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.)
Hoping to reset my work circadian rhythm after two consecutive weeks of a Weds holiday obliterating any meaningful activity.
Also, Halleluah is kinda lewd and get’s played in really inappropriate settings. It’s a classic overwrought boomer song that has a good melody if you ignore the lyrics. Sorry.Report
That song is definitely terrible.Report
It’s only lewd in the biblical sense.
Same with you on the work thing. Talk about unmotivated!Report
Heh. I was already unmotivated and this holiday configuration just made it worse. Couple that with catching a cold this past week and now I’m deep in the PTO hole with probably no shot at a non-holiday break until March and…is there a word for “negative motivation?”Report
I think the reason “Hallelujah” got famous was that Rufus Wainwright’s cover was used for the Dark Night Of The Soul bit in “Shrek”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iDfvoqOhD8Report
Interestingly, it was not Wainwright’s cover in the film, but John Cale’s. Wainwright’s was on the official soundtrack.Report
Oh, thanks for the correction!
Anyway, I think that for most audiences that was the first hit. It’s like “Bohemian Rhapsody”, which was a hit but I think did not become Part Of The Culture until it showed up in “Wayne’s World”.Report
Buckley died in 1997. The radio played that song a *LOT* in the months that followed.
Shrek was released in the eternal springtime of April 2001.Report
Though Grace peaked in the early Aughts, and Buckley’s version of the song reached its height more than a decade after his death, too.
I do remember hearing the Buckley version a lot in like 2002/2003, though I don’t remember where.Report
It was all over the college station here in town. I remember being ticked off that I had to buy a cd player because I couldn’t get a copy of Grace on cassette and I wanted to listen to “Last Goodbye” more often.
Yes.
That is a true story.Report
I also owned Grace on CD. Here’s my true story for the album/song:
In 2008, I was going through a painful breakup of a 2+-year relationship, and the last night we spent together, angry, hurt, but not wanting to leave, was at her place, with my CD playing in the background as the sort of soundtrack to the conversation, and silence, that ended it. When I left, silently, in the morning, I couldn’t bring myself to grab the CD. I haven’t listened to the album since, and avoid that version of the song as much as possible, even 16 years later.Report
I enjoyed this article about the song:
https://www.dallasobserver.com/music/the-best-and-worst-uses-of-the-song-hallelujah-14487531Report