CD Odyssey Disc 536: Leonard Cohen

As much as I wanted to give this album a few more listens, I couldn’t resist doing the review right away.  Some albums just inspire you in a way you can’t turn away from.  This is one of those.

Disc 536 is…. Songs From A Room

Artist: Leonard Cohen

Year of Release: 1969

What’s up with the Cover?  A stark black and white photo of Mr. Cohen himself.  This cover fits with the sparseness that Cohen likes to wrap himself in when he presents himself to the world.

How I Came To Know It:  I’ve known Leonard Cohen since junior high.  I haven’t known this album that long, but it has been in my collection so long that its origins are lost in the mists of time.  I bought it sometime in the very early nineties, I expect.

How It Stacks Up:  I have eleven Leonard Cohen albums.  I was just talking about how this album stacks up when I reviewed “Songs” back at Disc 522.  “Songs” having better production, and “Songs From a Room” having better poetry.  The writer has won out over the musician in me, because having heard them both fairly close together I’m going with “Songs From A Room” as my second favourite of them all.

Rating:  5 stars

I used to think Leonard Cohen had delivered the greatest opening track on a folk album with “Suzanne” but my joy and wonder were short lived when “Songs From A Room” kicked off with “Bird On The Wire.” 

I was lucky too.  When “Bird on The Wire” first kicked me in the teeth off of the new-fangled format of the Compact Disc I had never heard it by anyone else.  Not Jennifer Warnes’ bitter-sweet rebellion, not Johnny Cash’s gravelly resignation and – mercifully – not the Neville Brothers saccharine soundtrack abuse of it.

Instead, sitting in my basement suite in my first ever home away from home, nursing a broken heart, I heard Leonard Cohen’s sparse honesty as he broke through every emotional wall I was in the process of building and grabbed me as he sang, dry and empty, into the black night of the soul:

“Like a bird on the wire

Like a drunk in a midnight choir

I have tried in my way to be free.”

Cohen for me has always embodied the power of the poet to lay bare his personal doubts and fears and make those doubts and fears universal to us all.  The fact that he then put them to music makes us all the more fortunate.

Like its opening track, “Songs From A Room” is a very quiet album that digs very deep into the soul of anyone with the fortitude to sit still and listen and let it pull a little poison out.  It is a poultice for the soul.

After the introspective “Bird On The Wire” Cohen effortlessly switches to myth and allegory on a much larger scale with “The Story of Isaac.”  Cohen takes a classic bible tale of Abraham, a man who shows his devotion to God by willingly agreeing to sacrifice his son, and retells it from the wide eyes of the child to be sacrificed.  The music is simple; guitar, light and austere, calling to mind the alpine environment the father and son would have walked through on their way to the altar high on a mountain top.

Starting with devotional imagery including an axe made of gold, and a lake that resembles a lady’s mirror, it quickly devolves into “hatchets blunt and bloody” as Cohen takes the following unexpected turn at the end:

“And if you call me Brother now

Forgive me if I inquire:

Just according to whose plan?

When it all comes down to dust

I will kill you if I must

I will help you if I can.”

For me, this is a timely reminder that it is alright to question authority.  Even Captain Kirk knew that in Star Trek 5.  God doesn’t need your space ship, and he certainly doesn’t need you to murder your son.  Maybe not the lesson intended, but that’s what I get from the song.

Every song moves me in some way, but none more so than “The Partisan” a song that tells of the experience of French partisans in the Second World War.  It begins:

“When they poured across the border

I was cautioned to surrender,

This I could not do;

I took my gun and vanished.

I have changed my name so often,

I've lost my wife and children

But I have many friends,

And some of them are with me.”

It isn’t even written by Cohen – it is actually a folk song dating to 1943, written by Anna Marly and Emmanual d’Astier de la Vigerie and later translated by Hy Zaret.  Regardless of who wrote it, it is an amazing song, brought to life by Cohen’s prophetic voice.  You can say what you want about the limitations of that instrument, but Cohen makes every word drip with meaning.  You can have your multiple octave ranges; I’ll take truth in delivery when it is this good.

Every song on “Songs From a Room” has the same thoughtful resonance, although every one explores a different theme.  Space prevents me from spinning each of them out for you, but that is just as well – I would instead encourage you to go and buy this album and let Cohen spin the tales for you; he’s better at it anyway. 

Like the cleaning out of a wound, this is a record that scours deep and painfully into the most sensitive parts of what makes us who we are – both as individuals and as a brotherhood of man – and ultimately makes us the healthier for it.  As Cohen reminds us on “The Old Revolution” “even damnation is poisoned with rainbows.” “Songs From a Room” has plenty of both.

Best tracks:  all tracks, although if I had to live without one, I could survive without “Seems So Long Ago, Nancy.”  The others stay!