Leonard Cohen – Songs Of Leonard Cohen

leonard cohen---suzanne & hey that's no way to say goodbye 4-44439 45 single- columbia
radio station copy-tell me about it

I’ve wrestled with this album since a girlfriend first brought it by for a listen back in 1967, leaving me as conflicted today as I was then, though after fifty years of struggling, I suppose I’m entitled to my point of view.

Cohen is never clear or even translucent on this collection, everything is gauged, shrouded in mystery, coming in the back door and leaving by the window, creating a dark atmosphere of ambivalence, though that ambivalence actually isn’t ambivalence per say, it’s more that he wishes to tell you a truth, or to instruct without so doing in plain and simple English. These songs are a series of embellishments on some personal truth that I don’t believe ever existed, where so much is married and then divorced by its darker twin … laughter and tears, salvation and destruction, freedom and shelter. Unlike Dylan, due to Cohen’s strict religious upbringing, there is a sense of spirituality in all of these numbers, and while he certainly partook in substances such as LSD, there’s not one song here that comes off with a sense of freedom and vision, simply one series of weighty dilemmas after another, where questions in the form of statements are thrown down, yet not a single answer is given. It’s as if all that Cohen does or expresses, even his drug use, is considered and disciplined … and where’s the fun in that.

It would be easy for me to wave my hands in the air and say, “Leonard Cohen was a seeker, it’s all about discovery.” And to that I’d expect you to shout back that he never actually went anywhere, this is all some sort of sophomoric masturbatory fantasy of sitting in whitewashed chairs on a mildly breezy afternoon at table set with tea and Chinese oranges on a remote nondescript river bank, where these songs play on and out like some heady discussion that goes nowhere, leaving me feeling unfulfilled and unsatisfied, where with his deep somber delivery and sparse musical notes even saying something such as, “Do you realize that dog spelled backwards is god? Makes you think doesn’t it?” is taken to be profound. Then he goes on to sip his tea and eat his single treasured orange, leaving me wishing to jump up, spill my tea and say, “No, it doesn’t make me think, considering that hard only hurts my brain and ruins a good pot buzz.”

If Cohen is a seeker, he comes across as very lost to my ears, standing at the junction of Disorientation and Dysphoria, filled with the construct and pleasure of his own insecurities. Yet even this argument is embraced by Mr. Cohen with glee, where with his Jewish heritage, being lost in the wilderness is seen as a precursor to enlightenment. As to the depressive nature of his being, well who wasn’t depressed during the mid 60’s, both Kennedy’s were assassinated, as was Martin Luther King, we had the war in Viet Nam raging, television commercials were coopting everything we held dear, students were being shot on campus, civil rights workers were murdered and honesty, we were realizing that we couldn’t get the truth from nearly anyone for any reason.

The back cover of the album features a Mexican religious picture of the Anima Sola depicted as a woman breaking free of her chains surrounded by flames and gazing towards heaven. Cohen described the image as “the triumph of the spirit over matter. The spirit being that beautiful woman breaking out of the chains, the fire and the prison.” It’s said that Cohen found the picture in a botánica near the Hotel Chelsea in 1965. The album's front cover depicts a sepia tint photo of Cohen credited to Machine. Yet even here in his artwork Cohen shows us what a prisoner he was, as this woman stood in for the personality of Cohen, and then crediting the front image to a persona known as Machine (which of course is a subtle joke, as Machine is actually Mr. Photo Booth).

Cohen’s songs are always delivered very much matter of fact, as if they’re truths we should obviously be well acquainted with, yet they're beyond even sympathy, a forbidden marriage of words and music where neither is what it seems, for to add music to his poetry is to relegate it to background listening, removing all sense of depth and passion. Yes, of course, the first time one hears “Suzanne” one is swept away with visual intoxication, though the music sets that verse in stone, removing all freedom of exploration, as one would have when reading such lines. Again, of course I could say that Cohen singlehandedly began the goth movement, that his enigmatic songs are nether harmonious or melodious, that these songs and verse are filled with an unforgiving melancholia unsuitable for even sunlight, yet alone a cleansing cool breeze. Certainly there’s a cinematic dynamic to his delivery, though it’s all about show and no substance, the very essence of monotony, the shameless picking at wounds, scratching at unresponsive doors, narcotic substances that offer no relief, only the persistent vision of humanity as frail, naked, hungry, delicate and psychically broken.

You’ll receive what you’ll allow yourself to believe from these songs, expect nothing less and very little more.

Review by Jenell Kesler

Absolutely one of Cohen's best and a fav of mine. Methinks however that the album should have been titled 'Tony Montana', i mean seriously, look at the cover.

For me this is the best Cohen album or at least equal to Songs From A Room. Every song is amazing, nothing is out of place, it all flows together perfectly. One of maybe 5 albums in my collection I never get tired of..

So many comments and ‘reviews’, yet it’s all bullshit.
It’s a good album, regardless of pressings or versions.
Get your priorities straight.

What is the best version of the vinyl to get? I see that there is one remaster but I see it is from a third party label so I don't know if I should trust this or not. Should I go with one of the third party remasters or the 2007 repress (which is said to be 180g on it's page)? Or are all of these inferior to the original pressings, and if so then which of those is objectively the best?