Like many people, I came to Leonard Cohen's work by way of cover versions – in my case, Judy Collins' rendition of "Dress Rehearsal Rag." The lyric is one of Cohen's most searing – razor in hand, a man faces down "the horror" in his bathroom mirror–but the studied melodrama of Collins' treatment made the song sound too complete, almost comfortable. I didn't understand why until I heard Cohen's own version. Collins' recording, in retrospect, lacked the feeling of incompleteness, of discomfort – the kind of edge-of-the-precipice displacement that would give rise to such a lyric. This is a quality that's perfectly contained in Cohen's thin, droning voice, but one he's had
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trouble pinning down in his musical settings. After all, how do you move beyond minimal guitar accompaniment and toward increased listenability without making "the stranger" seem too much at home?
The grotesque beauty of Cohen's last LP, Death of a Ladies' Man–for all that album's flaws–was a step in the right direction. Though he took the task too far and too literally, producer Phil Spector shoehorned the singer into an alien tradition: American rock & roll. (Cohen's spoke-song style actually cleaves more to the European cabaret tradition; he's less a developed folkie than a more mordant Jacques Brel, or the Charles Aznavour of the apocalypse.) If Death of a Ladies' Man captured the large-scale metaphor, with the music serving as the artist's canvas for struggle, Recent Songs goes a step further. Leonard Cohen has finally learned to use music as another kind of paint.
Together with coproducer Henry Lewy, Cohen's couched his compositions in a musical vocabulary itself eerily alien: the half-breed flavor of mariachi, the not-quite-mandolin sounds of John Bilezikjian's oud. The accents of the East spice the rhythms of the West, while medieval symbols and modern language combine to let the songs swing free in time as well as space. The haunting strains of Raffi Hakopian's violin braid beauty and instability to give a name to the whole. What Cohen's come up with (he's been close before) is the gypsies' Romany, the nation that lives in the blood. It's the perfect, smoky back-room-through-the-looking-glass for his high-stakes floating crap game of the heart.
There's not a cut on Recent Songs without something to offer–though "Humbled in Love" and "Came So Far for Beauty" are fields that Cohen, that sharecropper of romance, has often plowed before – and at least four or five tunes are full-fledged masterpieces. I wish I had a tape loop of "The Guests," which features a hold-your-breath, haunting melody. Over Cohen's voice, Hakopian's melting, aching violin sketches high and empty rooms. In the choruses, Jennifer Warnes' layered harmonies weave in and out to fill those rooms with longing specters:
And no one knows where the night is going
And no one knows why the wine is flo
