Leonard Cohen's Tower of Song

I've given myself the task of writing about one song a week for 2024 because, well, I think it'd be fun.

Leonard Cohen's Tower of Song

Happy birthday, Leonard.

Well, my friends are gone, and my hair is grey,
I, ache in the places that I used to play,
and I'm crazy for love, but I'm not coming on;
I'm just paying my rent everyday in the tower of song.

This is my favorite song. I sing it all the time. I sing it in summer equally as I do in autumn. Every beam of sunlight makes me want to sing the song as every fallen leaf does. And my hair is not grey, but some of my friends are gone, and I wonder constantly where they are now, why can't I hold onto them, and the powerlessness of myself, and the powerlessness of people, to grab a hold of their lives, and to resist the tides of time. And just as I humble myself in this thought, I let it go, and continue, as Leonard does, to pay the rent of my life.

And here we go, the greatest lyrics to any song ever, and the ones I remember by heart:

I said to Hank Williams, "How lonely does it get?"
Hank Williams hasn't answered yet,
but I hear him coughing, all night long,
a hundred floors above me, in the tower of song.

This is the funniest verse in music. It's also very sad. Whenever I have no idea what I'm doing in my life, I ask the spirit of James Joyce - the caricature of Joyce in my head, anyway - what to do. Evidently, Leonard did the same for Hank and, evidently, Hank never answers as James refuses for me. Still, I never know what spirits are thinking, and I sometimes think he is talking, but he's too quiet to be heard over the sound of traffic or the sing-song of birds. Leonard is more polite than I am and thinks Hank has a cold.

More funny lines:

I was born like this, I had no choice,
I was born with the gift of a golden voice.

Leonard has a peculiar sense of humor. Often his music is full of cynicism and humility, but every now and then he'll say something so out-of-pocket that you can't help but laugh. You're not entirely sure if he's serious, and I think he thrives in that divide. This is one of them, as his gravelly voice rumbles through the line "I was born with the gift of a golden voice." What's even funnier is that he thinks it's such a pain to be so tremendously talented.

But, on the topic of Leonard's voice, I do actually believe the claim. His is one of the more unique voices in music. Even going back to "Songs of Leonard Cohen" (1967), his voice was dry and stringy, with the tendency to drag out the endings of words. This manifests as echo at the words "grey", "gone", "love", as if he really were singing into the ear of eternity. But it's not a matter of what his voice sounds like over how he uses it. Leonard was an actual poet-poet; he became a musician afterwards. He intentionally lingers on certain words and silences as a poet intentionally ends lines. He doesn't care all that much for the beat, though he certainly keeps up with it.

Leonard always finds different kinds of mumble. He's Shakespearean this way. He knows exactly what to do with a word. I contrast him with Dylan, who sings typically with the same revelatory, rusty amazement. The outset of "ache" is so sharp that the listener can hear how far his tongue is pushed into the gums. His lips take so long to close at the outset of "love", as if he really doesn't want to close the door on that one. That "play" is all lip action. And that delicious sigh after "coming on". One could analyze forever how Leonard emphasizes a word and how he emphasizes silence as well.

The following verse has another great example of Leonard's singing:

So you can stick your little pins in that voodoo doll;
I'm very sorry, baby, it don't look like me at all,
I'm standing by the window, where the light is strong.

It's kinda weird how "all" and "strong" kinda rhyme, at least by the way Leonard sings it, on the onset closing his throat by placing the tongue on his palate, then on the outset, as if opening a box of cigarettes, opening his throat by moving the tongue to the floor in an exaggerated movement (this movement, by the way, characterizes a long vowel). But beyond this detail, notice how exaggerated the "p" is in "pins", his lips mimicking the sharpness - and by mimicking, mocking - of the conjured pins. "Voodoo doll" is sung with such incredulity. This is how Leonard introduces humor and sarcasm in his music; the lyrics themselves, sure, express doubt and suspicion, but through the exaggeration of his voice he places his subject into the theater of the absurd. Then, Leonard's supreme gift: right after these mocking lyrics he relents, soften, and sings "I'm standing by the window, where the light is strong." The "-ing" ending of "standing" is sung softly, the "g" almost vanishing (same trick as Billy Paul's, come to think of it), and the "-ow" ending of "window" is very soft, the enunciation almost all nostril. He is conveying to you, by this gentleness, that he's vulnerable, at this moment where the light is gowning him. That's Leonard, of course; one moment he can be harsh, the next he can be romantic, because he is human, and trying to transform into his final state. I always think of these lines when I try to write about vulnerability.

I'll only briefly talk about the verse with the lines "The rich have got their channels in the bedrooms of the poor / and there's a mighty judgment coming, but I may be wrong." Leonard was never an activist, but he had an obsession with justice, starting as soon as track 2 of "Songs of Leonard Cohen", "Master Song". For you see, justice isn't merely a concept between two countries or a people and a monolith, justice occurs between two people, between two emotions, it's a conversation on how we treat and act toward one another, and how we respect another's autonomy. This concept of justice affected Leonard deeply, as he was a sensitive man, and seemed to read deeply into everything, and was affected by everything. That this verse precedes the last two verses, beside the reprise of the first verse, is an indication from Leonard that he believes the end of earth will be, or ought to be, accompanied by judgment, the clarification of the good and the evil. Yet he gives out that "I may be wrong". He has had reason to doubt salvation, though he believes in it all the same. What else is there to believe?

Now, the last verses, where he speaks to a lover long past:

I see you standing on the other side,
I don't know how the river got so wide,
I loved you baby, way back when.
And all the bridges are burning that we might have crossed,
but I feel so close to everything that we lost,
we'll never, never have to lose it again.

For all Leonard's attempts to be cool, this is the moment where he truly opens up. The lyrics are sung with a little more energy, a little more quickness, as if he wants to reach over, but he's too lazy. That metaphor of "how the river got so wide", it affects me. It's the perfect analogy to the gulf of time separating myself and people I used to know. That he follows with "I loved you baby, way back when" hits me as well. After all the metaphoring, he's just being honest.

I share Leonard's doubt. I don't share many things with Leonard Cohen, but I do share in his reluctance to believe and yet believing still. This reluctance permeates into the writing, a style that tries to search heaven and earth for a transcendental feeling, but finds the closest, most informal, ugliest words do just fine. These ugly words reveal the ugliness of ourselves, which is probably why we don't want to say them, but there's no choice except to be honest. And so we come to understand that "all the bridges are burning that we might have crossed" is not just dramatic imagery, it's the truth, it's something he sees plain in his eye. But we have to move on.

The last verse is a reprise of the first verse, but it takes on a completely different character because of the way he sings it. The only change in words is that the intro-ing "Well" is now a "Yeah", which is substantial, it's a bold admission of everything he just said and that he's moving forward in his tower of song. Notice the differences in how he sings "grey" and "ache" in these verses; in the reprise, he sings them much more quickly, passing them by as mere symptoms of his mortal condition. When he sings that sighing "but I'm not coming on", he no longer lingers. There's a tone in his voice that conveys "I'm not coming on (whatever)".

As Ira Nadel recounts, Leonard was kicking the song around since the beginning of the eighties, and originally caled it "Raise My Voice in Song". The idea is close to concept of "The Singer Must Die" on "New Skin for the Old Ceremony" (1974), so it took him a while to figure it out. Evidently he finished it up one night and recorded it on a toy synthesizer, thus explaining the skeletal arrangements, beside the choir of singers who I guess are dubbed over the original track. All of Leonard's songs in "I'm Your Man" are poems in of themselves, but "Tower of Song" comes closest to spoken word as a result of this. I cannot think of any kind of recording process more fitting. I see the idea of divine inspiration as bogus and yet strangely apt. No god descended and pieced together the puzzles in Leonard's brain, but the silent feeling that the song was done, that it finally said what he wanted it to say, or that he finally felt he could do the song the justice it deserved, is an event that happens to the artist without rhyme or reason. It's the sound of his life clicking together and bringing the body and soul into harmony. For a brief period of time, the songs five minutes and thirty nine seconds, he had that harmony, that unity of one's mind and one's purpose. And then it fled him. But that's mortality. He continued paying rent and moved on.