5. Leonard Cohen—Songs from a Room (1969)
Into this furnace I ask you now to venture,
you whom I cannot betray.
—"The Old Revolution" Leonard Cohen
An old man crouches in his basement, underneath the stairs, sweating and terrified. He is alone, as he has been for many years—his wife left him in distant memory, his children are long estranged. The power has been out for several days and the basement is pitch black. His only connection to the rest of the world is the thunderous sound of lunar debris making landfall outside. It shakes the floor beneath his feet but his eyes remain unassailed. He peers into the darkness, straining to see happier times in the depths of memory, times when he wasn't yet alone.
I came across a series of
photos a while back which were taken by a Life Magazine photographer on the island of Hydra, in Greece, in 1960. They were black and white shots of young bohemians at some courtyard party, sipping wine, smoking cigarettes, playing guitar and generally looking like some super hip cats before the hippies came along and made this kind of thing all mainstream. Apparently these images were intended to accompany an article about some Australian author, but that's kind of a footnote here. The really interesting thing is the smiling 26 year old playing the guitar—none other than Leonard Cohen—and the young woman at his side—Marianne Ihlen, who is both the subject of the song "So Long Marianne" and also the woman
pictured on the back of
Songs from a Room.
The old man alone in the dark, the half century old photos—these are the sorts of things that are the quintessence of this album. It's an album of loss and regret and longing for lost good times fading in distant memory. It's over four decades old and it only seems to get better with age as the years add layer upon layer to the omnipresent sense of loss. Really it's difficult to imagine a time when this album was new and fresh sounding, maybe it's always sounded musty and broken.
The funny thing is, despite the distinct overarching mood and sparse arrangements,
Songs from a Room is a fairly diverse album. The pinnacle of its sense of sadness and loss is the spare and echoing last song on side one of the vinyl, "Seems So Long Ago, Nancy", which is the chronicle of a troubled young woman and her eventual suicide. But elsewhere the album isn't quite so bleak, with "A Bunch of Lonesome Heroes" in particular providing a mythic and oddly uplifting counterbalance via its rousing chorus and extremely weird sounding electric guitar. Quite a few of the songs have strong narrative elements—surprisingly unusual for a wordsmith like Cohen. The best of these are the biblically-themed "Story of Isaac" and the World War II remembrances of "The Partisan", which I believe is actually some kind of reinterpretation of a French song from the 1940s. Despairing, dirge-like material pops up throughout—such as album opener "Bird on a Wire" and mid side two downers "The Butcher" and "You Know Who I Am"—but the upbeat, almost country-ish album closers "Lady Midnight" and "Tonight Will Be Fine" keep the album from getting too depressing. These are, after all, the kind of happy/sad feelings we all have when we look back on those lost golden days, even if in the present we're hiding in dark basements with the world exploding around us.