| Leonard Cohen – Alexandra Leaving Lyrics | 8 months ago |
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Such a beautiful and fascinating song. Yes, the lyrics can be traced back to Constantine Cavafy's Poem 'The God Abandons Antony' (http://users.hol.gr/~barbanis/cavafy/antony.html), but he makes it his own and expands the potential interpretations by aligning the events of the song with heartbreak, loss, admiration, a deepening love, respect that emerges from loss, and more. One can re-listen and unpack this song over and over again. As with the better poets and songwriters, although there is the creator's original meaning (and the intention of Cavafy's source poem), Cohen clearly invites the listener to apply the key thematic elements to their own lives. And to their own loves, possessed or lost. |
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| Leonard Cohen – Night Comes On Lyrics | 8 months ago |
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this is a novel in song form, and brilliant for all that. Cohen takes notes from his own life, and likely events in the lives of people he met along the way, to compose a complete story in five acts, from the fracturing innocence of a boy dealing with loss and horror all the way to an old man's search for peace amid the debris of regret. And always the open door of death calling to him as an escape from pain; with something always tethering him to life because it isn't yet his time. It's one of those songs I wish Cohen had turned into a novel. |
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| Tom Waits – House Where Nobody Lives Lyrics | 8 months ago |
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A beautiful meditation on the relics of human lives. A house becomes a home when people inhabit it and really live there. The house becomes something of a battery, storing both positive and negative energy; and in a poetic sense it becomes alive. When abandoned, whether by the death of the tenants or the collapse of a family/relationship that energy lingers. In a sense it haunts itself with those stored emotions, and visitors to the house feel the effect without context --leading them to speculate about the cause of abandonment and the (perhaps) ghostly energies slowly dwindling over time. Though this song isn't pitched to be precisely supernatural, it has a 'spiritual' sense about the house being like a shell of something once alive that has died. There is a deep sadness to it. For me, it recalls a house I stumbled upon while camping in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. It was so comprehensively overgrown and reclaimed by the forest that no one alive remembered the place's history. My young mind --already on a track to becoming the professional writer I now am-- kept revisiting that place in memory, telling and retelling imagined stories about why it was abandoned and what happened. I've since written several short stories about old, abandoned house, but Tom Waits, with the brevity and concision of a poet/songwriter captured it in a few lines of a song. Beautiful. |
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