LC: The Great Lyricist - free book in The Guardian 28th June

[Born With The Gift Of A G]

This looks a potentially interesting publication to be issued with The Guardian newspaper in the UK on Saturday, 28th June 2008:

http://www.guardianmarketing.co.uk:80/l ... nk=GUemail

If any distant Cohen fans would like to reserve a copy of this booklet, send me a personal message or email: towerofsong@btinternet.com and I'll endeavour to acquire one for you.

[Maarten]

Hi,
I'd like a copy if possible!
I will email you about it.

Thanks for the kind offer.

Regards,
Maarten

[Gregor]

If possible
I too would love a copy
Thanks
wil e-mail you
G

[martisan]

er, me too Mr G.
I wonder if you know what you let yourself in for?
I'll try to ask someone else in the UK to get it for me as you are likely to be overrun methinks.
Good on you for the generous offer though.
Martin

[loulou]

i will get a few copies too (hope i won't forget !) and let you know all know, so Mr G will not be completely inundated -
(p.s. nice of you to recognise me and say hello again in Manchester on Wednesday )

[John Etherington]

This series are not anything to get overly excited about (I got the Dylan one last weekend). They're just slim booklets with the lyrics of a few songs and a couple of pages of commentary. I suspect the Leonard one will inevitably include the lyrics of "Suzanne" and "Tower of Song". It's Leonard though, so I'll buy a copy to see what The Guardian are presenting to the wider public.

All good things, John E

[sirius]

Great lyricists
Leonard Cohen

http://music.guardian.co.uk/greatlyrici ... 29,00.html

The high priest of minimalism

Simon Schama
Saturday June 28, 2008

Guardian
http://music.guardian.co.uk/greatlyrici ... 95,00.html


Tea and ... what? Toast? Sympathy? No, oranges. From the start Leonard Cohen was out to surprise by cunning. No wonder, then, that he had to struggle for attention in the golden age of screamers. Janis's ecstatic rasp, Hendrix's maddened guitar, Lennon's glottal roar, even Dylan's adenoidal faux-country all made sounds through which their lyrical inventions had to fight for air, and if not quite up to snuff, those words could hide behind the wall of noise. But Cohen's minimalist drone was the drowsy couch on which his poetry lay, fully exposed, with nowhere else to go.

In the 60s, his lyrics grabbed attention through teasingly incongruous unions: "Like a worm on a hook / Like a knight from some old-fashioned book". For all I know, Suzanne did feed Leonard tea and oranges, but it was the coupling of the prosaic and the exotic (oranges, as Cohen well knows, did indeed come originally "all the way from China"), the yoking together of serenity and sharpness, that makes the line jump from the chant. Suzanne is, after all, "half crazy" so when she takes "you down to her place near the river" it may not be entirely for a picnic. On the other hand, "that's why you want to be there". OK, then, peel me an orange.

More than many great singer-songwriters of his generation (Dylan excepted), Cohen makes no bones about reaching for the heavy literary hitters for inspiration. Lorca gave him the spooky, beautifully sinister Take This Waltz - although Cohen's free translation of the Spanish arguably makes a more unsettlingly powerful poem than the original - "a forest of dried pigeons" (Lorca) becomes "there's a tree where the doves go to die" (Cohen); "take this waltz with its closed mouth" (Lorca) turns to "take this waltz with the clamp on its jaw" (Cohen).

When Cohen does invoke the canon it's usually with a shrewd knowledge of how it's been used and abused through the generations. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Sail On, O Ship of State, the anthem on which Cohen's Democracy builds to the marching beat of a snare drum, was written in 1850 as fears for the endurance of the Union were grave. After the civil war, the poem, set to music for choral performance, accompanied routine displays of patriotic chest-beating. But the tone of Cohen's Democracy could scarcely be less rah-rah; it's more a scalding spit in the eye. "It's comin' ... from the fires of the homeless, from the ashes of the gay ... From the homicidal bitchin' / That goes down in every kitchen ... From the wells of disappointment / Where women kneel to pray." Compared to the freakshow ferocity that dominates The Future, in which Cohen turns porno-totalitarian: "Give me absolute control / Over ev'ry living soul"; "Give me crack and anal sex / Take the only tree that's left / And stuff it up the hole in your culture". Democracy is, if not exactly warm and cuddly, at least a qualified redemption: "I love the country but I can't stand the scene". The starchy Longfellow anthem gets made over, in the election year of 1992, into a disabused song of possibility.

For a while, projecting his own bouts of depressive melancholy on to the state of things, Cohen specialised in acid-burn nihilistic jeremiads, demonic impersonations of the forces of darkness, growled at the mic. The Book of Revelation took over from New Testament sweetness, which came as a relief to those of us who had had enough of his gentle Jesus, the kind that shows up at music festivals in knee-hole jeans smilingly beatifically, ready for dope and three days of love. Cohen's gospel people stalk through contemporary streets and bedrooms, so the card dealer of The Stranger Song turns out to be: "Just some Joseph looking for a manger". But every so often the more adamant Yahweh of the Old Testament shows up, bringing the year's transgressions to a mighty reckoning. A cohen is, after all, a high priest.

As seriously as he takes this persona of Satan deploring sin, it's the more inward meditations on his favourite subject - "L. Cohen" (as he styles himself at the end of Famous Blue Raincoat) - that have always drawn from him the most intensely felt and precisely visualised writing, and have challenged his melodic composition to go beyond minimalist dirge to match the force of the poetry.

Cohen's subjects in this vein of mutilated romanticism have been the usual post-Renaissance suspects: valedictions, loss and remorse, emotional cruelty (inflicted and received), the inseparability of tenderness and pain. Sometimes images, often of wistfully recollected visions - "Your hair on the pillow like a sleepy golden storm", in Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye - are allowed to hang in the song for the sheer metaphorical hell of it. They work so seductively they disarm the carping lit-crit who might pause to wonder if storms, unlike the lover, can actually ever be "sleepy"?

If there's just a touch too much of happy self-regard about some of those early ballads, from the mid 70s on, the onset of years Cohen saw in his musical mirror encouraged him to use imagery as building blocks in beautifully constructed, authentically poetic narratives. In the sad love triangle of Famous Blue Raincoat, Cohen transfers a garment he wore to fraying point to "my brother, my killer", who had run off with his wife, and had given her just "a flake of your life / And when she came back she was nobody's wife". In the strongest songs of this period, Cohen makes sure to skid away from self pity - "Well, my friends are gone / And my hair is gray / I ache in the places where I used to play" - into something more akin to rueful gratitude: "I'm just paying my rent every day / In the Tower of Song."

So perhaps it's not surprising that Hallelujah, the song in which music making and love making wrestle with each other, is the one most covered by other singers, and without draining the power of the piece into empty rhapsody. But to get the heartache you want from Cohen - and you know you do - you need to hear the old(ish) baffled, battle-scarred Cohen himself sing "The minor fall, the major lift", his voice falling for the forbidden Bathsheba bathing naked on the roof, where "Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you". But nothing works out as planned. The overthrow happens as the music soars, the omnipotent sovereign-psalmist is bound and shorn, and it's from that moment, when the composing-lover is pierced to the quick, that music gets born. Hallelujah.

[sirius]

Great lyricists: Leonard Cohen from the Guardian

http://music.guardian.co.uk/greatlyrici ... 29,00.html


Foreword

The high priest of minimalism

Simon Schama: Tea and ... what? Toast? Sympathy? No, oranges. From the start Leonard Cohen was out to surprise by cunning

http://music.guardian.co.uk/greatlyrici ... 95,00.html


--------------------------------------------------------------------------


From the archive


Oracle of the Isle

August 29 1970: Hugh Hebert talks to Leonard Cohen

http://212.100.241.108/Repository/ml.as ... kin-custom


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Leonard Cohen at the Freetrade Hall

September 13 1974: If the music papers ran a poll for the heaviest artist in pop, Leonard Cohen would romp, or anyway slouch, away with it every year

http://212.100.241.108/Repository/ml.as ... kin-custom

[skunk]

Just to let anyone know that there is a free booklet with the Guardian (English Newspaper) today.

Was walking past a newsagent and saw the mans face on the front cover. First time I have ever seen LC in a national paper without some reference to Doom and Gloom. Good on them.

Its in a booklet called great lyricists. Along with the usual Suzanne etc they have chosen both Dear Heather and Because of which I found interesting choices. Worth getting for the retro article in the back.

[Waiting For Suzanne]

cheers - i shall nip and buy one! (the only sorta time i ever buy newspapers is with dvds & cds...)

[Born With The Gift Of A G]

Booklets will be in the mail shortly to the following people:

Dick in New Jersey;
Judy Remy in France;
Frank in Cork;
Tracey in Australia;
Martin Aylward in France;
Maarten in Belgium;
Helen in Florida.

Please bear with me whilst I prepare the packages!

[loulou]

i got some spare ones as well, so do not hesitate to ask if you want one too
(i thought i send one to Jarkko too for the archive ?)

[jarkko]

Loulou, thanks for your kind offer! However, Padma got a bunch of the booklets for me!
Jarkko

[loulou]

cool

so i have 3 more left i anyone wants one

[dick]

Wonderful and generous gestures by many

The circle of unified hearts is mucho strong!

BWAG -- I am so sorry to report that pins for the tour were not ever available in Montreal

All this press praise, however, is gold for we who value Cohen so much.

dick