LaRM day 84 (Leonard Cohen)

I've always found laughing boy Lenny Cohen a bit hard to take and have never really got what it is about him that gets people quite so exercised. To be honest I rather subscribe to the stereotypical view that he's a miserable old whinger who could do with actually bothering to write a tune once in a while. I think part of the problem for me is that for a start I don't buy the "poet as songwriter" schtick. I think it's always balls. I'm of the old fashioned opinion that music is expressive, evocative, just as poetry is expressive and evocative and as a result the two are effectively mutually exclusive. That's why the greatest classical composers and the greatest librettists concentrated on story and mood rather than some mysterious poetic rebus - the music did that work. Besides which looking at who gets the poet tag in the rock world simply proves the point - Nick Cave? Good lyrics yes, poetry certainly not. Dylan? Being oblique does not poetry make - good lyrics normally, poetry most decidedly not. Who else? Billy Childish?? Bruce Springsteen for Christ's sake. See? It's not poetry, it's song lyrics, and poor Lenny may have been a great writer, a great poet even, but the minute he starts setting this stuff to music what he's reduced the words to is song lyrics. The day people started suggesting Dylan was a poet was the day we forgot absolutely what poetry is, and entered this bold, moronic new world where saying something out loud makes it true. Got to love the 60's. Anyway, as a result Leonard Cohen's Live Songs (1973), recorded in 1970 and 1972, is for me something of an endurance test. There are great songs on Live Songs, mostly culled from Songs From a Room, but as usual rendered in such sombre colours that I simply find that I haven't been listening after a while. By all accounts Live Songs is a visceral portrait of the artist's journey through hell but all I hear is a gloomy egotist musing rather pointlessly about relationships.

Slightly more fun is Cohen's next studio album, New Skin for the Old Ceremony (1974), but not much more fun. There's the usual plodding self-indulgence, but New Skin has a handful of songs that are considerably more interesting - 'Who By Fire' is a brilliantly creepy, odd little pop song, 'Chelsea Hotel No.2' is absolutely lovely and heartbreaking, and 'There Is a War' is a very strange song indeed, and a brilliant one. However, despite the presence of a backing band, a new development for Cohen's studio work, it's still rather frustratingly drab. We skip forward four albums to 1988's I'm Your Man. Often regarded as one of Cohen's finest albums, there is an entirely different problem with I'm Your Man. With only a couple of glaring exceptions, the songs on I'm Your Man are absolutely fantastic, really great. The difficulty is the truly hideous production, arrangement and instrumentation. I've never heard such a great set of songs be made to sound so utterly awful - everything about the sound is dated in the worst possible way, sampled strings, jingling keyboards, wailing backing singers, and everything processed to within an inch of its life - it's hideous. It's such disservice to the songs that it's a difficult album to listen to, and it's clear why other people have been more successful with songs from the album. 'First We Take Manhattan', 'Everybody Know', 'Tower of Song', these are superb songs (the most egregious exception is 'Jazz Police' which may well rank as my most hated song in terms of both the song and how it sounds) and it's a crying shame the album sounds so godawful.
We skip over 1992's The Future and on to the next album, some nine years later, Ten New Songs (2001). It's a laid back affair this one and it's fairly charming (those synth drums could have done with being jettisoned, but oh well) and it's a less strident attempt to appear to be keeping up with the times. As a result it's a much easier listen, and it doesn't have the air of gloom that he fostered so early on, so much as a seasoned melancholy. If anything it's a delicate reflection on and of the aging artist and it's a much more personable record than many he's made. A lot of this may be down to the large role played by collaborator Sharon Robinson, who handles all kinds of technical duties as well as co-songwriting and duetting throughout the album. It's a subtle, unaggressive record and although the tendancy to just stop listening is pretty strong, it's an album that deserves attention while not demanding it. I really prefer Cohen in this mode to any other.

And so, with the necessity of checking out all of the Eurovision songs before tomorrow's nights big final, it's cheerio for the week.