Day: April 15, 2012

Sunday Music: Leonard Cohen Old Ideas

/ jpbohannon / 5 Comments

His voice is unmistakeable, his lyrics are second to none. And I’m not talking Dylan here. For nearly as long as Dylan has, Leonard Cohen has been creating incomparable songs–songs that deal with pain, sexuality, religion, the miscarriages of history, the ravages of love, and finality. And now at 77 years old, Cohen seems even more focused on the finality.

For instance, “Going Home,” the first song on his new album Old Ideas, is a description of a  “lazy bastard living in a suit” named Leonard. In the realization that he is “going home,” the fictional Leonard is wishing he had had a user’s manual for living, for living in defeat.

(If you know little about Leonard Cohen, you might be unaware that his manager did a “Bernie Madoff” on him and left him completely broke which is why he is touring the world and putting out new stuff at this stage in his life.  Unfortunately, he has to. Fortunately, it is still very good stuff.)

The music, like so much of Cohen’s work, is often just an understated support to Cohen’s enigmatic lyrics. Simple piano or guitar set up against the words.  At other times, the production  has beautiful, choir-like  singers (the Webb Sisters), whose voices are often in bright opposition to the darkness of his ideas. His work has frequently had the tenor of southern spirituals (cf. “Hallelujah”) and on this record, “Amen,”  “Show Me the Place” and “Come Healing” follow suit, while “Crazy to Love You” recalls the acoustic guitar work of Cohen’s early days.

But the music is ALWAYS secondary to the words.  How heartbreaking is a love song that begs “I know you have to hate me/But could you hate me less?” It is this heart-wrenching sadness, the jaded philosophy that makes Cohen so beguiling. And I find that in his old age, this jaded attitude is even more compelling–for underneath it all, there is something hopeful, poetically hopeful in the continuance of things. In a odd way, Cohen’s complaining about the world and its injustice implies that he wants to see it better, that it can be better, that it will be better.

Having Leonard Cohen’s voice in the world, having his striking words propped up by the most simple instrumentation, makes my world better. Hallelujah!

Barney McKenna–R.I.P.

/ jpbohannon / Leave a comment

So.  The mother-in-law of a fiddler I used to play with died last week. I went to  visit early Monday morning, but didn’t stay for the funeral.  When I got home, a friend called to say that he had just missed me at the church.  He also said–I thought –that the woman who died had been a relative of Barney McKenna, the great banjo player for The Dubliners.

Later in the week, I get another message from another friend that Barney McKenna had died earlier in the week.  Too weird.  I call my pal to tell him about the strange coincidence. Turns out that I had misheard his original message from the start.  The first friend knew about McKenna’s death and merely told me that Barney McKenna’s obituary was on the same page as the woman’s whose funeral I had just gone to.  There was no connection, no relation. Man, had I misheard.

A young Barney McKenna

One of the founding members of The Dubliners, Barney McKenna helped changed Irish music forever, moving it from the back rooms of O’Donahue’s pub on Merion Row to concert halls in the Europe and U.S.   With the original line up of Luke Kelley, Ronnie Drew, and Ciaran Bourke, Barney McKenna and the Dubliners were prolific and talented. In various incarnations and through changes of players, they played for more than 50 years.

As it happens, last week, McKenna was having tea at the kitchen table with a friend when he appeared to have “nodded off.”  If you gotta go–and we all have to–what a great a way to do it, place your chin on your chest and simply nod off.  Anyway, in memory of Barney McKenna, here’s a short clip of his playing in Germany sometime in the mid-90s.: