Читать книгу The Mojo Collection - Various Mojo Magazine - Страница 112

Record label: Columbia

Produced: John Simon

Recorded: Columbia Records Studio E, New York; August 1967

Released: December 27, 1967 (limited release); February 1968 (full release)

Chart peaks: 13 (UK) 83 (US)

Personnel: Leonard Cohen (v, g)

Track listing: Suzanne (S); Master Song; Winter Lady; The Stranger Song; Sisters Of Mercy; So Long Marianne (S); Hey That’s No Way To Say Goodbye; Stories Of The Street; Teachers; One Of Us Cannot Be Wrong

Running time: 41.09

Current CD: Sony 5051362

Further listening: His debut’s immediate successors Songs From A Room (1969) and Songs Of Love And Hate (1971) continued Cohen’s soul-mining in similar manner. Later albums are less reliable, but 1988’s superb I’m Your Man is one of rock’s more notable comeback successes

Further reading: Leonard Cohen – A Life In Art (Ira Nadel, 1994); www.leonardcohenfiles.com

Download: HMV Digital; iTunes

Having made his reputation as a poet and novelist through the late ’50s and ’60s, Canadian songwriter Leonard Cohen originally intended to go to Nashville to become a country singer, but had been, as he put it, ‘hijacked’ by New York, where he lived for a while in the mid-’60s at the notorious bohemian domicile The Chelsea Hotel. His plan was to ‘make a record, make some money, and go back to writing books’, although he found the ordeal of performance particularly gruelling to begin with.

Signed by legendary Columbia A&R man John Hammond after Judy Collins had featured his song Suzanne on her In My Life album, Cohen made an immediate impression with this debut album, whose sombre sepia cover hinted at the sometimes unflinching nature of the contents. Already well into his thirties by the time of its release, Cohen’s work boasted a maturity and emotional intensity denied to the more youthful singer-songwriters that had appeared in Bob Dylan’s wake. The album’s songs dealt with personal issues, mostly this legendary ladies’ man’s relationships with women – particularly Norwegian girlfriend Marianne Jensen, whom he met during his time on the Greek island of Hydra, where he had spent much of the preceding decade (she’s in the rear sleeve photo of his second album Songs From A Room). Both So Long Marianne and Hey That’s No Way To Say Goodbye were responses to their gradually failing relationship, while Suzanne celebrated his subsequent partnership with Suzanne Elrod, who would bear Cohen’s children Adam Nathan and Lorca Sarah.

Sung in his characteristic lugubrious baritone over rippling waves of fingerstyle acoustic guitar, Cohen’s songs possessed a brooding intimacy which proved surprisingly erotic: Songs Of Leonard Cohen remains, along with Tim Buckley’s Happy Sad and Tim Hardin’s first two albums, one of the masterpieces of boudoir-folk-rock. At the time, however, critics like the Village Voice’s Richard Goldstein castigated him for being a ‘Visceral Romantic … who suffers gloriously in every couplet’, crystallising a notion of Cohen as gloomily self-indulgent that would take years of wry drollery to dispel.