JUDY COLLINS & LEONARD COHEN - "Hey, Thats No Way To Say Goobye" 1976
Judy Collins welcomes Leonard Cohen to her PBS TV concert performance in this video clip from January 1976. They perform Cohen's song, "Hey, That's No Way To Say Goodbye," which Judy had recorded for her 1967 landmark album, Wildflowers.
Leonard Cohen's final album is a bleak masterpiece
Pop's longest-serving poet: Leonard Cohen
Neil McCormick, music critic
11 NOVEMBER 2016 • 9:51AM
Leonard Cohen’s 14th studio album is a bleak masterpiece for hard times from pop’s longest-serving poet. At 82 years old, what is truly extraordinary about Cohen is not that he is still making albums but that they are as rich, deep and potent as ever. If anything, his ruminations on life gain added poignancy and urgency with passing time.
Something between defeat and defiance has crept into his tone, which has dropped to a half-spoken bass whisper, a grumble and sigh filtered through a weary frailty that makes his pearly couplets shine even brighter.
The musical setting, by Cohen’s talented singer-songwriting son Adam, is perfection, an organic bed of elegantly twanging guitar lines, humming organ, melancholy piano and aching violin, following stately chord progressions framed by the warm, female vocal harmonies that have become a Cohen trademark.
Leonard Cohen's Elegy For Janis Joplin - Chelsea Hotel #1
"Blazing blue eyes, tangled dirty blonde hair, raunchy hoarse voice...
Janis socked her bluesy voice into the soul of everyone who listened to her." - Flip, 1968
when Leonard Cohen was twenty-five, he was living in London, sitting in cold rooms writing sad poems. He got by on a three-thousand-dollar grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. This was 1960, long before he played the festival at the Isle of Wight in front of six hundred thousand people. In those days, he was a Jamesian Jew, the provincial abroad, a refugee from the Montreal literary scene.
An easier, but less ultimately enriching route in – because once you “get†the central paradox of Cohen’s songwriting, everybody else sounds thin and limp in comparison – would have been a track like “The Partisanâ€, a French Resistance song adapted and translated into English by Cohen. Perhaps the best illustration of all of his genius for story-telling, it’s particularly difficult to listen to today: “There were three of us this morning, I am the only one this evening, but I must go on.†sks
