Leonard Cohen: Text and Music

I'm rediscovering Leonard Cohen: The Partisan, yes, but also "Who by Fire," which speaks to me quite a bit in these days of Zen exploration.

Who by Fire, by Leonard Cohen

I'm struck by the freedom of the meter.

Humming Leonard Cohen in the shower is harder than it looks: you end up with syllables to spare and beats missing, stumbling at the end of a line, fooled by how simple the delivery seems.

That's the strength of his songs, I think: simplicity. No needless adjectives, no forced rhymes, no imposed meter. You're surprised by a line that stops sooner than expected ("I took my gun and vanished"), by a word repeated when you don't expect it ("Oh the wind, the wind is blowing. Through the grave the wind is blowing"), or by the constant shifts in meter that create a music within the music, as in "Who by Fire."

That freedom creates surprise. Surprise gives weight to every idea.

I've always assumed – without giving it much thought, honestly – that songs were an extension of music. First you learn the guitar, then you look for something to sing. Listening to Leonard, I realize a song can be an extension of literature or poetry: first you write a text, then you find the music that makes it resonate.

On the page alone, you can't make the reader pause on a word or hear the emotional color of a line – except by adding more words that dilute the whole. So a song can be seen as staging a text in space (and in time). Through rhythm and delivery, each word gets the place and color the author had in mind, which the page alone couldn't convey.

Anyway, coming soon: Boulengerie, the album. Get ready.