Cohen, Leonard - Songs of Love and Hate

Tracks

Side 1

		Track Name	Length
	1	Avalanche	05:07
	2	Last Year’s Man	06:02
	3	Dress Rehearsal Rag	06:12
	4	Diamonds in the Mine	03:52

Side 2

		Track Name	Length
	1	Love Calls You By Your Name	05:44
	2	Famous Blue Raincoat	05:15
	3	Sing Another Song, Boys	06:17
	4	Joan of Arc	06:29

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Information/Write-up

“MYSELF, I LONG FOR LOVE AND LIGHT / BUT MUST IT COME SO CRUEL, AND OH SO BRIGHT?”:

Those are the concluding lyrics of “Joan of Arc,” the final song on Leonard Cohen’s third album, Songs of Love and Hate, from 1971. The song's world-weary “la-la-la” coda, sung with female background singers, summons the pained acceptance—or is it simply resignation?—that caused Cohen to refer to the album as the “European blues.” Words themselves have failed, only a melancholic old-world melody will do, experience has brought no wisdom, and the impassioned realms of love and hate seem no more knowable than at the album’s start. How else to close this album of ravaged emotions, but with a question?

Joan of Arc, of course, is a particularly resonant figure for Cohen. On this album, she also makes an appearance in “Last Year’s Man,” and she was vividly evoked in the cover art for Songs of Leonard Cohen, his debut album. She is an image of a heroic woman whose willingness to suffer and die for love—spiritual? physical? the distinction is moot for Cohen—is simultaneously erotically charged and a source of shame for the songwriter’s far more ambivalent and morally tenuous male characters. For her part, her nobility renders her somewhat remote and inhuman (“such a cold and lonesome heroine”), as if love's purpose were not pleasure, but a perverse means of isolated self-exaltation. In the song that bears her name, Joan of Arc comes to learn that her martyrdom is not something circumstance imposed on her, but a fate (“and then she clearly understood / if he was fire, oh then she must be wood”) that is inextricable from her love. Clearly, there can be no happy endings here.

“Joan of Arc” is also notable because, at its start and finish, Cohen both recites the lyrics, as if he were delivering a reading, and sings them, one version atop the other, his lives as poet and songwriter merged and held up for comparison. It's an appropriate technique on an album so concerned with dualities.

In the broadest sense, all of Cohen’s songs might be said to be “songs of love and hate.” But the title especially suits this album because of a tonal shift that takes place in some of the songs. On his previous two albums, Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967) and Songs From a Room (1969), Cohen had evinced a nearly Shakespearean ability to identify with all of his characters. No one’s point of view was right or wrong; all the participants in the dance of love were seen as moving in and out of their own states of grace, none more blessed, righteous or damned than any other.

That is not the case on Songs of Love and Hate. On “Dress Rehearsal Rag,” a song that Judy Collins had recorded even before Cohen's first album appeared, a despairing, out-of-work actor is depicted at the point of suicide, though by the song's end it’s unclear if what is happening is real life or a scene being shot for a film. But while Collins’ version is tender and empathetic, Cohen’s is harsh and ridiculing. “Where are you golden boy / where is your famous golden touch?” the actor asks himself derisively, as he is haunted by memories of what might have been. Cohen's vocal approach on the song, as elsewhere on the album, is far more aggressive than it had been previously—for characteristically contradictory reasons. Cohen had grown more confident as a singer as a result of having been on the road, but he was also becoming increasingly unsatisfied with his voice, which he partly blamed for his lack of commercial success.

The album's opening track, “Avalanche,” announces the theme of a life whose convictions are crumbling, and that song is followed by a title that seems to sum up Cohen's impression of himself at the time: “Last Year’s Man.” Like “Dress Rehearsal Rag,” this song centers on a figure who can barely marshal the will to create, a man whose time has gone: “The rain falls down on last year’s man / an hour has gone by / and he has not moved his hand.”

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