When,Where,And What Was The First LC Song You Heard?

[Ivan.Tereshko]

When - the summer of 2008, I was only 13

Where - I was a huge fan of Pink Floyd and Jimi Hendrix and I remember watching The Isle of Wight 1970 film and there was one man in strange clothes singing a beautiful song about a lady named Suzanne and the lines "And you know that she will find you, for you've touched her perfect body" touched me very deeply. And a couple of months later I accidentally found a video on YouTube of Leonard singing "Stranger Song" on Julie Felix Show in 1967 and that also very impressing for me and during the next 5 years I've been studying the songs and poetry of Leonard Cohen and the next Friday I'll have my first chance to see him on stage in Lodz and something is telling me that it's going to be a very beautiful concert.

Ivan.

[Gullivor]

The first time I heard Leonard Cohen was from the movie "Natural Born Killers". I must of been in my early 20's. "Waiting for the Miracle" and "The Future" were on the sound track. Leonard's voice and music stuck in my head even though I didn't know his name I somehow knew the sound.

It wasn't until a few years latter while after the bar had closed an old girlfriend and I were parked along a inlet jetty where "Waiting for the Miracle" came on over the radio and I instantly knew it was "that song". When the radio host announced the artist I wrote it down and we went out the next day and bought the album.

The rest is history.

[hadley]

I was watching 'Mills and Tunes', an old programme on VH1 with comedian Bob Mills in the mid 90s. He actually made a 5 minute impassioned speech about how us youngsters should throw away our Blur and Oasis CDs and get I'm You Man and actually learn a thing or two - I'm paraphrasing here a bit but I remember Mills ranting on about how you can learn just about everything you need to about life and women from this album, you guys would have enjoyed it. So anyway finally he played First We Take Manhattan and to be honest I didn't really like anything about it at first but I thought the video was incredibly cool and different. So almost for a joke I went out and bought the album and really it was like entering another world! After 2 or 3 listens of course I was hooked, so of course I have Bob Mills to thank for that. His show often played some pretty good and relatively obscure music on there like Patti Smith that you'd never see on any other TV show at the time

[Mollydc]

When: Some time in the 90's, when I was a little child
Where: At home - I grew up with L.C, he is the great hero of both my parents
What: The Future or The law

- Since I was so little at that time, I recall I first thought the words "Repent, repent" In The Future was "A pen, a pen" - funny how a childs mind is so innocent ha ha

[Japhy Ryder]

Borrowed the LP from our local library when i was still in high school circa 1985.

During this time i was devoting myself to learning everything i could about the music & lives of Bob Dylan, Neil Young & Bruce Springsteen; as well as pretty much just everything to do with popular music of the 1950s onwards.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songs_of_Leonard_Cohen

[lizaduch]

I am living in Poland - and in years '80 at us were the commune and the socialism, we didn't have access to foreign records, even to ambitious foreign songs on the radio. There was only oneradio broadcast then at us, where we could hear the good music "from behind the Iron Curtain" - it was called the "Hit Charts of the III Program" ("Lista Przebojów Programu II in Polish), the author of it was a charismatic journalist Marek Niedźwiecki - and in this programme for the first time I just heard the song of Leonard Cohen. I was 13 years old then and I fell in love with it immediately. It was song Dance Me To The End Of Love.
Since that time Leonard is with me always, and he will be forever.

[mara43]

as a very little girl...Suzanne, the cover by judy collins or neil diamond...my parents had them both on albums, not sure which one I heard first!

[alb123]

The first time I heard Leonard Cohen was from the movie "Natural Born Killers".

The Same for me.
From the opening sequence when Waiting For The Miracle started playing, I was practically hypnotised by the voice and words of this then-unknown singer. I was delighted to hear two more tracks from L.C. in that movie (Anthem and The Future). This was my freshman year at UMass-Amherst. The next day I went to the local CD shop and I had to ask the guy behind the counter if he knew the songs I had heard the night before. Fortunately, he did. I bought The Future that day. I think I purchased every CD Cohen produced within the next six months. Thus began my now 20-year love affair with L.C.'s words & music. The man's brilliance is unmatched by any other songwriter, imo. I love Roger Waters. I love Neil Young. I love Bob Dylan. Leonard is one hundred floors above them in the tower of song...

-Chris

[godnose]

*edit - just saw this

When: Some time in the 90's, when I was a little child
Where: At home - I grew up with L.C, he is the great hero of both my parents
What: The Future or The law

- Since I was so little at that time, I recall I first thought the words "Repent, repent" In The Future was "A pen, a pen" - funny how a childs mind is so innocent ha ha

- Great story. Reminds me of my own. So proud.

I was a toddler (perhaps 3 years old in 1989) my mum used to play them to me and dance with me in the kitchen of my old house. I loved Hallelujah and Ain't No Cure. I used to demand "Ainnocure!" not realising the word pattern at all. I had listened to these 2 and Dance Me To The End of Love on and off in my life, helped along by Napster in the late 90s.

When I was 18 and went to university, I got the whole of Various Positions and was totally blown away. I couldn't believe every track was so amazing. I then got the first album and moved forward.

[Paul R]

1969 in my student days. One of my housemates had the first two albums, so it was probably Suzanne or Bird on a Wire. I never really followed LC after that until I saw Alexandra Burke (yes I know, sorry) win BGT with a cover of Hallelujah. That led me to discover some of the wonderful stuff I'd missed in the intervening 35 years.

[MaryB]

A positive side to an LC cover Welcome to the forum Paul!

[godnose]

1969 in my student days. One of my housemates had the first two albums, so it was probably Suzanne or Bird on a Wire. I never really followed LC after that until I saw Alexandra Burke (yes I know, sorry) win BGT with a cover of Hallelujah. That led me to discover some of the wonderful stuff I'd missed in the intervening 35 years.

Yeh, that's amazing. Great to hear that this can happen!

[Mollydc]

*edit - just saw this

When: Some time in the 90's, when I was a little child
Where: At home - I grew up with L.C, he is the great hero of both my parents
What: The Future or The law

- Since I was so little at that time, I recall I first thought the words "Repent, repent" In The Future was "A pen, a pen" - funny how a childs mind is so innocent ha ha

- Great story. Reminds me of my own. So proud.

I was a toddler (perhaps 3 years old in 1989) my mum used to play them to me and dance with me in the kitchen of my old house. I loved Hallelujah and Ain't No Cure. I used to demand "Ainnocure!" not realising the word pattern at all. I had listened to these 2 and Dance Me To The End of Love on and off in my life, helped along by Napster in the late 90s.

When I was 18 and went to university, I got the whole of Various Positions and was totally blown away. I couldn't believe every track was so amazing. I then got the first album and moved forward.

Amazing! Haha Proves that L.C appeals to everyone with his music, young and old.

[AlexandraLaughing]

I got to know Leonard Cohen in a very Leonard Cohen way- forty years after everyone else, via kd lang.

I must have heard LC songs many times throughout my life (I'm 46), including on Shrek I, and I certainly knew the name. When I learned to play the guitar (vaguely) in the late 1980s, my guitar tuition book (Russ Shipton) had two Leonard Cohen songs, Bird on the Wire and Suzanne, but I had never heard them and so couldn't figure out what they were meant to sound like, and concentrated instead on the songs I actually knew, and the ones which were easier to play. He was known to me as a kind of joke figure, a byword for teenage depression, so I was sort of surprised that Suzanne seemed to be such a hopeful, happy song (as it seemed to me then, not looking too closely at the second verse), but I just let it all go by. I'm not very into popular music, mainly classical and traditional folk, so it takes a lot for something contemporary to come up on my radar and get a real hearing.

In 2008, an interview with the Canadian lesbian singer kd lang appeared on the Guardian Women's page, and I thought she sounded kind of interesting. She talked about her album, 'Hymns of the 49th Parallel', an album of covers of great Canadian songwriters which she had released in 2004 because she was so sick of the 'oppressive environment of fear' generated by 9/11, and the jingoistic American response to it. So I filed away the name, and a year or so later I bought the album. It's got some great and famous songs on it (two by Neil Young, two by Joni Mitchell, various others), but I was completely blown away by the two by Leonard Cohen, Bird on the Wire and Hallelujah. (I have to admit I prefer her version of both to his- she has such an amazing voice.) For a year or more it was my favourite CD (even above my classical ones), and I played it all the time. Hallelujah in particular deeply impressed me as a particularly brilliant and unusual song. kd lang does the sex version rather than the religion version, though without the particularly heterosexual verse, but the use of the figures of David and Samson was just extraordinary. I got to know just those two songs really well, and did 'Hallelujah' at a karaoke in 2013, still without having heard any of LC's other work.

In late 2013, I picked up a copy of 'Greatest Hits' (the reissue with the new songs up to A Thousand Kisses Deep). I then found the complete lyrics of all the studio albums online, and searched out on YouTube the ones whose lyrics I liked, being particularly ravished by Alexandra Leaving. I've been picking up the studio albums since in record shops wherever I find them, and I got Live in Dublin as a Christmas present this year from my husband (along with the Sylvie Simmonds biography).

[lachlanmacleod1]

I think mine was the Elvis' Rolls Royce with Was Not Was about six years ago, courtesy of my mum.