Tonight you were the bearer of bad tidings, Mac. This hits me rather hard. What a great songwriter he was.

Bad news to wake up to. I listened to his music growing up, and got interested in it in my late teens - my parents had his albums hanging around. I didn't really understand any of it for a long while, though I remember grilling my mother for a verse-by verse explanation of the song "Teachers" at one point. (She thought no-one else really understood Cohen's songs either, possibly including Cohen himself.)

His last album was excellent, if dark. I was actually curious when you'd get round to reviewing it, Craig.

I've heard very little of Cohen's music, but what I've heard I've liked. He's just one of those people that I missed along the way, although I know how well respected his music is. RIP.

That is very moving.

AMDG

Mac: it depends what you mean by "coherent", but I know what you mean about Dylan, whose work often contained strange cryptic imagery and you have to guess whether there's a hidden meaning or he's just throwing words at the wall to see what sticks. I tend towards an over-literal, analytical approach towards things; part of the reason I like listening to Cohen is the way his music supplies something that resists precise analysis and says things in a way where I'm not quite sure how it works or why. (I grant that poetry in general works this way; why Cohen's stuff fascinated me so much, I cannot tell.) I first listened to it about 20 years ago but I still couldn't tell you what "The Master Song" is all about, for example.

(There's a story - I can't find the article I read about it right now, and the articles I can find don't have the relevant quotes - about how the Isle of Wight festival in the 70s was gatecrashed by angry violent hippies who went around throwing bottles at the musicians and setting fire to stuff, and everyone was panicking until Cohen went on stage, slightly drugged and indifferent to everything except whether someone could find him an organ or keyboard, and then proceeded to calm the angry hippies by saying weird Leonard Cohenish things to them until they turned peaceful. He also, apparently, toured mental hospitals for a while.)

Hmm. It's easier to say which ones to avoid. I have never heard Death of A Ladies Man, which is kind of famous as a catastrophe--produced by Phil Spector. Pretty much universally disparaged. Skip Dear Heather. I would not recommend his latest until or unless you decide you really like him, because it's basically him reciting lyrics over musical arrangements by his son Adam. It's good, and very powerful in its way, but not a true album of *songs*.

Other than that: I'm partial to Recent Songs, Various Positions, and I'm Your Man. One of those latter, maybe both, has some kind of dated-sounding 1980s arrangements. VP includes "Hallelujah", which you've surely heard. It's a great song but for me has sort of been run into the ground. (Everybody except me seems to love Jeff Buckley's version, but to me it's way overblown.) Future Songs. Ten Songs (great songs, somewhat cheesy arrangements). The first album, Songs Of, is more florid than most later ones. The second, Songs From A Room, is more austere and is a sentimental favorite of mine--it includes the "Nancy" song in the video above. I don't like Songs of Love and Hate as well as a lot of people seem to, though it has several of his better songs. It also has a suicide song, "Dress Rehearsal Rag," which some people find induces the same mood in them as in the song's speaker, but I always just found it kind of tiresome. And it seems rather un-LC-ish to me (that song, not the album as a whole).

Really, now that I run through them, most of the albums seem a bit uneven to me--each one has at least a couple of songs that I'm indifferent to. But the great stuff is so great.... I'll be interested in hearing your opinion.

Btw I realized, upon LC's death, that there is an album besides Ladies Man that I haven't heard: New Skin for the Old Ceremony, though I've heard several of the songs (via mixtapes from a friend). Have to get that one. There were also two late ones before this final one which I've never properly listened to, because I thought he was probably finished with Dear Heather, which preceded them. I need to remedy that.

I agree with you about Jeff Buckley, Mac. If I need to hear someone else sing it I go with kd lang.

Though I have to say that Kate McKinnon did a very nice job (as Hillary Clinton) on the SNL following the election. :)

"most of the albums seem a bit uneven to me--each one has at least a couple of songs that I'm indifferent to. But the great stuff is so great..."

Funny -- that's almost exactly the way I feel about Van Morrison's stuff. Even the really good albums tend to have at least one clunker, and the bad ones usually have a gem or two.

Thanks for the tips!

There is a little paragraph under the song title on Wikipedia about kd lang singing it, Mac. I tried to cut and paste and send to you unsuccessfully, but it is interesting enough that you might seek out and read.

I think Cohen's fans, at least the more enthusiastic ones, are very aware of his Jewishness, Marianne. He's discussed it in a lot of interviews. There's also a lot of Catholic influence in his songs, which I think he once attributed partly to having had a Catholic nurse or housekeeper or something when he was growing up.

!!!
My two favorite Van Morrison albums are Poetic Champions Compose and Hymns to the Silence. Both from probably late 80s, early 90s.

:)

I'm not as big a fan of the early Van stuff, being first exposed to him around 1980. But I like most of the stuff he did between the late 70s and the early 90's. My favorites are Inarticulate Speech of the Heart, No Guru, No Method, No Teacher, and Enlightenment. No Guru... is generally considered his best 80's record. Hymns to the Silence (1991) is the last record of his that I really like; to me everything since then has seemed fairly spotty.

I guess I like the spiritual/mystical Van better than the jazzy/bluesy Van.

Yeah, I think that if you listened to, say, No Guru... and Enlightenment, you'd probably have a good idea whether you wanted to pursue it further.