1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 105. Leonard Cohen – Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967)

 

If you know any Leonard Cohen song, you kind of know them all. I don’t necessarily mean that in a bad way, but I don’t think he ever deviates much from poetic lyrics over a fairly simple folk-tune style motif.

Young Cohen here has a much smoother voice with a higher range than the more gravelly tones of later Cohen, and some of the songs, notably the track So Long, Marianne, are surprisingy tuneful. Again, I don’t mean that in a bad way.

Cohen’s lyrics are often poetic to the point of opacity, more about evoking a certain feeling than directly meaning something. Take the refrain from the classic Suzanne on this album - “for you’ve touched her perfect body with your mind”. It speaks to desire, perhaps unrequited or unspoken, or to a kind of mutual kinship that surpasses words, or perhaps Suzanne finds the intelligence or compassion of “you” to be an attractive factor. Or all, or none. Now imagine pretty much every line of a song being like that, and you can see why for the most part it’s easier just to absorb the lyrics than think too much about them. They do, however, tend to find melancholy in happiness, or pleasure in sadness, and perhaps that’s part of his charm, the tension inherent between the two feelings - “Love is not a victory march, it’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah” for example (not on this album). I couldn’t help but think of the quote “Sad is happy for deep people” from Stephen Moffatt’s Doctor Who episode Blink.

The melodies are generally simple – taking a folk technique of maybe four to six bars of a tune that repeat, verse, chorus, for as long as it takes, and yet I didn’t find any of the tracks outstayed their welcome. He’s a little like Dylan, but also far enough away to be his own thing and not just sound like this Canadian Dylan wannabe. He’s also kind of like Brel in continuing a troubadour style.