The Tower of Song

"The gifts were many and many were the warnings that went with them. We are giving you a great heart but if you drink wine you will begin to hate the world. The moon is your sister but if you take sleeping pills you will find yourself in the company of unhappy women. Every time you grab at love, you will lose a snowflake of your memory."


















Leonard Cohen, my second all-time favorite songwriter, was born in Montreal in 1934. I quote him above from the documentary Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man (2005). I watched the film twice last summer at the Shattuck Cinema while “a suntanned woman yearned me through the summer,” as he might say.

I dream of performing all the songs on Field Commander Cohen (1979), a live album from his 1979 tour. I doubt we will have time to view the I'm Your Man documentary, but I recommend it mainly, if not only, for the parts in which Cohen himself is speaking (not the performances of his songs by other artists). Leonard Cohen is eloquent and impressive.













Sometimes called “music to slit your wrists by,” perhaps, similar to Bob Dylan, he is hard to like. For example, I just read that his Greatest Hits (1975) collection was voted the most depressing album ever by a British magazine.

He clearly owes much to old songs, pays his rent in “The Tower of Song,” but not in quite the same way Dylan does. Comparatively I find his sources more often biblical than blues and folk, and more sensual, with a focus on female beauty.

“A woman watches her body uneasily, as though it were an unreliable ally in the battle for love.”