singers. Cohen has been covered by saints and sinners. He has been soiled by Coil ("Who By Fire"), hauled over by Nick Cave ("Avalanche") and sanctified by Judy Collins and Buffy Saint-Marie. But Jenny sings Lenny is the first fullscale LP interpretation of Cohen. Its surprise partly lies in the fact nobody's done it before.

"Well about a century ago Frank Sinatra talked about doing something like that," drawls Leonard Cohen, speaking out of LA. "But it never happened. And between Frank Sinatra and Jennifer Warnes there hasn't been a murmur."

Ambitious to be sure, Warnes' collection is perhaps too LA-ed to be a totally successful translation of Cohen. But, with her more extensive range, she can take these songs to places where the Cohen monotone is denied entry. And the fact of a woman singing songs ridden with male romanticism affords an intriguing shift in perspective. Cohen's work addresses women in the highest of terms. Even the most fallen is accorded the reverence of a Madonna. While this partly accounts for his large female following, other women dismiss his beat venerations as a variant of woman-as-object, a more literate come-on. Warnes' versions usefully render gender secondary to the songs' expressions of feelings.

"You know it's hard to keep up with your position in the stock market," sighs Cohen. "I've been attacked by Maoists, supported by Maoists, attacked by Freudians, supported by Freudians, attacked by feminists, supported by feminists. I think it's because what they call poetry, that has harmonics and the necessity of paradox and ambiguity, that's it's pretty hard to get a take on what I'm actually singing.

"Because it comes from a deep place where these paradoxes and ambiguities are resolved and I think that's why these songs are effective when they are. Of course, I sometimes blow it, but when they do work it's because they track a lot of resonances, even if it's hard to associate them with a hard and fast social and political position."

Is the poet absolved from responsibility towards clarity?

"No, I think he's consecrated and dedicated to that position. But there's clarity that is perceived by the heart and clarity that is perceived by the mind. You know, clarity's not a fixed idea. Sometimes something that is clear to the heart demands quite a complex expression. You just let the words or tune speak to you and it's very clear. You give yourself to the kiss or embrace and while it's going on there's not any need to know what is going on. You just dissolve into it..."

Ha! The poet's get-out clause?

"Yeah, well, you know, I've heard that stuff. Maybe some of it is true. But if there's an obscurity in my work, it's something no one can penetrate, not even me... You just try to be faithful to that interior landscape that has its own rules, its own mechanisms, and it's important to be faithful to them. If someone says, 'I love the song, what the fuck does it mean?' the question is not as important as the declaration."

And the popularity of Warnes' LP is more important than any minor quibbles about its LAmbience. It re-introduces to American radio the idea that listeners can cope with expressions more complex than moon and June schemes. Perhaps it's also preparing the way for a greater acceptance of this enduring Montreal-born poet, singer and songwriter, whose heavy-lidded Beat-God-on-100-Gauloises-a-day charms have worked across decades and generations. Currently recording a new LP -- his first since Various Positions three years ago -- its late Spring release will test Cohen's present marketability. He promises a Lorca cover and a stronger dance influence.

"I always thought I was doing them dancy and rhythmical but it turns out they weren't."

It depends how you dance.

"Right. Ha ha. You hear a different drum... Probably by the time I get my record out everything will switch back to the dismal tunes of the singer songwriter. And I won't coincide with the market place once more."

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