There's blood on every bracelet
you can see it, you can taste it
and it's Please baby
please baby please...
Light As The Breeze
The Future
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There's blood on every bracelet |
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Leonard Cohen...The ManBy Ellen Sander
Email: databirds@aol.com
Judy Collins spoke of him at Newport, and put two of his songs in her recent Elektra album. His novel, Beautiful Losers, is making waves as a Bantam paperback. His Columbia album is scheduled for release as this magazine goes into the mails. His songs, the consummation of his music and his poetry, speak of love and lovers, of aching, tender intimate love, of obscure love, born of that something else we all feel in bittersweet moments, and of reasonable facsimiles thereof. He is also curiously and uniquely preoccupied with orthodox religion. Although it almost seems irrelevant, there was a beginning for Cohen. He was born in Montreal. He attended school there, and was graduated from McGill University in 1955. His work, which includes in addition to Beautiful Losers another novel, The Favorite Game, and three volumes of verse, has been much anthologized and has appeared in periodicals in Canada and the U.S. He has twice won the Canada Council Award. Cohen maintains a home on the Greek isle of Hydra, but frequently returns to the States to renew his "neurotic afflictions" and brings more songs and poetry with him. Lately he has been prowling New York, Los Angeles and Montreal folk and rock houses for a taste of the new sounds. In April he gave a reading of his poetry and Beautiful Losers at Buffalo State University, and sang some of his songs. This reading was in conjunction with their Festival of Arts program. No comparison can be drawn between Leonard Cohen and any other phenomenon. Many will undoubtedly attempt such a comparison, but the result will be, at best, fragmentary. For Cohen is a rarity, if not a scarcity. And though he will always be rare in the true sense of the word, he will be listened to, sung, and read by an ever increasing entourage, those of the new awareness, those seeking artists of sensitivity.
Leonard Cohen...His Songsby Buffy Sainte-Marie
He lacks musical training and whether or not the original quality of his melodies comes from simply not knowing what he is doing is not the point. He is obviously not a product of the G-E-D 7th school of songwriting. Almost all of his melodies start in one key and go through progressively more outrageous modulations, which often end up in a key entirely unrelated to the original one. This asks a lot of a first time listener who will no doubt be so enchanted by the magnificent poetry he's hearing that he may find himself itching to hear the song again and again to be able to absorb all that was going on in the music. Most songwriters use a very simple melodic line if the words are of great merit, and vice versa, but not Leonard Cohen. He has the delicious gall to ask us, who do not even know him, to follow him into a completely original and sometimes scary mind of words without the aid of any of the old folksy musical clichés we are used to holding on to as a guide-rail. There's something uncomfortable about hearing a Leonard Cohen song for the first time. It seems to lack roots or direction or something. But be patient; that's you, not him. The melodies are "unguessable," but listen again. When you have gotten used to the idea of chord x following chord y, though it has possibly never dared to do so before, the pattern becomes clear to you, and clearly unique it is. Cohen's songs are both other-worldly and incredibly "mortal"...as I find Cohen himself to be. Most of his melodies are not immediately "catchy" but they are, you'll find, after hearing him, amazingly sophisticated to a much more extended form than Anglo-Saxon folk and pop music employs. With the exception of "Suzanne," the musical figures inevitably take a long time to repeat themselves as they do in some kinds of Indian and American Indian music. So it is that a casual listener might miss these patterns. I'm sure that Cohen will be criticized for this. He'll be called vague, aimless, cloudy. But I, for one, am grateful to him for lifting me off the familiar musical ground. It's curious to start off in one key and then find yourself in another, and to have no idea how you got there. It's like losing track of time; or realizing you've outgrown your name; or getting off at Times Square and walking into the Bronx Zoo; you don't know how it happened or who is wrong, but there you are.
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