Old Ideas

*Crossposted at Classical Values.*

Let me admit that I have a bad Leonard Cohen habit.  In fact, the only reason boy #2 is not named Leonard is that my husband put his foot down and said “No” fairly emphatically.

As with Heinlein, I’m one of the odd fans of Cohen, the ones who prefer late Cohen, very mature Cohen, over the Cohen of the seventies.

I’d always liked his music.  Dance Me To The End Of Love is Dan’s and my song, as much as we can be said to have “a song.”  (Our musical tastes tend to be diametric opposites.  Yes, it’s possible to be happily married despite that.  This is why G-d invented headphones.)

But when Ten New Songs came out, I remember I saved listening to it till I’d finished cleaned the house.  Then I sat down in my office, to do some editing and put the album in.  There I was, in freshly clean and vacuumed office, with a cup of tea, ready to do some work.  Then the songs hit.  And … oh my.  I found myself just closing my eyes to enjoy them and not getting much else done.

The difference between young Cohen and old Cohen is the difference between unaged Port Wine and Port Wine properly aged in oak barrels.  One can be drunk lightly chilled as refreshment in summer – or listened to as a background to life – the other needs your full attention and will make you moan in sheer pleasure.

Still I confess I had some misgivings about his newest album Old Ideas, because the man is pushing 78 and how many people can sing at that age.

Well, I ordered it, and my husband ordered it for me.  I cancelled my order, and his came through.

First of all, if you’ve never listened Cohen let me point out that part of his attraction is highly targeted and part, probably, acquired taste.  I can’t speak to the acquired taste.  I started listening to him before ten, because my much older brother listened to him.  I don’t remember not liking his songs.  (Yes, including Don’t Go Home With Your Hardon.  Everytime I talk about Cohen SOMEONE brings this song up as if in the hope of shocking me.  Oh, please.  Have ya’ll read what I write?  There are things that shock me deeply.  Consensual sex is never one of them.)  Part of it (part of the targeted thing) is that Cohen’s mix of mysticism, sex, religious (several religions) fascination and beautiful, exalted language (in most cases) acts like catnip to people like me.  Oh, h*ll, it couldn’t be more targeted to me if he’d stopped in the middle of the song and said “This is for you Mrs. Sarah Hoyt, sitting there on your chair, surrounded by high falluting books and writing compulsively as though some higher power tells you to.  Yes, you, who have a complicated relationship with the fact that when you weren’t paying attention some bastard encumbered you with a physical body.  Yes, you, who believes in G-d almost despite herself and who has an even more complicated relationship with Him, which includes trying to discuss the plot of your life.”

And yet, as I said, as I put this album in the MP3 player with some trepidation.  There’s nothing like watching the decay of a great artist to drive home to the rest of us that we too are mortal.

In a way my fears were justified.  This album is very much about the artist and mortality.  On the other hand, my fears were insane, because this song takes the artistic fears, the mortality, the lack of control over our own careers, the creativity that goes where it lists, and the hankering for something beyond and above ourselves that we can almost touch at the edge of our creative jags.  As for how Cohen sounds, the best way to put it was the comment on one of the youtube videos “He sounds so very nearly dead and so, so good.”

The minute the first song started playing, I found myself in tears, because it is so much “artist at the end of life.”  (On this, I’d like to point out that the Canadian reviewer of this album is an ignoramus, being totally puzzled by “a brief elaboration of a tube.”  Kids – as far as it goes, evolutionarily, we are.  Also, there’s the sexual innuendo, which with Cohen you have to assume is intended.)   That is one of my favorite songs, probably for this part “He wants to write a love song/an anthem of forgiving/a manual of rliving with defeat/ A cry above the suffering/A sacrifice recovering/But that isn’t what I need him/ to complete.”  As someone who just recently found herself writing A Few Good Men and ignoring the three books under contract, let me tell you this sounds “right.”

As for the refrain “Going home/Without my burden/Going home/Behind the curtain/Going home/Without the Costume/That I wore.” anyone who believes in anything more hereafter can resonate with that.

Next is Amen and to me it has a special impact, partly because… Well, ya’ll know I write to music, right?  Well.  I tried and tried and tried to write The Brave And The Free, but I couldn’t tune in to the main character or to the voice character.  And then this started playing, and suddenly I HAD it.

Show me the place is another artist end of life song and it is full of religious imagery.

Darkness and Anyhow are not among my favorites, but they are still better than most other songs.

Crazy To Love You works on so many levels, from love affairs, to my relationship to my (admittedly fraught) career. I keep finding the words “Had to do time in the tower/Begging my crazy to quit” and also “Crazy has places to hide in/Deeper than saying goodbye” coming to my mind unbidden.  There are nods to Buddhism (when being confused between two religions isn’t enough, or why Sarah became a Buddhist at 12 though she got over it by fourteen.) such as “I’m tired of choosing desire/Been saved by a sweet fatigue.”
Come Healing is clearly a blessing song and it will touch you if you’re the kind to be touched by that.

Banjo – and we’re back to the relationship between art and artist.  Weirdly, within minutes of the release of the album there were MISHEARD lyrics for it on line that were ALMOST worthy of Cohen: “There’s something that I’m watching/Means a lot to me/It’s a broken angel bobbing/On the dark infested sea.”  The word should be banjo, not angel, but I can see why the confusion.

Lullaby – is just that.

Different sides is very much a religious song, with allusions to the separation of the surface being from another (clearly G-d, becasue “You to your side, call the Word.”) while “up above” there’s unity.  Of course my joke having always been that whatever Cohen wrote he was writing love songs to G-d, in one of the most misguided attempts at courtship since my (fixed) cat tried to copulate with my toe, I think this song is a marital argument.  And it’s magnificent.  “Both of us say there are laws to obey/But frankly I don’t like your tone.”

Anyway, I’m going to listen to Amen again, and then write the first chapter of the Brave And The Free again.

“Tell me again, when I’m clean and I’m sober/Tell me again when I’ve seen through the horror/Tell me that you love me then.”