Life of a song - Famous Blue Raincoat

[Wybe]

In the FINANCIAL TIMES - Live of a Song by Dan Einav.


Life of a song - Famousblue Raincoat

Famous Blue Raincoat — a song so mysterious, Leonard Cohen himself was never satisfied with it.

[HugoD]

Unfortunately the article is behind a paywall or am I doing something wrong?

[Wybe]

For my was it free !
I check it again and let you know.

[Wybe]

Hugo, you are right it looks that it worked only one time.

[WiTS]

try the link in this tweet
https://twitter.com/FTLifeArts/status/1 ... 2533705730

[Wybe]

Post by WiTS » Tue May 19, 2020 4:59 pm
try the link in this tweet
https://twitter.com/FTLifeArts/status/1 ... 2533705730

Perfect, thanks WiTS

[lizzytysh]

Found that I would need to Subscribe, too, and don't do Twitter, so can't get to it that way, either.

[Mabeanie1]

Found that I would need to Subscribe, too, and don't do Twitter, so can't get to it that way, either.

Did you try the Twitter link anyway Lizzy? You shouldn't need to be registered on Twitter to access the link to the FT article (though I could be wrong).

Wendy

[LisaLCFan]

Here is the article:

Life of a Song
Famous Blue Raincoat — a song so mysterious, Leonard Cohen himself was never satisfied with it

This enigmatic, quietly devastating story is one of the songwriter’s most beloved tracks

Dan Einav - May 17 2020

Somewhere in the world, possibly hanging unassumingly in a wardrobe, or bathetically stowed away, unrecognised, in a dank basement or dusty attic, a famous blue raincoat might be found. It once belonged to Leonard Cohen, and in the early 1970s it was stolen from the New York apartment belonging to the songwriter’s lover, Marianne Ihlen.

While Cohen was never reunited with his Burberry coat, it was immortalised as the central image in one of his most beloved and enigmatic songs. Released on the 1971 album Songs of Love and Hate, “Famous Blue Raincoat”offers up perhaps the clearest synthesis of Cohen the poet-novelist and Cohen the singer-songwriter, as he relays a vividly characterised tale of adultery, regret and loneliness in just five minutes.

Delivered in Cohen’s warm, recitative style, the song takes the form of a letter (partly composed in an unusual poetic metre called amphibrach) addressed to an unnamed man who, we learn, once unsuccessfully tried to prise away Jane, the wife of the writer (a fictionalised version of the singer himself). But this is no ordinary torrid love-triangle narrative, filled with wounded egos, bitterness, blame and recriminations. Trust Leonard Cohen to come up with something altogether more subtle, spare, and quietly devastating.

The letter is in fact curiously fraternal, even conciliatory towards the narrator’s rival. The tragedy here was never the infidelity, but the way in which the narrator was resigned to the decay of his marriage. “Thanks, for the trouble you took from her eyes, I thought it was there for good, so I never tried,” he concedes in an arresting line that distils the heart of marital despair and miscommunication as well as anything you’d find in a book by Richard Yates or John Cheever.

But such is the rich ambiguity of Cohen’s words that no amount of parsing of the lyrics could yield a definitive interpretation of “Famous Blue Raincoat”. Was there, for instance, ever a second man, or was he an alter-ego, an abstract spectral presence? Is “going clear” a euphemism for sex, or a reference to a stage of Scientology, in which Cohen rather uncharacteristically dabbled at the time?

Cohen provided little elucidation, possibly so as to not attenuate the song’s open, inscrutable nature, but mainly because he didn’t really have the answers himself. In an interview in 1994, he admitted: “It was a song I've never been satisfied with. I've always felt that there was something about the song that was unclear.”

An array of artists admired it enough to take it on themselves. In 1986, Cohen’s longtime backing singer Jennifer Warnes gave an emotive, jazz-inflected rendition — a version that Cohen worked on himself, and one that he said he preferred to the original. The lyrics were slightly adapted so that the narrator is recast as an observer rather than a participant in the affair; “my woman” becomes “some woman” and the letter’s sign-off is no longer “L. Cohen”, but “a friend”.

Joan Baez recorded a moving iteration in 1989 that features her signature quivering vocals and retains Warnes’s lyrical tweaks. And the equally prodigious coverer Tori Amos included “Famous Blue Raincoat” in many of her live sets; hers is a beautifully aching, original piano-led rendition.

Elfin Norwegian singer Aurora provided a more idiosyncratic live interpretation in 2017, complete with tinkling keys and a ghostly choir. But while her vocals are little short of stunning, her slightly histrionic gestures jar with the song’s more restrained sadness. Sticking with ethereal Nordic artists, the Faroese singer-songwriter Eivorhas also performed the song live several times in versions that possess a Jeff Buckley tone thanks to her reverb-heavy finger-picked guitar playing.

Similarly atmospheric and eerie is the gothicky effort by Americana duo The Handsome Family from a 2006 compilation album of Cohen covers; the fact that they’re husband and wife lends added authenticity to the story.

Elsewhere, the ever-doleful Damien Rice proved the perfect choice to cover the song at a 2017 tribute concert for Cohen; his superb, pain-stricken rendition features orchestral accompaniment and a dramatic coda that repeats the song’s most confrontational line: “My brother, my killer.” Fellow Irishman Glen Hansard, meanwhile, gave a much more pared-back, but no less affecting, version for a live radio session.

Despite his personal reservations about the track, Cohen continued to play it throughout his long career. Perhaps he kept returning to it in the hope that with each performance he’d come closer to finally discovering some clarity within the song. Or maybe he simply never stopped missing his stolen, famous blue raincoat.

[lizzytysh]

Thank you for posting the whole article, Lisa.
I can't remember now if I tried or not, Wendy. I only just now saw your reply, and my mind has been blown over the past weeks. I know that I have tried to access Twitter elsewhere before and could only get as far as that blue bird in the middle of the screen. Yet, it seems like I've also gotten to it before, too. So, the upshot of all that is I don't know.

The final sentence is funny. Ironic that Leonard would suggest that something lacking clarity would be dissatisfying to him. Wonderfully unclear keeps people trying to sort the meaning of his songs. This article takes me back to my first hearing it and being so astonished at the uniqueness of his perspective, and thinking "Am I hearing that right??" I like this article.

[mWoelke]

t was 1972 and i was 14 years old. i convinced my grandmother to let me ride a greyhound from Atascadero to Anaheim to spend 4 days with my girlfriend. i still cannot believe that she bought me the ticket. Her mother let us sleep together and we slept under a single sheet in the heat of summer. naked and chaste, barely touching in the oppressive heat. i did not sleep a moment. just lay there and felt her presence. i don't believe she slept either. the next evening a friend of hers picked us up to go cruise. he was driving a 65 mustang with the obligatory hijackers, thrush mufflers and mags. we sat in the back seat, holding hands while we passed a joint and the car filled with smoke. i remember looking out the right side of the car as the wall around Disneyland passed by. Her friend slid a cassette tape into the tape deck and "Diamonds in the Mine" began playing from partway through the opening verse. i was mesmerized. he seemed to be singing right from my secret place, vocalizing emotions that i was, up till then, unable to voice. then i heard the song that has haunted me all of my life, "Famous Blue Raincoat" i can still smell the pot and exhaust and feel the heat of the summer and the rumble of the engine and i can remember the feel of her small hand in mine.. i do not remember her name and i cannot, for all of my trying, see her face but i remember those four days in the summer of 1972. it all comes rushing back every time i hear that song. i went back to grandmothers and then rode the bus back to San Diego and went right to the record store and ordered his album on vinyl. i played it 10,000 times if i played it once and waited for every album after that to come out.
Leonard said that Famous Blue Raincoat was the one song that he felt was never finished, a story with missing parts, a mystery about regret and resignation and about forgiveness, forgiveness finally extended much too late for that unfortunate triangle of lovers. I still listen to it, waiting to hear the next layer of meaning. my life is certainly a story with missing parts and maybe all of us have a few missing parts... and more than a few layers of meaning waiting to be heard .

i have listened to his music my entire life, i am always amazed at how powerful his lyrics are, how he was able to place a few simple words into a perfect sequence that could evoke such emotion and such depth of meaning. i still, to this day, will hear a lyric that i have heard 5,000 times and suddenly a deeper meaning becomes so apparent that i cannot believe it took so many years to peel back the layers to discover it. i sometimes think that he wrote songs that i would need decades later in my life.
A great poet a fierce critic of hatred and suffering, a man who battled against the wrong in the world and never lost his belief in the goodness of humanity. He was never afraid to to stand up and shake his fist into the face of the creator, demanding an explanation for the suffering and evil he allowed in the world. He could write poetry that was at once both sensual and spiritual and leave you knowing they were one in the same.
it sounds funny but i will not miss him; he has been a friend, a guide and a teacher. he will remain so, always at arms reach. I am sad that i will not see him again. i am grateful that i saw him in Red Rocks in 09 and i regret that i did not buy that ticket to Dublin.

...I choose the rooms that i live in with care
the windows are small and the walls are bare
there is only one bed, there is only one prayer
and i wait every night for your step on the stair...

enjoy the next adventure Leonard, demand that our deities be accountable for what they have done and what they have not.

...and i know from your eyes
and i know from your smile
that tonight will be fine,
will be fine, will be fine, will be fine...

for awhile

Mike Woelke

[MaryB]

Mike - just thank you....