Classic Album Review : Leonard Cohen - Songs from a Room (1969)
Listen to Songs From a Room here
In 2020, Leonard Cohen’s Songs from a Room is most often remembered to be the album featuring the iconic Bird on a Wire. Why wouldn’t it be? It’s literally his most played live song ever, according to Setlist.fm. He sang it a whopping 627 times in front of audiences. But like for any album older than a decade, time and the overcrowded market for popular music didn’t do any favors to Songs from a Room. Sure, there are boring songs on it. But it has treasures for you to unearth. Treasures who were forgotten for the simple reason they were not as catchy and easygoing as his later material.
But it doesn’t mean they’re not awesome in their own way.
Songs from a Room begins with the aforementioned Bird on a Wire, which needs no introduction. It’s a great, but straightforward country/folk song that is great to walk home drunk at 4AM to. The lyrics give the inherent promise of a new day, where things (and the protagonist) will be better. It has the essential component of a memorable Leonard Cohen song: it elegantly tells a story about normal, universal human longing. We’ve all walked home drunk, wanting to be better and making smarter life choices. Cohen himself called it his declaration of duty.
The “real” Songs from a Room starts with Story of Isaac, though. A somber, bone-chilling ballad about the famous story of Abraham in the Old Testament, narrated from his son’s perspective. It is symbolically representing war (Vietnam war was going on then) and a generation sacrificing another for its own gain. A Bunch of Lonesome Heroes is one of the two straight up country songs on Songs from a Room. It heavily features a mouth harp (or Jew’s harp), a bizarre instrument that pleasantly clashes with the bare and elegant presentation on this record.
It also clashes with the highly introspective and symbolic songwriting everyone loves Leonard Cohen for. It’s just a song about a bunch of outlaws. It does offer breathing room before the two darkest, most serious pieces on Songs from a Room, like a pleasant, elaborate interlude.
Is the portrait clearer yet? Songs from a Room is… a country record? Kind of? A quite militant one at that. It was recorded in Nashville, in the wake of Cohen’s separation from Marianne Ihlen. So, I guess the circumstances lent themselves to it. Songs like A Bunch of Lonesome Heroes and Tonight Will Be Fine could’ve been found on a Johnny Cash record. Leonard Cohen experiments in his own nuanced way on Songs from a Room. He was still young then, in a militant phase and figuring out what kind of singer he wanted to be. It resulted in an eclectic jack-in-the-box of a record.
My absolute favorite song on Songs from a Room, though is the super dark and elegiac Seems So Long Ago, Nancy. Written as a tribute to a friend who committed suicide, it’s the only song on the record featuring organ. It’s done in a very tasteful way that allows the song to breathe, it almost enhances the feeling of solitude like the hum of a telephone line. He’s not trying to communicate her pain in a self-serious way like most contemporary songs about suicide do, but merely positions himself as an observer of her personal tragedy. It’s fucking beautiful AND harrowing.
The other awesome piece on this record is The Partisan, a cover of a WWII-era French song. I don’t have much to say about it because it wasn’t written by Leonard Cohen, but it’s the song that’s musically most like Songs of Leonard Cohen. It has this dreamlike quality to it, which is also emphasized by the bilingual delivery. The other songs on Songs from a Room: The Butcher, You Know Who I Am and Lady Midnight are kind of conventional country folk and don’t live up to the powerful and eclectic first half of the record. It might’ve worked better with only eight songs.
Songs from a Room is a conceptual departure from Songs of Leonard Cohen. It’s more eclectic and adventurous (also influenced by a different setting), but it’s nowhere near as cohesive as its predecessors. It’s just a bunch of songs. A lot of them are great and a couple of them are completely forgettable. It’s a complicated record to like given its placement between two immortals and a complicated record to dismiss given its sheer quality. It’s not just the album with Bird on a Wire on it, though. It’s a record where perfection and imperfection coexist.
7.8/10
