Weekend Plans Post: Leonard Cohen

When I was coming up and through my adolescence, there were a *LOT* of Leonard Cohen covers on the radio that I didn’t know were Leonard Cohen covers.

First, let’s get this one out of the way. Like everybody else, I was entranced by Jeff Buckley’s cover of Hallelujah but I think that 90% of that was due to the fact that Buckley was very recently dead. It’s been some decades since and now I think that Willie Nelson has found something in it that the whole “let’s make it a funeral dirge” take on the song misses. A little bit of honky tonk puts a cigarette back in the hand of the song and the song benefits.

With that out of the way, I suppose the biggest one that hit me the hardest first, was Concrete Blonde’s cover of “Everybody Knows”.

My gosh, I love her voice, I love the slow guitar, and I love those lyrics.

Everybody’s hands are in their pockets
Everybody wants a box of chocolates
And a long-stemmed rose
And everybody knows

The next big one was probably R.E.M.’s cover of “First We Take Manhattan”.

I mean, look at this rhyme:

I’m guided by a signal in the heavens
I’m guided by this birthmark on my skin
I’m guided by the beauty of our weapons
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin

But I want to say that my current favorite is the one from Echo and the Bunnymen’s Ian Mcculloch: “Lover, Lover, Lover”.

How’s this for some bars?

He said, “I locked you in this body,
I meant it as a kind of trial.
You can use it for a weapon,
or to make some woman smile.”

And as I was doing a little bit of research to make sure I got the lyrics right, I was reminded of Joe Cocker’s cover of “Bird on a Wire”, Neil Diamond’s cover of “Suzanne”, and, for a second, I got really excited because I saw “Sisters of Mercy” but it was talking about the song rather than the band. That one was covered by Emmylou Harris and Linda Rondstadt.

And all that to say: People should cover Leonard Cohen more.

This weekend will be spent getting back to normal.

You’re not supposed to do laundry on New Year’s Day so this weekend will have a little more laundry than I could have gotten done except I didn’t want to wash the New Year’s Luck out of any of my stuff. (It’s settled in by the 2nd, I understand.)

We’ve got a game night on Saturday. And I will be making a Ham and Cheddar Strata for dinner for a guest coming down from Denver. And then Monday, oh my gosh, Monday.

So… what’s on your docket?

(Featured image is “That’s *MY* puffball”, featuring Radar. Photo taken by Maribou.)