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agree that lennie hasn't made a good lp since i'm your man
I can't agree with that, because The Future is probably my favourite Cohen album and Ten New Songs isn't too far behind. Admittedly the last one was rubbish, but IIRC it was meant to be an experimental low-key release and only became "the new Leonard Cohen" because of his financial problems.
Another massive Cohen fan checking in. It all began with Everybody Knows for me, too, a song which I heard in the Atom Egoyan film Exotica. It's the soundtrack to a striptease in the movie, which looking back I find a little unlikely. Even in a Canadian strip club they recognise the importance of keeping the customers upbeat, surely? I heard the song in about 1997 and downloaded it off Napster three years later. Ten New Songs was my first album, I think because it was cheap, and there are some fantastic songs on there, Boogie Street and In My Secret Life especially. Okay, texturally they suffer from being too similar to each other but what Cohen album's free of that?
I meant to start a thread like this because I wanted to rave about a new album of Cohen covers (always something of a cottage industry) called, unhelpfully, I'm Your Man. The show it comes from, performed in New York and Australia, was called Came So Far For Beauty which makes much more sense as a title but because an accompanying documentary film was made and titled after the Len's most famous album the soundtrack got renamed as well. Anyway. It's got a host of artists doing various songs and I'm deeply in love with Teddy Thompson's Tonight Will Be Fine. It's so yearning, so closed off, so perfect in its pessimism. Perhaps it helps that I'm not familiar with the original, but in the last few weeks when I'm home it's only a matter of time before it's on and I'm somewhere else, in that room where the windows are small and the walls are bare. It's stark, hopeless, beautiful. And funny, of course. Len never forgets to be funny.
Antony's If It Be Your Will is astonishing, more so on film than on the CD, Nick Cave's Suzanne refreshes Cohen's most famous song, and though Martha Wainwright's quaver annoyed me watching the movie her versions of Tower Of Song and The Traitor are emotionally spot-on. And Rufus does Everybody Knows, a standard you'd be scared to approach, but manages to make the song his own; a little bit showtune, a little bit vicious, wonderful. If you're going to buy a Leonard Cohen covers album I recommend this one. |
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