From this broken hill / All your praises they shall ring / If it be your will / To let me sing

[petronia]

My mum always called Leonard Cohen "the old monk", because she said that's what he sounded like. She was appropriately amused when he disappeared into a Zen monastery for most of the last decade.

I don't have any trouble remembering that Leonard Cohen is from Montreal, for some reason. (Others I tend to forget. Rufus Wainwright, who is Musical Spawn and there are probably Canadian folkies out there secretly cursing the McGarrigles and Wainwrights for genetically dead-ending even if they got a lovely voice out of the deal, oh well there's always Martha; GY!BE, which for years was the Weird Band Holed Up In a Mile End Warehouse to which the alternative press referred darkly but never properly interviewed - and then they got famous.) Maybe because he went to McGill. But there's a disconnect in my head between the Leonard who wrote Beautiful Losers and the one who's still putting out albums. The former seems to belong to an age long ago, and the latter is merely someone I'm resigned to Never Seeing Him Gig Ever.

I have a number of songs - not a CD's worth - that I think of as "Wolfwood's Hymns". This is one of them. So it is that when Leonard reaches:

If it be your will
If there is a choice
Let the rivers fill
Let the hills rejoice

Let your mercy spill
On all these burning hearts in Hell
If it be your will
To make us well

I start sniffling in a frightening emo way.

Comments

[starlighter.livejournal.com]

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Uhh... (Am drunk off my ass on white crane sake.) Leonard Cohen, "If It Be Your Will". Nick Cave, "Into My Arms". "Angel Band", my version of which is with Joan Baez but it's probably a real hymn. "Hallelujah" - Leonard Cohen again - which is definitely not a real hymn but does well as V/W. There's a loverly Jeff Buckley cover of that one.

More, but I can't remember. (I'll post them. Should've thought to do it last afternoon.) Mostly they're love songs that sound like darkly contemplative hymns, which frankly is a fair description of *all* Leonard Cohen's music. I think I have this vague theory that a bunch of Leonard Cohen / Nick Cave songs survived the original crash landing and eventually made their way into the hymnal of whichever flavour of Christianity Wolfwood practices - because really, who's to know the difference?