Songs Of Leonard Cohen

Product Information

This collection is a companion piece to the new documentary Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song,which premieres at Tribeca Festivalthis month, and was also an official selection at 2021 Venice Film Festival and 2021 Telluride Festival. The film is a definitive exploration of the singer-songwriter as seen through the prism of Cohen’s internationally renowned hymn “Hallelujah.” Approved for production by Leonard Cohen just before his 80 thbirthday in 2014, the film accesses a wealth of never-before-seen archival materials from the Cohen Family Trust, including Cohen’s personal notebooks, journals and photographs, performance footage, and extremely rare audio recordings and interviews.The feature-length documentary contains movingtestimonies from personal friends of Leonard’s such as Adrienne Clarkson and Larry “Ratso” Sloman, and recording artists for whom “Hallelujah” has become a personal touchstone like Judy Collins, Brandi Carlile, and Rufus Wainwright.

Leonard Cohen had been a friend since 1982 or so, and in the last 15 years of his life, he became a close friend,” says Klein. “He was possibly the wisest and funniest friend that I had, and someone that I enjoyed, immensely, in every way. After he passed away, I found myself frequently covering his songs with other artists that I was working with. One reason, of course, is that the songs are so good—in a certain way, Leonard is the best pop songwriter ever—but the other reason was that it helped keep him in the air around me.” When Cohen died, at age 82, though still not a household name, he was roundly recognized as one of the great songwriters, his work admired across the globe. “He said in his last interview that he was ready to die, and he said in his last public outing that he would live forever. Both are true,” De Mornay, then 57, told the press in a statement. “There was no one like him, and there never will be.” The Future is murder, and it’s reconciliation, resurrection, endless love; it’s Mozart and it’s bubblegum. Both are true.His first collection of poetry, Let Us Compare Mythologies, was published in 1956, followed by The Spice Box of Earth in 1961. After traveling throughout Europe, he settled on the Greek island of Hydra, where he stayed for seven years. There he wrote another collection of poetry, Flowers for Hitler (1964), and two novels, The Favorite Game (1963) and Beautiful Losers (1966). In 1967, Cohen moved to the United States to pursue a career as a folk musician. In 1994, Cohen retreated to the Mt. Baldy Zen Center near Los Angeles, beginning what became five years of seclusion at the center. In 1996, Cohen was ordained as a Rinzai Zen Buddhist monk and took the Dharma name "Jikan", meaning "silence". The Future’s liner notes begin with a quote from the book of Genesis, in dedication to De Mornay, and there are moments across the album when Cohen’s familiar lust hints at something more lasting. The achy-breaky fiddle-country of “Closing Time,” every bit as flush with significance as The Future’s more topical songs, paints an uproarious scene of boozy barroom hookups—someone’s “rubbing half the world against her thigh,” the drinks are spiked with LSD, and the Holy Spirit wonders, “ Where’s the beef?”—but a confession of love lies at its heart. The musical-chairs moment when last call ends and single bar patrons couple up acts as a nifty metaphor for how anyone finds a meaningful connection with anybody. Cohen, of course, states his intentions more existentially: “I loved you for your body/There’s a voice that sounds like God to me/Declaring that your body’s really you.” If Cohen is a seeker, he comes across as very lost to my ears, standing at the junction of Disorientation and Dysphoria, filled with the construct and pleasure of his own insecurities. Yet even this argument is embraced by Mr. Cohen with glee, where with his Jewish heritage, being lost in the wilderness is seen as a precursor to enlightenment. As to the depressive nature of his being, well who wasn’t depressed during the mid 60’s, both Kennedy’s were assassinated, as was Martin Luther King, we had the war in Viet Nam raging, television commercials were coopting everything we held dear, students were being shot on campus, civil rights workers were murdered and honesty, we were realizing that we couldn’t get the truth from nearly anyone for any reason. Elsewhere, Cohen’s tormented search for transcendence leads him in a more self-consciously meta direction. The results can be confounding but also profound. His games with high-gloss production begin to drag on “Light as the Breeze,” a schmaltzy ode to oral sex (“So I knelt there at the delta/At the alpha, and the omega/At the cradle of the river and the seas…”). But the song is most fascinating for how it doubles, once again, as a paean to inspiration itself. Cohen sings about “sleeping in your harness,” a phrase he also used in an interview to describe his all-consuming life’s work: The songwriter as a dog forever tied to his sled, disciplined and attentive even when he’s at rest. Puppets,” the final video from the posthumous album Thanks for the Dance is released today, commemorating the fifth anniversary of Cohen’s passing (November 7 th, 2016). The video marks the return of director Daniel Askill, who also created the “Happens to the Heart” video. Daniel worked closely with Leonard’s son, Adam Cohen, on this closing cinematic vision, the last of five videos created for the album. Watch “Puppets” here.

Leonard Cohen was a Canadian poet, singer, and songwriter born on September 21, 1934, in Montreal, Quebec. He passed away on November 7, 2016, in Los Angeles, California. Cohen's artistic journey began with the publication of his poetry collections "Let Us Compare Mythologies" (1956) and "The Spice Box of Earth" (1961). After spending time in Europe, he settled on the Greek island of Hydra where he wrote more poetry and novels. In 1967, Cohen moved to the United States to pursue a career as a folk musician. Despite his success, Cohen sought solace at the Mt. Baldy Zen Center near Los Angeles where he spent five years immersed in seclusion. During this time, he became ordained as a Rinzai Zen Buddhist monk under the name "Jikan," meaning "silence." Leonard Cohen's legacy lives on through his timeless music So Klein decided to assemble an album’s worth of Cohen songs, matching vocalists from different genres with an exceptional core band of jazz-based musicians—or, as he puts it, “a group of the most prescient and forward-looking musicians in the jazz world”—guitarist Bill Frisell, saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins, pianist Kevin Hays, bassist Scott Colley, and drummer Nate Smith with additional contributions from Greg Leisz on pedal steel guitar and Larry Goldings on organ.It was an immensely gratifying experience to recontextualize these poems, and shine a different light on them,” Klein continues. “I hope that this musical language that we developed together, the context that we put these things in, makes the songs connect with people in a new way.” One of The Future’s breakthroughs was bringing Cohen’s apocalyptic stand-up routine into the sharper context afforded by the fall, in 1989, of the Berlin Wall. “It was a universal event, like David and Goliath, like the Crucifixion,” Cohen explained. The collapse of the Iron Curtain and the breakup of the Soviet Union were cause for celebration among most liberal Western observers. Not so much for Cohen, who foresaw a “tremendous” cost in human suffering that would come with the shifting political tides.

Leonard Cohen was born September 21,1934, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada and died November 7, 2016 in Los Angeles, California, USA. He was a Canadian poet, singer and songwriter. The father of Adam Cohen and Lorca Cohen. The ‘Songs’ trilogy: Songs of Leonard Cohen, Songs From A Room and Songs of Love and Hate are reissued on vinyl on 29 April 2016. Selected items are only available for delivery via the Royal Mail 48® service and other items are available for delivery using this service for a charge. You’ll receive what you’ll allow yourself to believe from these songs, expect nothing less and very little more.Democracy, Cohen suggested in interviews, won’t live up to the old Enlightenment goal of a less stratified, more egalitarian culture where everyday people learn to “love Shakespeare and Beethoven.” He said, “It’s going to come up in unexpected ways from the stuff that we think is junk: the people we think are junk, the ideas we think are junk, the television we think is junk.” It’s a testament to the song’s artistry that “Democracy” can be heard both as a dire prediction of a vulgar reality-show U.S. presidency and as a Tocqueville-esque cosmopolitan observer’s stirring celebration of the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.