I feel kind of the way I did when Orson Welles died – I didn’t really care, I wasn’t particularly a fan. A little went a long way. But he’d been around all my life, and it was as if pastel colors had suddenly been done away with. No personal loss, really, but it would require adjustment.
When I was a teenager in the late sixties and he was a hot songwriter, Leonard Cohen was barely a name to me. I always had the impression that if I were better educated I’d not only know who he was, I’d even care. You know, like the college kids did. In Paris. I was too busy listening to the Beatles and worrying about getting old enough to be drafted. Neither Cohen nor ‘Indochina’ interested me very much. Nor Paris, for that matter.
Now I too am growing old and stiff, and I must be educated because there are a few Cohen tunes on my playlist. But I’d be lying if I claimed to be weeping or upending any glasses over the matter. Rest in peace, I guess, Mr. Cohen, but you needed a better producer.
I was a fan but not a rabid one. Some of his tunes did strike a cord with me and it was nice to listen to his raspy old voice with the lights turned down low while having a wee dram of single malt but now he’s gone so I’m a little bummed out.
Here’s a tune that you might like given what has happened in the US of A this past week…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DU-RuR-qO4Y
Oh! I forgot about that one. Maybe my favorite of the later Cohen tunes I’ve heard. Thanks!
Once again, the strangeness that is WordPress, or something, has manifested itself. In the home-page view, I see the embedded YouTube video which is the “Kingsman head blown scene”, which was amusing, but I couldn’t connect it to Leonard Cohen. Here in single-post view, I see you embedded Suzanne. I spent a lot of time, last night, listening to covers of that tune. Because I recognized the lyrics, and I damn well know that I’d never heard of Mr. Cohen until I heard, on the radio, the nearly unlistenable First, We Take Manhattan as rendered by Jennifer Warnes. Nothing I could find on YouTube matched the version of Suzanne which lives in my head. Imagine the Neil Diamond version done in Kris Kristofferson’s voice – that’s what that song sounds like to me. And that’s nearly the extent of my thinking on Cohen. Except for …
Allison Crowe – Hallelujah – live-in-the-studio, which is, IMHO, magnificent.
Seems universally written that some other version of that song is the best. I ain’t buyin’ it.
And I’ll have to find the cover that Concrete Blonde did, and hear if I recognize it, which I should, but I don’t ring no bells for me now.
I have to say I’ve been a fan of Leonard for a few years now; nothing rabid, but I liked his music in the way I like that of Tom Waits or other artists who never get airplay.
A Facebook friend posted If It Be Your Will last night while I was at work, and I totally lost it, blubbering like a baby.
And perhaps the most bizarre Leonard Cohen cover of all, a SNL Hillary Clinton impersonator singing “Hallelujah”!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUdZzOQcZeE