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Friday, May 04, 2007
STRANGER SONG
Leonard Cohen
Songs of Leonard Cohen
Sony Legacy : 2007 (originally released in 1967)
[Buy It]
YOU KNOW WHO I AM
Leonard Cohen
Songs from a Room
Sony Legacy : 2007 (originally released in 1969)
[Buy It]
FAMOUS BLUE RAINCOAT
Leonard Cohen
Songs of Love and Hate
Sony Legacy : 2007 (originally released in 1971)
[Buy It]
Well ok, so I told Alex that I was going to post the transcript from an interview I conducted with Common for a Paste article today, and I will probably do so soon. But today, instead, we're going to have a little Leonard Cohen appreciation day. The occasion is the re-release of his first three albums (with bonus tracks, which I'm not going to post in the hopes that people will buy the albums), which, after many years of obsession, I finally got the chance to say my piece on here. Like most Cohen true believers, I find it difficult to approach him with a critical mindset - as I said in another Cohen review, this one of Dear Heather, it feels rather like trying to rate a sunrise, or a religion. But the more I learn about Cohen himself, the more I realize that his life really has been one of those rare ones, marked by mythological proportions. Consider that the first Cohen to immigrate to Canada from Lithuania, in I think 1869, was named "Lazarus." Consider that Cohen was once, after an opium experience, struck temporarily blind on the way to a restaurant, like Saul on the road to Damascus. Consider that he knew and was in hopeless, unrequited love with Nico. The myths practically make themselves. While there's all sorts of pithy inference to be drawn from his bio, the truest thing I can say about Cohen remains this: I discovered him when I was a young man freewheeling about Europe (it's hard to imagine a more ideal circumstance for discovering Cohen's music, with its relentless tension between shelter and freedom), at a time in my life when a great many things were flying away from me, hurtling toward me too, and I intuitively got things about his music, how it worked and why it seems impervious to the passage of time, that it would take me years to articulate. I knew I'd found something that was made to last. And I knew that Cohen would become a sort of lodestar for me. The solace I find in his music is more than aesthetic - it comforts me to know that someone like Leonard Cohen is out in the world, simply existing, or, more specifically, that it is still possible for such a rare and graceful soul, consecrated to his task and trying, in his way, to be free, to exist in the world we know, so often bereft of grace.
posted by Brian
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