Working hard to get the listing on the Tower of Song . . .

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m really not the off-topic type, but it’s Friday and I’m toast and I feel like sharing a little of the background here at Bloodhound HQ. For weeks now we’ve been listening to the soundtrack albumfrom the film Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man.

If the movie is still around in your town — it’s long gone from the world’s most sophisticated cow town — go see it. It has two redeeming features over most rockumentaries: First, the interview portions are viscerally honest, in contrast to the usual obviously phony PR treatment. And second, the interview portions are very brief, with the result that the music holds sway — vast stretches of uninterrupted music. Who’d’a thunk it? A music movie about music…

Leonard Cohen is one of my secret vices — along with Tom Waits and Townes Van Zandt. However far they might fall from my own esthetic, I make room in my life for songwriters who ring true to me — no matter how gut-wrenchingly true. The obvious contrast is to Bob Dylan, who has whole suites of space in my mind, but who is always hiding behind one mask or another. If you listen to something like Marie, the experience is the perfect antithesis to one of Dylan’s set pieces. With the possible exception of Blind Willie McTell, which is excruciatingly excellent, Bob Dylan is nowhere to be found in a Bob Dylan song, whereas in a song by Townes Van Zandt or Leonard Cohen, the man is always right there. Tom Waits is a little more challenging, and I like to use a remarkably bad live bootleg I have of Falling Down as a litmus test for sophisticates. If you can hear through level upon level of rubbled ugliness to the sad and perfect beauty of the song, I might let you look at my record collection.

I’ve infected Cathy will all my musical affectations, and part of learning to live and work with me is learning to put up with, respect, like and eventually love what I admire in popular music — because if I feel a need to listen to The Part You Throw Away three hundred times in a row, that’s what we’re going to do. She’s happier with this Leonard Cohen encomium, if only because I listen to the whole CD over and over again, rather than just a particular song (although we may yet come to that).

The album (and the film) are largely Wainwright-made. Many of the performances feature Rufus Wainwright, Martha Wainwright and their mother and aunt Kate and Anna McGarrigle. At some level, this is a tribute from a prominent Canadian musical family to the greatest name in Canadian pop music. So who knows why the whole thing was made in Sydney, Australia…

For me, the standout performer is Martha Wainwright. The kid can belt out a song. She opens the album with a nicely wry take on Tower of Song.

She is followed by Teddy Thompson covering Tonight Will Be Fine. He does an excellent job, but we both are dying to hear this from Lyle Lovett and his Large Band. And this is something that comes out again and again in these performances: These are country songs. Cohen’s own arrangements are normally so spare, and his voice so captivating, that you don’t hear how easily they are adapted to the Maybelle Strum and decomposed major chords. Simple beautiful North American shit-kicker music…

Nick Cave comes next with I’m Your Man. Cathy thought this was over the top in the theater, but I hear it as a PoMo tragi-comedy, like Straight To The Top, so I thought he was on solid ground. Plus which, Nick Cave wrote The Mercy Seat, so I’ll forgive him anything.

Skipping ahead, someone named Anthony does the most amazingly beautiful cover of If It Be Your Will. In the film, Anthony is visually disquieting, but you can forget all that on the CD and just revel in this heart-wringing performance.

Cathy likes Jarvis Cocker’s take on I Can’t Forget, and I really, truly hate Rufus Wainwright’s campy dismantling of Everybody Knows.

But then there’s Martha Wainwright again, delivering The Traitor as though it were written for her.

There are sixteen tracks in total. The last is Cohen himself with U2, reprising Tower of Song. The old man’s voice is more perfectly broken than ever, as if god himself is speaking through him in a steadily more strident tone: “This is dry wit!” Bono is there to demonstrate with finality that he cannot sing, only yell. The whole thing, on the CD and in the film, feels grafted on. Maybe Bono was an investor. Certainly he adds nothing to what should have been a quiet perfection — and by adding nothing, he subtracts substantially.

And that highlights my larger complaint with the project. Where is Jennifer Warnes, who sang behind Cohen for decades? Why was there no mention of Jeff Buckley, whose cover of Hallelujah was canonical — the absolute best-ever recording of a Leonard Cohen song. I love whom we have, I miss whom we’re missing, and I would happily flush Bono down an Australian toilet.

But the man himself comes through beautifully in the film, and his music comes through beautifully on the CD. Perla Batalla and Julie Christensen cover Anthem anthemically, and we’ll finish with that because it’s beautiful:

Anthem

by Leonard Cohen

The birds they sang
at the break of day
Start again
I heard them say
Don’t dwell on what
has passed away
or what is yet to be.

Ah the wars they will
be fought again
The holy dove
She will be caught again
bought and sold
and bought again
the dove is never free.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

We asked for signs
the signs were sent:
the birth betrayed
the marriage spent
Yeah the widowhood
of every government —
signs for all to see.

I can’t run no more
with that lawless crowd
while the killers in high places
say their prayers out loud.
But they’ve summoned, they’ve summoned up
a thundercloud
and they’re going to hear from me.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

You can add up the parts
but you won’t have the sum
You can strike up the march,
there is no drum
Every heart, every heart
to love will come
but like a refugee.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.
That’s how the light gets in.
That’s how the light gets in.