The Songs of Leonard Cohen

Released: 27th December 1967

Track Listing

Side A

"Suzanne" – 3:48

"Master Song" – 5:55

"Winter Lady" – 2:15

"The Stranger Song" – 5:00

"Sisters of Mercy" – 3:32

Side B

"So Long, Marianne" – 5:38

"Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye" – 2:55

"Stories of the Street" – 4:35

"Teachers" – 3:01

"One of Us Cannot Be Wrong" – 4:23

Album from: https://www.heavenfieldrecords.com/

£3.99.

Songs of Leonard Cohen is the debut album by Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, released on December 27, 1967, on Columbia Records. Less successful in the US than in Europe, Songs of Leonard Cohen foreshadowed the kind of chart success Cohen would go on to achieve. It reached number 83 on the Billboard 200. It peaked at number 13 on the UK Albums Chart, spending nearly a year and a half on it.

Cohen had received positive attention from critics as a poet and novelist but had maintained a keen interest in music, having played guitar in a country and western band called the Buckskin Boys as a teenager. In 1966, Cohen set out for Nashville, where he hoped to become a country songwriter, but instead got caught up in New York City's folk scene. In November 1966, Judy Collins recorded "Suzanne" for her album In My Life and Cohen soon came to the attention of record producer John Hammond. Although Hammond (who initially signed Cohen to his contract with Columbia Records) was supposed to produce the record, he became sick and was replaced by the producer John Simon.^[4]

Initially, Hammond had Cohen work up guitar parts for "Master Song" and "Sisters of Mercy" with jazz bassist Willie Ruff, and then brought in some of New York's top session musicians to join them, a move that made Cohen nervous; as biographer Anthony Reynolds observes in his book Leonard Cohen: A Remarkable Life, the dynamic between Cohen and Ruff had been intimate and natural but "the arrival of more anonymous personnel unnerved Cohen, the studio novice put off by their proficiency." Cohen did ask that a full-length mirror be brought into the studio because, as he explained to Mojo in November 2001, "through some version of narcissism, I always used to play in front of a mirror. I guess it was the best way to look while playing the guitar, or maybe it was just where the chair was. But I was very comfortable looking at myself playing." After Hammond dropped out of the sessions, John Simon took over as producer and, by all accounts, Simon and Cohen clashed over instrumentation and mixing; Cohen wanted the album to have a sparse sound, while Simon felt the songs could benefit from arrangements that included strings and horns. Writing for Mojo in 2012, Sylvie Simmons recalls, "When Leonard heard the result, he was not happy; the orchestration on 'Suzanne' was overblown, while everything about 'Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye' felt too soft. Several tracks had too much bottom, and there were even drums; Leonard had clearly stipulated no drums." The singer and producer also quarreled over a slight stop in the middle of "So Long, Marianne" – a device Cohen felt interrupted the song. According to biographer Ira Nadel, although Cohen was able to make changes to the mix, some of Simon's additions "couldn't be removed from the four-track master tape".^[4]

From Wikipedia

Cohen was 33 when he released his first album and was well established as a poet and writer, although it seems he was interested in making music from a young age. For all that, this first album does amount to a set of poems each with a simple guitar accompaniment. Almost as if the music is just an enhancement to the meter of the recital. In fact when ‘Hey, That’s No Way To Say Goodbye’ starts up, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was just a reprise of ‘Suzanne’.

The opening song, and one of his best known, was covered by Judy Collins in the previous year (1966, the year of the poem’s publication), but she either dropped the lines:

Now, Suzanne takes your hand and she leads you to the river
She's wearing rags and feathers from Salvation Army counters

or Cohen modified these lines after her recording. Whatever the explanation, Collins doesn’t mention the Sally Army. The song, has a relentlessness, partly due to the aforementioned simple arrangement and brings in two of Cohen’s key themes, the complexitiies of male-female relationships and religion. Now Cohen is Jewish, but he does seem to focus more on Christianity in his songs and I’m not sure Jesus comes out of the song all that well. It comes up again on ‘The Stranger Song’ with “He was just some Joseph looking for a manger” and suggests (to me) that he sees the whole thing as a bit of a scam. The imagery on ‘The Stranger Song’ also draws on games of chance, which I believe will come up again in Cohen’s work.

Sisters Of Mercy has religious overtones as well, but was apparently written on a stormy night in Edmonton after taking a couple of hitchhikers under his wing and putting them up in his hotel room. While they sat on the bed, Cohen apparently knocked the song out overnight.

My copy of the album had some scratches at the start of Side 2. Nothing serious but ‘So Long Marianne’ was affected by a couple of early jumps. It’s actually a pretty straightforward song. Memory tinged with regret for a relationship from which both parties have moved on.

‘Stories of the Street’ is clearly set in Havana with “spanish voices” and “cadillacs” in the street. He was there in the early sixties when being a Canadian was probably his best protection against being prosecuted for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I’m guessing a woman’s hair is pretty important to Leonard’s first impression of her. Hair of various shades spread across pillows and beds feature a lot, including on ‘Teachers’ which has a rather complex musical arrangement to accompany the gabbled lyric.

Cohen has an undeserved reputation for bleakness, but whilst these songs can’t be described as cheerful, the mood is not necessarily sad. His voice is also much lighter than might be expected. In his later years he used to rumble away with a great basso profundo, but here he is reedy and plaintive.