What started your Leonard Quest?

[Fljotsdale]

LOL! Well, I do! I can't help it.

I'm glad to see you've converted your daughter and almost converted your husband, though.

My older daughter is almost as nutty about Cohen as I am, but my younger daughter... she's a tough nut to crack!

[smile]

Hi Breezie glad you find there is so much to get stuck into here It`s never ending..all very interesting....enjoy..

[Diane]

Hi friends. I have been dipping in here for a few months and thought I would get around to posting.

My indoctrination was in my student years in the early 80’s when I first heard SoLaH. Joan of Arc was my favourite then. Still is, sometimes. What hooked me was Leonard’s deep, deliberate, resonant vocals, the depth of feeling, the honesty, the intensity. Then in ‘85 I saw him live and was further bowled over in by his charisma and gentleness.

That about sums up how I ‘got’ Leonard Cohen.

Diane

[Fljotsdale]

Hi, Diane.

There's a sort of 'little boy lost' look to him, when he smiles that lopsided smile of his, isn't there? A sort of shyness, as well - though you can't really believe the shyness when you consider all those girls in his life, LOLOL!!

[VAN]

I had been a Nick Cave fan since I was about 17 and periodically would hear Cohen's name come up either as his influence or in Cave's covers but I never really invested in him further than that for a while. I don't know when for certian it began, about two or three years ago I picked up Ten New Songs. I started listening to him and fueled by some fucked up relationships and a desire to figure them out, by last summer I had bought everything he ever reocorded. I feel like I'm a graduate of the school of Cohen. I'm 22 now and Cohen has influenced me dramatically in my attitudes toward life and art more than nearly anyone. I feel like, felt like, no, I have lived some of those songs. It's almost comical but Leonard Cohen to me is a sage, a prophet, an artist of the highest order.

[Menni]

Hi everyone,

Nice topic for my first post here . Thanks to my parents I've been hearing Leonard since childhood, but the passion really started with watching Pump Up the Volume in 1990. It's still my all time favorite movie and of course Everybody Knows and If It Be Your Will have something to do with that.

Take cure,
Menno

[smile]

I found myself listening to LC in 1969 at the age of 14 and where as all the other kids were into the chart thing I was very much a different person. It has become a strong emotional sound for me and my husband as it takes him back to my schooldays as I married him when I was 16 and have just celebrated our 34th by the skin of our teeth as I have been critically ill and may soon have to undergo major surgery. The music is always in the back of my mind. God Bless.

[Quetzal]

Well, I am a great fan of Federico García Lorca, the Spanish poet. Through the album "Poetas en Nueva York", I learned about the version of Leonard Cohen of "Pequeño vals vienés" (Take this Waltz). I loved the version, but my interest in Cohen didn't grow until I bought a tango CD in Buenos Aires, by Roberto Goyeneche, who is a great singer. In the booklet of the CD, there was a quote by Joaquín Sabina, who recently did a There is a War cover, where the songwriter said "I never go to bed without first listening to Roberto Goyeneche, Chavela Vargas or Leonard Cohen". Goyeneche and Vargas are amazing, so I imagined Cohen would be worth getting into. And it was.

[lizzytysh]

Hi Quetzal ~

Yours was a very interesting and unique path to Leonard Cohen. Absolutely meant to be .

~ Lizzy

[Quetzal]

Well, most good discoveries tend to be by coincidence, and this was a chain of coincidences. Truth is I rarely listen to music in English, I have Cohen- wich I adore- and Bob Dylan, wich I like a lot. Bob Dylan is hard not to know about, since he is insanely famous and an icon of the sixties. Cohen, if you are into songwriter music, is discovered sooner or later. After discovering Cohen, I started to notice all the references in Spanish music to this author, wich, trust me, are quite a lot. Luis Eduardo Aute, for example, has a song to Cohen called "All your beauty", in the only CD he ever did in English. Well, it has little to do with Cohen, but it's dedicated to him. Aute also thanks Cohen in the booklet of "Templo", a CD of religious-erotic songs in the style of Hallelujah. Also, the most famous of all the Spanish songwriters, the great Joan Manuel Serrat, had in his CD "Banda sonora d'un temps, d'un pais" a song called "Susana", wich is a translation to Catalan of Suzanne. This is something curious, I think, this CD- the title could be translated to "Soundtrack of a time and a country"- is meant to have a recopilation of songs from multiple songwriters, all of them coming from the 60s-70s. The thing is those songs are all written in Catalan- which is a language spoken northeast of Spain and south east of France, and nowhere else- and appeared during the Franco dictatorship, where Catalan was severely repressed. For some reason, Serrat decided to take an English song and translate it, a song that is completly out of the rest of the group, but that Serrat considered deserving of appearing.

[lizzytysh]

Ah, okay......that's something I wouldn't have necessarily known, that there would be a lot of references to Leonard in Spanish music [though with his popularity in Spain, and his affiliation with Lorca's work], it makes sense. However, I hadn't thought of those things .

[linda_lakeside]

Forgive me, but I'm absolutely enthralled with your avatar. Your post also has much creative use of an obvious (sly) intellect. Dylan and Cohen, or Dylan vs. Cohen, is always such a passionate debate in this forum.

Linda.

[tomsakic]

Quetzal,
thank you for your *very* interesting post. This "erotic-religious" CD in style of Hallelujah seems very interesting. Is it worth getting?

You didn't mention Enrique Morente's flamenco CD with Garcia Lorca's and Cohen's poems/songs. Are you familiar with it? - http://www.leonardcohenfiles.com/omega.html

And welcome!

[Quetzal]

Forgive me, but I'm absolutely enthralled with your avatar.

Heh, it's from a Studio Ghibili movie. Not their best film, but the character was very charming, and the movie was preety nice, mainly because it was so imaginative.

http://www.onlineghibli.com/cat_returns/

Dylan and Cohen, or Dylan vs. Cohen, is always such a passionate debate in this forum.

I believe both are great, but differ in style. I'd rather have the melodies of Cohen, those are the ones of a beautiful loser. His voice is also very attractive, in fact at first thought Dylan didn't have a nice voice, but I have becomed used to it and now I like it. But the main reason for Cohen are the style of his lyrics, one would say Cohen is introspective, his writing seem to be inspired by the inner light, while I would say Dylan is more inclined to write from the light outside, one is more intimist, the other one more open. You can throw stones at me for saying this, and counter attack with arguments showing me how Cohen can be very political, and you would be right, but I feel like Cohen has this style. If I had to speak in colors, Cohen is dark blue or black, while Dylan feels yellow or red. I don't think I have to explain, anyone who has listened to both understands.

This "erotic-religious" CD in style of Hallelujah seems very interesting. Is it worth getting?

Absolutely, but it's in Spanish though. Aute is, with Cohen, my favourite songwriter, and I know Cohen liked Aute's CD, there's even a photograph of them together in Aute's art exposition (Aute is also a painter, and a very good one). The CD cover is from one of the paintings:



I can give you some examples on the Aute lyrics. I'll get a copule of songs with short lyrics to translate. Also, the verses may not be correct, I translate from hearing:

Even though in English, I believe the Bible quote is "the word became flesh", in Spanish we say "the verve became flesh", as "verve" works both as a word for an action and to simply say "word".

The verve became flesh

The verve became flesh.
Your flesh,
and my flesh,
and conjugated between us

The sacred perfume

I could even do without
the intense miracle
of deciphering the sacred perfume
of the planets.
But never ever
of the incense your body gives off
after the comulgated flesh.

Those are just a couple of examples. Mosts songs are much better than that, I just chose the short ones.

You didn't mention Enrique Morente's flamenco CD with Garcia Lorca's and Cohen's poems/songs. Are you familiar with it? - http://www.leonardcohenfiles.com/omega.html

Omega is a masterpiece. I didn't mention it because I was thinking of songwriters, and Morente is a flamenco singer. In an interview to Joaquín Sabina, he said Morente was the best musician alive in Spain, someone who could just do something different in every CD, and manage to make it sound great. Omega is a perfect example of completly unorthodox flamenco music. At first I had no idea this CD had Cohen songs, I discovered because I was telling a friend it's a shame none of the musicalized versions of the poem "La aurora de Nueva York"- my favourite from Lorca's Poet in New York- were good. Well, except for the Chico Buarque one, but it's in Portuguese. He sent me the Omega version, and since I didn't find the CD, I downloaded it, then I was surprised to see some songs were familiar.

Now that was a long post. I guess I got carried away

[The Captain]

My way to discovering Cohen is somewhat mainstream. I saw the film Shrek, in which some young male singer is performing a song with a chorus consisting of Hallelujahs. It stuck with me a long time after I saw the movie, and one day i decided to try to download it.

When I typed in the title Hallelujah the name Leonard Cohen appeared. I heard the original version and decided that such music was too beautiful to download and went out and bought some of his records.

Haven't looked back since and I'm lucky enough to still have plenty of records to look forward to hearing for the first time!