Songs of Leonard Cohen

Ten songs on two sides of five, and most resist the subtractive test, because each is a different station of one man’s dealings with women and with the sacred. Suzanne must open: it states the method, the beloved and the divine met in one harbour city. The Stranger Song and Master Song are the long portraits of rivalry and departure; Sisters of Mercy closes side one in shelter; So Long, Marianne opens side two in leave-taking, and Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye answers it more briefly. The test bites on side two. Stories of the Street is the most diffuse of the ten; Teachers, a riddle-song, restates the seeker’s stance without adding to it; and the wordless coda of One of Us Cannot Be Wrong is added more than required.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The disclosure can be stated: love here is hospitality between strangers, given for a night and owed nothing, and the sacred is met inside it rather than above it. Suzanne gives the whole thought in the first song: a woman by the river who serves “tea and oranges”, a Christ who “was a sailor”, both reached by touch “with your mind”. Sisters of Mercy finds grace in two strangers who give shelter and ask nothing; The Stranger Song turns the claim on the man who receives it, “looking for a manger”. The voice, flat, close and unsentimental, discloses as much as the words. Held below the gate: the condition is mostly the singer’s own, rendered as a stance, and the meaning slides at times into a mood of grave tenderness.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Elevation is quiet and frequent, and about five of the ten songs rise. Suzanne is the summit: the fingerpicked figure circling, the voice level, and the image of Christ on the water lifting the song without any rise in volume, the added voices and strings arriving like light on the river. Sisters of Mercy has a fragile height in its waltz. So Long, Marianne rises by its chorus, the one place the record sings out, and its “laugh and cry” is the most open feeling on it. The Stranger Song reaches a grave, hypnotic height by repetition. Master Song absorbs more than it lifts; Winter Lady and Teachers are slight, and Stories of the Street stalls. The height is real and never overwhelming, a little below Low at 8.8.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Myth is built in Suzanne and evoked across the rest. In Suzanne the archetype is load-bearing: the Madonna and the madwoman in one figure, the drowned Christ as a sailor keeping watch, the river as the passage between them, and the singer who must follow both, while the particular holds in a harbour, a woman’s rags and feathers, a cup of tea. The Stranger Song builds a second figure, the gambler who is also Joseph, wanting shelter and unable to stay, and the woman who has housed many such men. Sisters of Mercy makes two travellers into a sacred order. Held below the gate: the frame is assembled from songs rather than built as a whole, Master Song’s master is a shadow, and Teachers and Stories of the Street summon figures that carry no weight.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The inheritance is the folk revival as Dylan had turned it toward literary language, Judy Collins’s art-song folk, and the poet’s own lyric. The turn is real: in 1967, with electric rock at its height, a thirty-three-year-old poet with a narrow baritone made a record of slow, strophic, unamplified songs in a liturgical and erotic diction, over a flamenco-derived guitar figure, with no concession to rock rhythm. The words are the turn more than the music: devotional imagery made intimate, without irony or protest. The stake was real, a published writer staking his name on a voice many heard as unmusical. Held below the gate: Dylan had already made the long literary song popular, and Collins had already carried Suzanne to a public. The swerve is in register, not in kind.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Change the form and part of what the record knows goes with it, but not all. The form carries incantation: long strophic verses over a repeating guitar figure, so that each song is a meditation rather than a drama, and the listener is held inside a slow repetition as the singer is held inside his obsessions. The Stranger Song’s unchanging figure enacts the gambler’s patience. The sequence is counted here, once: an invocation, portraits of rivalry and shelter on side one, leave-takings opening side two, and a bitter end whose collapse into wordless noise turns the record’s restraint inside out. Against it stands the substitution test: these songs pass whole into other arrangements, and the versions of Suzanne by Collins and by Nina Simone keep most of what it knows. The form is a fit vessel more than the instrument of the knowledge, and that holds it under 8.0.

Score: 7.9 / 10

Fifty-nine years supply evidence, and most of it is semantic. The words have drawn continuous return: Cohen’s lyrics are studied as poetry in Canada and beyond, and the songs are taught and annotated. They keep yielding to singers who read them differently, Collins with grace, Simone with gravity, later interpreters more darkly, and Suzanne alone has sustained readings as erotic, religious and civic. The formal yield is smaller: the guitar figures and strophic forms are taken in on first hearing, and return finds little new in the music. Some songs are thin on return, and part of the depth found here is cast back on the first record from Cohen’s later work. The well is deep in the words and shallow in the sound.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The field is the folk and singer-songwriter record of 1967 and the years after. The intrinsic force is real and bounded: the record showed that popular song could carry the grave, devotional and erotic lyric of a serious poet, sung plainly by an untrained voice, and that a whole album could be built in that register. It did not reorganise the music; it reorganised what the words of a popular song could be allowed to weigh, and Dylan had made the larger part of that change first. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: several songs became standards within a few years; Robert Altman built McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) on three of them; and the grave literary singer who came after measures himself against Cohen. Much of that reach runs through the whole career, and that discount holds the figure.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Survival is weighed over fifty-nine years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued and has stayed in print, remastered without change of sequence. Presence is continuous and has widened: Suzanne, So Long, Marianne, Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye and Sisters of Mercy are still sung and broadcast, and the late revival of Cohen’s standing brought listeners back to the first record. Charged: the songs are more present than the album heard whole, and popularity is presence, not proof. The fabric is light, since voice and acoustic guitar carry almost no date, though the female backing parts, some string and jaw-harp colour and the last song’s coda are of 1967. It stands below Kind of Blue at 9.0, which has the widest presence.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Command of the recorded medium. The centre of the making is load-bearing: Cohen’s guitar, fingerpicked in rolling patterns drawn from flamenco and folk, is exact and distinctive, and his voice, narrow in range, is placed close and dry so that its grain and timing carry the meaning; the phrasing of Suzanne and The Stranger Song is a real command. John Simon’s arrangements are uneven. On Suzanne and Sisters of Mercy the added voices and strings are discreet and right; elsewhere they sit on the songs rather than in them, the female voices on So Long, Marianne pleasant and generic, some colour on side two decoration, and the last song ending in a noise that reads as indulgence more than design. The voice’s limits show at the top of its range. It stands below Remain in Light at 8.7 and above It’s My Life at 7.8.

Score: 8.1 / 10

One law governs the record: a low voice addressing women, and through them the sacred, over a repeating acoustic figure, in grave tenderness without irony. Take the two most distant elements: the hushed devotion of Suzanne, and the end of One of Us Cannot Be Wrong, where the singer lights “a thin green candle” to make a lover jealous and the song breaks into wordless howling. They obey the same law: devotion turned sour is still devotion, and the breakdown is the restraint giving way, not a second physics. Otherwise the range is narrow, from waltz to dirge, and narrowness is not coherence: the record holds its law partly because it rarely tests it. The added colour sometimes pulls against the law, and that holds the figure.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held fully, in the singer’s watchful, guilty, devoted self. The couple is held in many forms: the muse, the rival’s lover in Master Song, the woman who houses strangers, the parting in So Long, Marianne. The sacred is held as no other order is, Christ, Joseph, the sisters and the master folded into the erotic rather than set beside it. The city enters as Montreal’s harbour and the street of Stories of the Street; money as the gambler’s trade. Labour, the family beyond lovers, the state, history and the natural order beyond river and winter are absent or glimpsed. Few orders, lying close together and integrated by one voice: that holds the figure lowest on the record, below Remain in Light at 7.6.

Score: 7.3 / 10