If Leonard Cohen had only recorded this extraordinary debut album and then disappeared, his stature as one of the most gifted songwriters of our time would still be secure. Released nearly forty years ago, in late December of 1967, Songs of Leonard Cohen remains startling for its confidence, its absolute artistic assurance. Some debuts are validated by an artist's later work; the depth and power of their songs revealed only by subsequent events and the passage of time. Others are betrayed by posterity, their promise shown to be a lie, or, more generously, a misunderstanding, a form of wishful thinking whose wish was never granted.
But, uniquely, Songs of Leonard Cohen remains exactly as forceful and surprising as it was four decades ago. It immediately seemed like a work of major importance by a daunting new talent back then, and that perception has more than been borne out. Its ten songs were entirely contemporary and strangely outside time, ancient without seeming what we would now call retro, and also visionary intimations of the future.
Now they do not so much sound as if they've been deepened by time; after all, they sounded deep on first hearing. It's more that they are untouched by time, unaffected by the ebb and flow of the many days and listenings and cover versions since their initial appearance in the world.
And they still sound simultaneously ancient and visionary, as potent in 2007 as they have ever been and, doubtless, will ever be. What is fascinating and could not have been anticipated in 1967, however, is how thoroughly this album maps the territory that Cohen would explore throughout his career. There are songs about women and songs about love; songs about power and the illusion of power; sons about the body and songs about the spirit; songs about finding what you think you want and songs about endless searching. Often many, or even all, of these themes overlap. They don't contradict each other as much as transform into each other, or reveal themselves ultimately to be the same thing, regardless of their apparent differences. What a character believes is discovery turn into a search. What seems like love turns into a struggle for power. The futility, the foolishness, of trusting what we think and see and feel, the inevitable duplicity of our expectations, is another of Cohen's essential motifs.
Such sensitivity to the complexity of human emotion and experience was not particularly a hallmark of the music released in 1967, the year, among other things, of the Summer of Love. It's not that great music didn't come out that year, but Songs of Leonard Cohen refused to flatter the conventional wisdom of the time. There is nothing utopian about it, no sense of generational struggle or political upheaval, though alert ears will detect how haunted this album seems by its birth during wartime. These songs are chronicles of the human journey, both internal and external, and yield nothing to easy, us-against-them oppositions.
What Cohen did share with his contemporaries was aesthetic boldness, a determination to create music unlike anything that had been heard before. The authority he brought to his first album is attributable to a couple of factors. First, Cohen, who was born in Montreal in 1934, was thirty-four years old when Songs of Leonard Cohen came out, old enough to embrace the creative momentum of the Sixties counterculture without falling prey to its more naïve aspects. He had also been a published poet for more than ten years, and a novelist as well, and Songs of Leonard Cohen became an extension of his work as a poet.
Cohen was signed to Columbia Records by the legendary John Hammond. Hammond planned to produce the album, but was unable to complete it, and John Simon took over. Cohen and Simon fought over the string, horn, keyboard and background vocal touches that Simon thought necessary to ameliorate the effect of Cohen's famously monochromatic voice. Cohen won some, though by no means all, of those battles, but, regardless, the album still rests squarely on his vocals and lyrics. The arrangements, though sometimes more elaborate than Cohen wanted them to be, are Spartan compared with the psychedelic grandeur characteristic of the period.
Listeners had been somewhat prepared for this album by the eloquent versions of "Suzanne", "Sisters of Mercy" and "Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye" (along with "Dress Rehearsal Rag" and "Priests", two songs that Cohen wrote, but did not include on his debut) that Judy Collins had performed on her albums In My Life (1966) and Wildflowers (1967). But Cohen's own more stringent versions — not to mention the inclusion of such unsurpassable songs as "Master Song", "The Stranger Song" and "So long, Marianne" — made it clear just how formidable a songwriter he was.
Every track on Songs of Leonard Cohen declares an artist who is speaking indelibly in his own inimitable voice. Lines such as "Like any dealer he was watching for the card/that is so high and wild/he'll never have to deal another/He was just some Jesus looking for a manger" have no precedent in popular song. The effortless blending of imagery from profane and sacred worlds, from gambling, the drug culture and the Bible, in this instance, would become a Cohen signature.
Ever the album art for Songs of Leonard Cohen told a compelling story, much more dramatically, of course, in the days of vinyl albums. Evidently based on the image of a saint on a Mexican postcard that Cohen had found, the woman on the album's back cover is apparently naked, enchained and engulfed by flames. Yet she looks calm and confident, her eyes raised upwards to the sky, her goal beyond. The fire could be the flames of martyrdom, or of passion, or both. The chains may well be symbolic of the prison house of the body and the material world, in the process of being burned off in purifying fire, so the spirit of this Joan of Arc can escape to a freer place.
Art, religion and Eros merge, then, in this portrait of a woman at the very extreme of her experience in this world. What more seductive enticement, what better introduction, could there be to Songs of Leonard Cohen, and to all the Leonard Cohen songs to come?
Anthony DeCurtis
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