„I'm your man“

(Sony, 1988)

How to choose the “best record” by Leonard Cohen? As if there was a bad one. So actually, this is more a question of which record to start with, so why this one? It is not because of the amount of great songs on this one, which of course is true: “I’m your man”, “First we take Manhatten” and “Tower of Song” are classics – but then again there are at least two or three timeless classics on any album by Leonard Cohen, so this would have made room for other albums like “Songs of Love and Hate” or "Songs by" and actually all others as well. Moreover, listening to a Cohen-album you’ll find a bunch of hidden timeless classics as well for sure, because sometimes those really great and classic songs like “Suzanne” tend to hide other great but little known songs like “So long, Marianne”. A matter of radio airplay and public exposure, maybe, but then again Leonard Cohen is a songwriter who demands intimate listening and that won’t ever go over well with a hot medium like radio. Especially not in our times, where radio is formatted and made to support the advertising breaks, with disc jockeys whose comments range between imbecile and downright stupid and music that is made to measure the needs of the office slave or the lonely housewife.

The reason I chose “I’m your man” as the first Leonard Cohen album to be included in this section of “best or at least most undeservingly underrated albums of all time” is also not because Tom Waits had this one in his top 10 list of his all time favourite records. Even though I tried to hunt those all down, and the range goes from Frank Sinatra to Gavin Bryars and from Bohemian prison songs (or something) to Elvis Costello, with some Lounge Lizards thrown in for good measure, but that is not the reason. I can well imagine Tom Waits singing “Eeverybody knows” by the way, with its gypsy blues beat and the repeating lyrics, very much in Wait’s “Swordfishtrombones”-phase. That would have been really great, but as far as I know that never happened. Tom Waits by the way is not the only great songwriter who hails Cohen’s name, the list of admirers is as long as the night is dark, probably right in the front is Nick Cave, who did “I’m your man” for that Cohen-tribute that was staged in New York and London. To show you how much I think of Cohen, I will mention that I bought that tribute CD even though the whole thing was operated a lot by one Bono Vox, major flunky of global capitalism and master of bigotry. So much for that.

Another reason that did not matter in the decision is that the album has a waltz on it and mentions my hometown of Vienna in the lyrics of “Take this waltz”, because if that was important you might as well be reading about Ultravox or Jose Feliciano right here, but then the whole section wouldn’t make much sense, now would it? One thing that did play a role, but was in no way decision-making was the great cover though. It shows – of all things – Leonard Cohen in some lofty room with black glasses on eating a banana. What else could be put on a record cover that is still within the range of decency and style but shows a stronger couldn’t care less attitude that that? Not much that I can think of anyway. I wonder who came up with that idea and who was able to sell it to the record company? Who lost his job afterwards? Finally, this album wasn’t chosen because it signifies some special landmark in the career of Leonard Cohen, most of all because his career doesn’t seem to have any special landmarks, except maybe for almost going broke at the end of the Nineties, but other than that I just wouldn’t know. Some say that “I’m your man” was the starting point of his “second career” (the one where he went broke?) and that there is so much saying goodbay, so many echoes of disappointment and a new re-evaluation of his own persona – but then there was a lot of that on all his releases, so what? No, let’s get to business here.

The main reason I sat up and started to write this entry on this special album is a short verse that comes up in one or probably the best song ever written about songwriting which of course is “Tower of Song” and the lines are: “I asked Hank Williams, how lonely does it get? / Hank Williams hasn’t answered me yet / but I can hear him coughing all night long / a hundred flights above me in the Tower of Song”. This is where Cohen pays tribute to the greatest of them all, who penned the deepest and profound about love and hate and despair and misery and, most of all, loneliness, and that in the guise of the sweetest melodies and harmonies. Makes me realize that whenever you write or think about Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, Nick Cave, and a billion of other songwriters, you are always actually writing and thinking about Hank Williams at the same time. Or as Kris Kristofferson (another one!) put it: “If you don’t like Hank Williams, you can kiss my ass.” Less poetic and less euphonious, but just as effective and true.

Leonard Cohen is a songwriter and singer who grew on me in the last years. Before that he was too lonely, to sparsely arranged, his melodies too sentimental and without enough movement to strike my juvenile mind. These days that is exactly what appeals to me. The Tower of Song is a lonely place, but there are a lot of big minds on every floor. Moreover Cohen is a slow and pensive writer, sometimes working on a song for a couple of years, and then changing them around for another few years, so that many different versions start to float around. He is a lot more than just a songwriter’s songwriter, though, his ease and freedom of heart in his voice is good to soothe babies and unsatisfied lovers as well. He is the rock that watches over the people in the valley below, probably just from his spacious loft in Manhattan, probably from a plane much higher than you might imagine.

For most songwriters who survived the Sixties and Seventies the Eighties were an awful time. Lou Reed turned into something indescribable like a thinking hardrock machine and Kris Kristofferson had his songs drowned in stupid instruments by some producer. Bryan Ferry was right at home there amongst the cold and artificial synthies and the lonely saxophones, on the other hand. Leonard Cohen probably was never at home anywhere, so there is not so much change for him there. The songs on “I’m your man” do feature some insipid and typically Eighties arrangement ideas, but then they never take over. They are silenced by the presence of Leonard Cohen and his charismatic voice. And after all they fit in more than one way. Which is probably a nice way to say, it could have been much worse. Of course, there are synthdrums and strings and keyboards and whatnot, but it supports the songs miraculously.

The album starts off with a call to arms, a true war call: “First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin” – an interesting reversal of the way it usually seems to happen, with the American continent being the final frontier, but Cohen is at home in Manhattan anyway. The album ends with the aforementioned “Tower of Song”, the best and most fascinating self-analysis of a songwriter and his place in time and history of songwriting ever written this side of “The Singer” (oh no, memory fails me – was it written by Tim Hardin? Anyway, both Johnny Cash and Nick Cave did good versions of that one...). In between there are a hundred lost loves, places visited, ideas pondered and lives lived.

Summing up, this album can take you miles and miles and miles through your life. It will help you out on bad days as well as on good days. It is an enormous mountain of masterful songwriting, and even though it breathes the coolness and aloofness of the Eighties in all notes, it is also filled with encompassing warmth and emotion.