Weekly music upload
Jul. 11th, 2006 08:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
petroniaAt some point in the recent past I promised Bell Leonard Cohen songs, so here are some Leonard Cohen songs. It's not a particularly careful selection, I may add to the folder when I have time. XD My top 5 is easy (and personal) but back catalogue is huge, we could be here for hours.
I had plenty of leisure to think about this during the Paul Simon tribute concert, squished on all sides by the crowd - it actually is entirely possible not to be familiar with songs like "Suzanne" or "The Sound of Silence", depending on one's age and parents' listening habits. (I still am basically ignorant re: much of the Beatles.) But play something often enough and like it in your pre-teens and it hardwires itself into your DNA, you can't approach it in the same way as someone who's hearing it for the first time at age 25. Thinking about it the dorky catechism class teaching assistant who ran the choir after-school practice in seventh grade had a much greater influence on my music taste than warranted.
So I don't really know how to talk about this. Also, I'm tired. So I'm just going to ramble stupidly. XD
Re Leonard Cohen my guess is that when a good cover is extant, people are going to prefer the cover, not just because of the voice but because the arrangements could stand to lose the tinny-synth-drum-pad-cheese habits he picked up during the 80s. The voice is of course something else. XD One situates the tracks chronologically according to how gravelly they sound, Ten New Songs approximates a quarry landslide. My mother always complained he sounded like "an old monk mumbling sutras" (and then laughed her head off when he joined a Zen monastery) but my father and I consider it a selling point.
Leonard Cohen - By the Rivers Dark (this is a Vagrant Story songcall for me)
...It must be a selling point for my dad, anyway, because he doesn't pay attention to or engage with the lyrics of English songs at all. ^^; Not listening to Leonard Cohen's lyrics is a feat in itself. Generally speaking song lyrics can be poetic but not poetry; they resort to shorthand, internal redundancy, spaces left for the music to occupy. Leonard Cohen at his best has no redundancy. Every word is that word, the whole like a water-polished onyx pebble. I learnt a lot about writing just from listening to "Famous Blue Raincoat" or "Dance Me to the End of Love" over and over.
(But why write anything at all when "Famous Blue Raincoat" already exists? ...I remember reading this one Weiss Kreuz fic that was a direct paraphrase in prose of said song with the names changed, so clearly I'm not the only person with this idea. XD)
There's something Jewish about it, not just all the Old Testament imagery or how "Dance Me to the End of Love" kind of sounds like klezmer. Assume the right word spoken in the right way at the right time by the right being can give life to a lump of clay or an entire universe and the imperative to be careful - but that doesn't explain why I relate. Leonard Cohen is a very serious JuBu, though, in that he's both seriously Jewish and seriously Buddhist. XD
"Hallelujah", "If It Be Your Will", etc. could as well be Christian. Judeo-Christian.
I have an aesthetic connection to Catholicism that more or less recapitulates the Japanese version thereof i.e. not on the gut level, guilt and faith being largely foreign to my constitution. But "If It Be Your Will" hits me in a way that has nothing to do with that. I honestly don't know what button it's pushing.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mrmoonpants got it too, with her SSBB story, I cried until I couldn't see. ^^;
Leonard Cohen anecdote #1: In CEGEP I had English class with this wannabe beatnik? hippie? girl who wore tie-dye kerchiefs and wrote, and the talisman book she carried at all times was Beautiful Losers. Later she had a poem in the student lit journal titled - memorably - "Leonard Cohen and the Blender", about a sonic battle between Leonard Cohen and a blender. Actually I'm not even sure she wrote it, but I don't see that it could've been anyone else. It was a better poem than anything I was turning out at the time and I still like it. Arguably it was Last Plane To Jakarta-style musicbloggery five years early. XD She came up with the perfect word to describe Leonard Cohen's backup singers: "bouffant". Bouffant backup singers.
Leonard Cohen - So Long, Marianne (am way too young for this to sound to me like being fourteen again XD;;;)
Leonard Cohen anecdote #2: Dave would tell the story of how his grandfather was the social hub of the expat community forty years back, in Greece or maybe Istanbul or Algiers, I don't really remember. He was having a beach party one day and some skinny kid came walking through the surf with his guitar and asked if he could play them some songs. So Dave's grandfather heard out an early version of "Bird on the Wire", told the kid not to quit his day job and sent him packing. XD
Previous posts on Leonard Cohen, not to repeat myself too much XD: 1 | 2 | 3 and that's not even all there is to it. I blog about Leonard Cohen on average once every three months.
Re: JoJo, will continue summaries of part 6 tonight. I'm on volume 78 and it's messing with my head big-time.
I had plenty of leisure to think about this during the Paul Simon tribute concert, squished on all sides by the crowd - it actually is entirely possible not to be familiar with songs like "Suzanne" or "The Sound of Silence", depending on one's age and parents' listening habits. (I still am basically ignorant re: much of the Beatles.) But play something often enough and like it in your pre-teens and it hardwires itself into your DNA, you can't approach it in the same way as someone who's hearing it for the first time at age 25. Thinking about it the dorky catechism class teaching assistant who ran the choir after-school practice in seventh grade had a much greater influence on my music taste than warranted.
So I don't really know how to talk about this. Also, I'm tired. So I'm just going to ramble stupidly. XD
Re Leonard Cohen my guess is that when a good cover is extant, people are going to prefer the cover, not just because of the voice but because the arrangements could stand to lose the tinny-synth-drum-pad-cheese habits he picked up during the 80s. The voice is of course something else. XD One situates the tracks chronologically according to how gravelly they sound, Ten New Songs approximates a quarry landslide. My mother always complained he sounded like "an old monk mumbling sutras" (and then laughed her head off when he joined a Zen monastery) but my father and I consider it a selling point.
Leonard Cohen - By the Rivers Dark (this is a Vagrant Story songcall for me)
...It must be a selling point for my dad, anyway, because he doesn't pay attention to or engage with the lyrics of English songs at all. ^^; Not listening to Leonard Cohen's lyrics is a feat in itself. Generally speaking song lyrics can be poetic but not poetry; they resort to shorthand, internal redundancy, spaces left for the music to occupy. Leonard Cohen at his best has no redundancy. Every word is that word, the whole like a water-polished onyx pebble. I learnt a lot about writing just from listening to "Famous Blue Raincoat" or "Dance Me to the End of Love" over and over.
(But why write anything at all when "Famous Blue Raincoat" already exists? ...I remember reading this one Weiss Kreuz fic that was a direct paraphrase in prose of said song with the names changed, so clearly I'm not the only person with this idea. XD)
There's something Jewish about it, not just all the Old Testament imagery or how "Dance Me to the End of Love" kind of sounds like klezmer. Assume the right word spoken in the right way at the right time by the right being can give life to a lump of clay or an entire universe and the imperative to be careful - but that doesn't explain why I relate. Leonard Cohen is a very serious JuBu, though, in that he's both seriously Jewish and seriously Buddhist. XD
"Hallelujah", "If It Be Your Will", etc. could as well be Christian. Judeo-Christian.
I have an aesthetic connection to Catholicism that more or less recapitulates the Japanese version thereof i.e. not on the gut level, guilt and faith being largely foreign to my constitution. But "If It Be Your Will" hits me in a way that has nothing to do with that. I honestly don't know what button it's pushing.
mrmoonpants got it too, with her SSBB story, I cried until I couldn't see. ^^;Leonard Cohen anecdote #1: In CEGEP I had English class with this wannabe beatnik? hippie? girl who wore tie-dye kerchiefs and wrote, and the talisman book she carried at all times was Beautiful Losers. Later she had a poem in the student lit journal titled - memorably - "Leonard Cohen and the Blender", about a sonic battle between Leonard Cohen and a blender. Actually I'm not even sure she wrote it, but I don't see that it could've been anyone else. It was a better poem than anything I was turning out at the time and I still like it. Arguably it was Last Plane To Jakarta-style musicbloggery five years early. XD She came up with the perfect word to describe Leonard Cohen's backup singers: "bouffant". Bouffant backup singers.
Leonard Cohen - So Long, Marianne (am way too young for this to sound to me like being fourteen again XD;;;)
Leonard Cohen anecdote #2: Dave would tell the story of how his grandfather was the social hub of the expat community forty years back, in Greece or maybe Istanbul or Algiers, I don't really remember. He was having a beach party one day and some skinny kid came walking through the surf with his guitar and asked if he could play them some songs. So Dave's grandfather heard out an early version of "Bird on the Wire", told the kid not to quit his day job and sent him packing. XD
Previous posts on Leonard Cohen, not to repeat myself too much XD: 1 | 2 | 3 and that's not even all there is to it. I blog about Leonard Cohen on average once every three months.
Re: JoJo, will continue summaries of part 6 tonight. I'm on volume 78 and it's messing with my head big-time.
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no subject
Date: 2006-07-11 11:09 pm (UTC)Now I'm curious. Which ssbb story was that?
no subject
Date: 2006-07-13 02:42 am (UTC)And also apparently developing an appreciation for Leonard Cohen's voice after a long period of only listening to songs I could find nice covers of.
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Date: 2006-07-13 03:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-11 11:36 pm (UTC)I don't know 75% of Beatles stuff either, though it surprises me how much I DO know and just didn't realize was the Beatles. XD Songs like "Get Back" I think I heard a few times as a kid, but I didn't really remember well and basically can say I recently got into (and you know why XD). Other songs, like "Help!" or "Yellow Submarine" or "Hey Jude" or "Michelle" are basically buried so deep in my brain that I can't even concieve of NOT knowing them. (And still other songs, like "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" I got into somewhere in the time between and do not associate with "oldies". XD)
no subject
Date: 2006-07-12 01:52 pm (UTC)No, no carbonite in my case!
no subject
Date: 2006-07-13 03:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-12 03:04 am (UTC)And oddly enough, I hadn't really heard many of their classics (e.g. - "In My Life") or even THEIR version of the song (e.g. - "Michelle" and "Yesterday") until that time.
no subject
Date: 2006-07-12 01:50 pm (UTC)The only "Suzanne" I know is by Tori Amos which is... *checks* indeed a Cohen cover. (You want? It's off her latest set of live cds.) How 'bout that. This happens all the time-- I think I don't know an artist, and it ends up that I know their songs well enough to sing parts of it. I just didn't know it was theirs.
Thanks for the mp3s! I'll let you know how this particular mid-20s gal, with a solide connection with music from the 80s, reacts. :D
no subject
Date: 2006-07-13 03:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-13 04:04 pm (UTC)