Well, this week kind of got away from me. Add moving house and a continued lack of internet at home; multiply by the normal amount of day-to-day crap and what you get is one blog post a week apparently. The lack of home internet thing is the biggest factor, I tend to read and write after the dinner’s made and the kid’s in bed at night and without internet at home, I just don’t have any good writing time. We had to wait months to get the net up and running when we first moved to Oz and it looks like we’re on the same pace this time around.

Yes, we apparently do live in the Third World. But onwards and upwards…

Up until this very day if you had asked me who was the best songwriter of the last fifty years I would have answered, with little hesitation, Bob Dylan. No question. Even if ‘Idiot Wind’ was the only song he ever wrote:

Someone’s got it in for me, they’re planting stories in the press
Whoever it is I wish they’d cut it out but when they will I can only guess.
They say I shot a man named Gray and took his wife to Italy,
She inherited a million bucks and when she died it came to me.
I can’t help it if I’m lucky.

But this morning, listening to ‘Songs of Love and Hate‘, I realized that I was wrong. Maybe it’s my mood – which has deteriorated rapidly since my last post – but, this morning, hearing songs like “Sing Another Song, Boys” and “Joan of Arc” and especially “Diamonds In The Mine” it became abundantly clear to me that Bob Dylan stands rather small in the shadow of the great Canadian wordsmith Leonard Cohen.

I came to Cohen relatively late. My Dad was a Dylan fan and I probably heard ‘Another Side of Bob Dylan’ from roughly birth. But I was over 18,the first time I heard Leonard Cohen on the soundtrack of the teen melodrama ‘Pump Up the Volume‘ in 1990. Not a great movie, but a damn fine soundtrack. (As an aside, that was the first time I heard The Pixies as well). I bought my first Leonard Cohen album after hearing “Waiting for the Miracle” in ‘Natural Born Killers‘ – another bad movie with a great soundtrack. I learned that Cohen wrote what I consider to be the best pop song ever performed – Jeff Buckley’s version of “Hallelujah”. I started listening to a lot of Cohen’s music. I loved the writing and his haunting voice but hated the instrumentation and arrangements. A lot of Cohen’s music is accompanied by cheesy 80’s synth that just destroys great songs. “Hallelujah” is a perfect example. It’s an incredible song – a poem really – but it opens with an organ that sounds a lot like my 18 month old son’s synthesizer and is backed by standard TV commercial jingle singers.

In the intervening period, I’ve come to love Cohen. I still struggle with his musical accompaniment, but when he starts singing – in that gravelly baritone growl – I can tune out that damn soft jazz and just listen to what he has to say. I’ve always been a sucker for the lyrics, which is why my preferences veer toward the singer-songwriter genre. A beautifully written song can almost make me hurt with its beauty. Nobody can make me hurt better than Leonard Cohen:

The woman in blue, she’s asking for revenge,
Man in white — that’s you — says he has no friends.
The river is swollen up with rusty cans
And the trees are burning in your promised land.

And there are no letters in the mailbox,
And there are no grapes upon the vine,
And there are no chocolates in the boxes anymore,
And there are no diamonds in the mine.

Cohen was in South Australia earlier this year. He played a concert at a winery in McLaren Vale. I didn’t go. At 74, I don’t know how many gigs Cohen has left in him. I hope that I don’t live to regret not going to that show.

On top of a little bit of pleasurable pain, a good song can get me through a tough day. I’m absolutely fed up with one of my two jobs. Again, I’m going to avoid specifics but a week after this post I’m again going to have to grit my teeth and get through the day without quitting or doing something to get the sack. ‘Songs of Love and Hate’ has soothed me and given me the patience to get through the next five and a half hours. It helped me come up with the correct answer to this question:

“In the middle of a global financial crisis, do you: A) Walk out of a job that’s driving you batty or B) Just suck it up for as long as you can and cash the pay check?

The correct answer is B. Thanks Leonard.

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Cohen’s got a new live album, recorded at a concert in London last year. Check out “The Future” from this show – one of Cohen’s finest songwriting efforts. Like what you hear? Buy the live album and anything from Cohen’s back catalog from Leonard Cohen - Live In London.

Image credits:

Leonard Cohen 1

Songs of Love and Hate

Leonard Cohen 2

 
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