Fact #68555
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Canadian songwriter, poet and author, Full article:
Already in his mid-30s, Cohen was a successfully published poet in his native Canada before the release of this debut album thrust him into the international spotlight. Where Dylan’s greatest lyrics achieve much of their dazzling effect by being inscrutable, surreal and stream of consciousness, Cohen’s most enduring songs are usually easy to understand. The only smoke and mirrors element with Cohen was how he pulled off the clever trick of writing almost exclusively about love and sex, while making it feel like the stuff of arcane metaphysics.
The religious allusions of Sisters Of Mercy, for example, make it seem much more than a song about a night in bed with two mini-skirted girls, which is what it actually is. “I suppose I always wanted to be a pop singer,” he said many years later while talking about this album, going on to explain that he’d rather be the kind of writer whose “songs were sung by the women washing their clothes” than be considered an intellectual.
None of this, however, detracts from Cohen’s achievements on this album, evoking powerful emotions with a limited vocal range, a finger-picking guitar accompaniment and the ability to spin an engaging yarn. In Suzanne, for example, her ‘place by the river’ is brought vividly to the mind’s eye with judicious details about ‘tea and oranges that come all the way from China’. Cohen felt that producer John Simon’s over-dubbed strings, choirs and percussion marred his songs, but their timeless ability to stir the heart isn’t that easy to suppress.
(Source : by Johnny Black, originally published in the book Albums by Backbeat Press, 2007)
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The religious allusions of Sisters Of Mercy, for example, make it seem much more than a song about a night in bed with two mini-skirted girls, which is what it actually is. “I suppose I always wanted to be a pop singer,” he said many years later while talking about this album, going on to explain that he’d rather be the kind of writer whose “songs were sung by the women washing their clothes” than be considered an intellectual.
None of this, however, detracts from Cohen’s achievements on this album, evoking powerful emotions with a limited vocal range, a finger-picking guitar accompaniment and the ability to spin an engaging yarn. In Suzanne, for example, her ‘place by the river’ is brought vividly to the mind’s eye with judicious details about ‘tea and oranges that come all the way from China’. Cohen felt that producer John Simon’s over-dubbed strings, choirs and percussion marred his songs, but their timeless ability to stir the heart isn’t that easy to suppress.
(Source : by Johnny Black, originally published in the book Albums by Backbeat Press, 2007)