The musical treatment is sophisticated and adult. If it is true that as my daughter, the music teacher, tells me, the first musical phrase that children can comprehend is the music to "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star"-a three note repeating range-then, as adults, we acquire the taste for the music that Anjani gives us. This taste, like aged Scotch Whisky or fine red wine moves up and down the scales in a manner that presents new possibilities to us-half note, half world, half time.
The first element that struck me aside from the rich voice, and intense piano accompaniment, is the imagery of clothes and fashion that decorate the songs.
"Wearing my blue chinese dress
A Yellow jacket with padded shoulders
Smoking Sobranie cigarettes."
"My heart is always sore
Tuxedo gave me diamonds
But I never loved before."
"There's a rose in my hair
My shoulders are bare,
I've been wearing this costume
Forever."
Here enters, Mr. Leonard Cohen, an acclaimed expert on nakedness. The clothes are continually present, but throwing them away is an intense chore...
Nakedness is the key to future...those intense emotions, laid bare in this present dream, reveal the last, best, action that our choices make.
They even include a bit of it here-
"All Tangled up in nakedness
You even touch yourself
You're such a flirt
Blue Alert."
You guys know me and know how I'm drawn to these images that make us look at appearance and reality, substance and illusion, physical and spiritual, flesh and soul.
I mentioned it before, but I'll say it again, in Beautiful Losers, Leonard writes, "My friend F, used to say in his hopped us fashion: We've got to learn to stop bravely at the surface. We've got to learn to love appearances." But all of his work points toward discovering the "Innermost Door" or "A Thousand Kisses Deep." We are pointed toward windows where, like Keats's perspective from the magic casement, a new reality can be glimpsed from a transformed consciousness.
But this view doesn't come without a price, the nakedness and loneliness that darkens many of our nights, points to the tranparency of the weightless world of our dreams. This, as Anjani sings, is
"...that fundamental ground
Where love's unwilled, unleashed,
Unbound
And half the perfect world."
The landscape of this album is perfect. From the crucial, "Four o'clock" in a fog draped San Francisco to the suggestion of the Laurentian mountains in St. Jovite, the images, along with the diminished chords and minor shifts take us to country that has been visited before but only in a dream-like state. Tempos change from the bluesy, off beat "Blue Alert, to the light, triple time of "Innermost Door" to the full blown waltz of "Thanks for the Dance." In between we are treated to a startlingly new treatment of "Nightingale." This song, with its beautiful guitar treatment and Leonard's old tenor voice on "Dear Heather," still has a frenetic quality that is absolutely erased in Anjani's new hymn-like version. The new subtle chord changes gently suggest the "sun going down behind a veil" isn't a fate to be feared, but truly "Love was all beginning."
Another revelation for me is Anjani's treatment of "The Mist." It's been some time since I read "The Favourite Game," but I've had the opportunity to see the Canadian movie version. In it, Breavman pens
"As the mist leaves no scar on the dark green hill
So my body leaves no scar
On you, nor ever will."
He's lying in bed with Tamara; she reads it and says to him,
"So this is a kiss-off."
I've been paging through the book and can't find the scene and I don't really remember it, but my point is that Anjani's version is far from "a kiss-off." This version absolutely contains all the love and deep appreciation of being granted a temporal moment when whatever we call the "surface" opens to that innermost door.
"So will we endure when one is gone and far."
Can there be a more honest and faith-filled statement of the human condition? Despite the uncoupling that divorce forces upon us, it is the presence of death that presents the truly frightening complexity of our oneness. Anjani's musical treatment is complex, respectful and above all filled with abiding gratitude.
The next song, "Crazy to Love You" contains all the imagery of the altered states from the pit to the tower. Like the clothes with which we dress ourselves, the state of mind that we bring to our relationships is one that is determined in our innermost self-the self that we continually create-"Had to be no one at all."
"I'm old and the mirrors don't lie
But crazy has places to hide me
Deeper than saying goodbye."
"Thanks for the Dance" is a tour de force of a song that rivals all the great songs of Leonard's career. It contains both the intensely personal reflections of a long life with the wisdom that this time has achieved in the soul. When Anjani sings,
"Turn up the music
Pour out the wine
Stop at the surface
The surface is fine
We don't need to go any deeper."
it is like a prescription has been written for lovers everywhere. No scars to be found here-provided that you are as hopeless and decent as they are.
I have to say that my favorite lines in the whole album are here:
"It was fine it was fast
I was first I was last
In line at the
Temple of Pleasure
But the green was so green
And the blue was so blue
I was so I
And you were so you
The crisis was light
As a feather."
The combination of intense imagery, light poetry, deep feelings along with Anjani's exquisite performance is breathtaking.
I guess you can tell I like this album-just my humble opinion.
Joe