If It Be Your Will

Sometimes there’s ambiguity in Leonard Cohen’s lyrics. Sometimes he seems to have the Almighty confused with one of his lovers. Not here. Here there are no loves and nothing profane. This song is about kneeling before God, plain and simple. Some of us have a hard time praying. We don’t like any of the words we learned in Sunday school and we can’t think of any new words to say to God. May we adapt some Leonard Cohen songs into a new modern prayer book for the young modern beautiful losers? And just in case the power of Cohen himself doesn’t reduce you to a quivering mess, check out Antony Hegarty’s version.

If it be your will
That I speak no more
And my voice be still
As it was before
I will speak no more
I shall abide until
I am spoken for
If it be your will
If it be your will
That a voice be true
From this broken hill
I will sing to you
From this broken hill
All your praises they shall ring
If it be your will
To let me sing
From this broken hill
All your praises they shall ring
If it be your will
To let me sing

If it be your will
If there is a choice
Let the rivers fill
Let the hills rejoice
Let your mercy spill
On all these burning hearts in hell
If it be your will
To make us well

And draw us near
And bind us tight
All your children here
In their rags of light
In our rags of light
All dressed to kill
And end this night If it be your will

I’m Your Man

If there’s some small part of me that believes in romance, it’s thanks to Leonard Cohen. With Cohen, you’re never sure if he’s addressing a lover or speaking to the divine. There are so few things to remind me that love and desire may be profound rather than mundane and stupid. I guess it’s that momentary conviction that your base feelings are somehow important and larger than yourself are what people mean when they speak of romance. I’ve honestly always struggled to understand the concept. Maybe I’m just born with a cynical nature, or maybe it’s my own bad luck. Or maybe I missed that part of my education where the ladies are programmed like Pavlov’s poor canines to feel mushy and teary-eyed at certain culturally agreed-upon signifiers like flowers, sunsets and movie stars embracing in slow motion. Maybe the forcible romanticizing of romance is the only thing that’s keeping the wedding industry in business anymore. It’s Leonard Cohen who makes me believe in the possibility that there may be some road to emotional redemption, one that’s paved with love and lust and romance and tears. Is it possible there’s some Gemini-like duality in a lover’s unwavering devotion and the faith of a believer? Could they be expressions of the same thing or do they cancel each other out? Perhaps those are two paths that lead to the same door.

I Can’t Forget

No one explains the human condition quite like Leonard Cohen. He writes about all the love, lust and bitterness everyone goes through so truthfully, yet makes it sound noble. There’s a lot of pitfalls in writing about those things. Even if we can relate to it, we often find the human condition of others irritating and pathetic. It takes a real poet to elevate the merely emotional into the spiritual.

“I Can’t Forget”

I stumbled out of bed
I got ready for the struggle
I smoked a cigarette
And I tightened up my gut
I said this can’t be me
Must be my double
And I can’t forget, I can’t forget
I can’t forget but I don’t remember what
I’m burning up the road
I’m heading down to Phoenix
I got this old address
Of someone that I knew
It was high and fine and free
Ah, you should have seen us
And I can’t forget, I can’t forget
I can’t forget but I don’t remember who

I’ll be there today
With a big bouquet of cactus
I got this rig that runs on memories
And I promise, cross my heart,
They’ll never catch us
But if they do, just tell them it was me

Yeah I loved you all my life
And that’s how I want to end it
The summer’s almost gone
The winter’s tuning up
Yeah, the summer’s gone
But a lot goes on forever
And I can’t forget, I can’t forget
I can’t forget but I don’t remember what

Hey, That’s No Way

Everything you need to know about romance you can learn from Leonard Cohen. Maybe not everything, but a lot. Should you even be trying to learn about romance by listening to songs? How else are you supposed to learn? Isn’t that why man created poetry in the first place? Music may be little more than our inadequate attempt to mimic the rhythm of our mother’s heart, but poetry is where we learn how to feel. Really. Poetry and literature aren’t just to entertain. They’re tools for teaching us what to believe, what to feel, how to be. So of course it’s only human nature to turn to pop songs when forming our expectation for love, life and whatnot. Whether what we turn to is a good guide or not is up in the air. But we could do worse. We could just base everything on our own experiences. I doubt there’d be much faith in romance left if we all did that, though.

I loved you in the morning, our kisses deep and warm,
your hair upon the pillow like a sleepy golden storm,
yes, many loved before us, I know that we are not new,
in city and in forest they smiled like me and you,
but now it's come to distances and both of us must try,
your eyes are soft with sorrow,
Hey, that's no way to say goodbye.

I'm not looking for another as I wander in my time,
walk me to the corner, our steps will always rhyme
you know my love goes with you as your love stays with me,
it's just the way it changes, like the shoreline and the sea,
but let's not talk of love or chains and things we can't untie,
your eyes are soft with sorrow,
Hey, that's no way to say goodbye.I loved you in the morning, our kisses deep and warm,
your hair upon the pillow like a sleepy golden storm,
yes many loved before us, I know that we are not new,
in city and in forest they smiled like me and you,
but let's not talk of love or chains and things we can't untie,
your eyes are soft with sorrow,
Hey, that's no way to say goodbye.

Here It Is

“May everyone live, may everyone die“

Leonard Cohen was never given to youthful frivolity. Or, if he ever was, we didn’t see it. He just appeared on the stage world weary and love burned. Over the years that elegiac tone has become more and more, shall I say, flattering. In the sense that the persona has grown to so perfectly fit the man. Because there’s two kinds of poets – the flame-out die young ones, and the ones who were meant to be old all along. Maybe Cohen would agree that growing old is the revenge of the ugly. It’s sad to see a formerly beautiful satyr who’s lost his youthful mojo, that’s the tragedy of being a figure of beauty. Meanwhile the homely age with dignity, armed with their hard-earned lessons, etched all over with character.

Heart With No Companion

So the great Leonard Cohen is on tour again. He must have enjoyed it so much last time. H certainly made a lot of money and the adulation must have felt good too. He’s become something of a mythical figure in his old age. Can you imagine any poet ever again becoming so revered? Is poetry even a thing anymore? Some people still write good song lyrics, but who among them would put down ‘poet’ as his profession? So the old wordsmith is on the road again. I don’t know if I can afford it this time around, although I couldn’t afford it last time either and that didn’t stop me. It almost feels greedy to want a second chance. I was lucky to see him once, I should be still grateful.

I greet you from the other side
Of sorrow and despair
With a love so vast and shattered
It will reach you everywhere
And I sing this for the captain
Whose ship has not been built
For the mother in confusion
Her cradle still unfilled

For the heart with no companion
For the soul without a king
For the prima ballerina
Who cannot dance to anything

Through the days of shame that are coming
Through the nights of wild distress
Tho’ your promise count for nothing
You must keep it nonetheless

You must keep it for the captain
Whose ship has not been built
For the mother in confusion
Her cradle still unfilled

For the heart with no companion …

I greet you from the other side …

Hallelujah

I am not worthy to critique this. Let’s observe a moment of silence.

Going Home

Anything new from Leonard Cohen is cause for rejoicing. That he’s named his new album Old Ideas is only right. At his age, who can expect him to have new ones? At his age, where can he look except at the past? The new album is self-aware and self-referential. He knows very well what his image is, and he can get away with writing a song about it. He has always presented himself as a ladies’ man, but an old and weary one, even in the beginning. Remember, though he entered music and became famous during the youthquake sixties, he is a generation older than the folk-rock peers who first embraced him. When his voice, lamenting and enshrining some Suzanne, entered the world’s consciousness he was in his thirties, old enough to have amassed enough conquests to feel weary about. He was old all along, and he’s only gotten older. So of course he’s taken an even deeper turn for the rueful. Somehow his last album, Dear Heather, didn’t make any impression on me at all. It just felt bare-bones and cold. This one I want to delve into. It may be the last chance we have to hear new words from the man, snuggle up to his warm voice, soak up his wisdom.

The Future

When Leonard Cohen thinks about the future he doesn’t see much to be optimistic about, though he’ll concede that “love’s the only engine of survival.” The Future was a depressing album, full of the world’s harshness. But this is Cohen, and though the world is ugly and cruel, there’s  still that crack letting in the light. Speaking of crack then, check out the spiffy video which comes with nifty subtitles but inexplicably bleeps out the bit about wanting crack and anal sex. Now, I somewhat understand why someone saying the word ‘sex’ on a Top 40 radio hit would get bleeped, but why bother bleeping Cohen, who isn’t about to get within ten miles of a Top 40 anything? Also, I’m fairly certain that ‘anal sex’ is a legitimate scientific term, not some kind of dirty slang, and this is the first I’ve heard of drug references getting bleeped. Maybe Canadian censorship in 1992 was more draconian than I’d previously realized?

First We Take Manhattan

From Leonard Cohen, the most ominous synths ever birthed in the 80′s. In was in the 80′s that Cohen widened his view from affairs of the heart and started having apocalyptic visions. I can’t say for sure that Various Positions was the point he started getting political; his stuff from the late seventies I don’t much listen to, because it’s too depressing, natch. But it’s definitely the 80′s when Cohen decided to experiment with a more accessible pop sound, outside of  his comfort zone of strummed guitar. The surprise is how well he adapted to the pop modes of the decade. It was probably a laugh at the time to even imagine old Cohen going all synth-pop, but he did with panache. I’m Your Man was a masterpiece, combining on-trend music you could almost dance to with the maestro’s increasingly bleak (and yet very funny) picture of a heartsick world. A few years later The Future would be as explicitly political and bleak as Cohen could go without losing the hope of redemption that’s always been a steady stream in his music.