Information/Write-up
Such sensitivity to the complexity of human emotion and experience was not particularly a hallmark of the music released in 1967, the year, among other things, of the Summer of Love. It’s not that great music didn’t come out that year, but Songs of Leonard Cohen refused to flatter the conventional wisdom of the time. There is nothing utopian about it, no sense of generational struggle or political upheaval, though alert ears will detect how haunted this album seems by its birth during wartime. These songs are chronicles of the human journey, both internal and external, and nothing to easy, us-against-them platitudes.
What Cohen did share with his contemporaries was aesthetic boldness, a determination to create music unlike anything that had been heard before. The authority he brought to his first album is attributable to a couple of factors. First, Cohen, who was born in Montreal in 1934, was thirty-three years old when Songs of Leonard Cohen came out, old enough to embrace the creative momentum of the Sixties counterculture without falling prey to its more naive aspects. He had also been a published poet for more than ten years, and a novelist as well, and Songs of Leonard Cohen became an extension of his work as a poet.
Cohen was signed to Columbia Records by the legendary John Hammond. Hammond planned to produce the album, but was unable to complete it, and John Simon took over. Cohen and Simon fought over the string, horn, keyboard and background vocal touches that Simon thought necessary to ameliorate the effect of Cohen’s famously monochromatic voice. Cohen won some, though by no means all, of those battles, but, regardless, the album still rests squarely on his vocals and lyrics. The arrangements, though sometimes more elaborate than Cohen wanted them to be, are Spartan compared with the psychedelic grandeur characteristic of the period.
Listeners had been somewhat prepared for this album by the eloquent versions of “Suzanne,” “Sisters of Mercy” and “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye” (along with “Dress Rehearsal Rag” and “Priests,” two songs that Cohen wrote, but did not include on his debut) that Judy Collins had performed on her albums In My Life (1966) and Wildflowers (1967). But Cohen’s own more stringent versions—not to mention the inclusion of such unsurpassable songs as “Master Song,” “The Stranger Song” and “So Long, Marianne”—made it clear just how formidable a songwriter he was.
Every track on Songs of Leonard Cohen declares an artist who is speaking indelibly in his own inimitable voice. Lines such as “Like any dealer he was watching for the card / that is so high and wild / he’ll never need to deal another / He was just some Joseph looking for a manger” have no precedent in popular song. The effortless blending of imagery from profane and sacred worlds, from gambling, the drug culture and the Bible, in this instance, would become a Cohen signature.
Even the album art for Songs of Leonard Cohen told a compelling story, much more dramatically, of course, in the days of vinyl albums. Evidently based on the image of a saint on a Mexican postcard that Cohen had found, the woman on the album’s back cover is apparently naked, enchained and engulfed in flames. Yet she looks calm and confident, her eyes raised upwards to the sky, her goal beyond. The fire could be the flames of martyrdom, or of passion, or both. The chains may well be symbolic of the prison house of the body and the material world, in the process of being burned off in purifying fire, so the spirit of this Joan of Arc can escape to a freer place.
Art, religion and Eros merge, then, in this portrait of a woman at the very extreme of her experience in this world. What more seductive enticement, what better introduction, could there be to Songs of Leonard Cohen, and to all the Leonard Cohen songs to come?
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