| Leonard Cohen – Famous Blue Raincoat Lyrics | 19 years ago |
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I see this song through a different lens, perhaps colored or clouded, as much as informed, by personal experience... I believe the singer is "writing" to someone (his “brother”, for lack of more insight) suffering from manic-depression (clinically, bipolar disorder). For sufferers. the inevitable bouts of depression combined with reckless manic episodes and periods of relative calm, make personal lives extremely complex and trying. The imagery created in many lines ("just to see if you're better", "You're living for nothing now", "Your famous blue raincoat was torn at the shoulder", "Did you ever go clear") paint a picture of a very troubled soul for which the singer feels concern and compassion, tinged with admiration. But manic-depressives are also often unusually gifted, compelling, and charismatic individuals (particularly while manic - "I see you there with the rose in your teeth/One more thin gypsy thief") whose occasional more serious depressive dispositions can lend air of drama and complexity of character. With this backdrop, I imagine the brother, perhaps insulated by mania or wrapped in the depths of his own illness, and despondent about losing "Lili Marlene,” having a brief, careless affair with Jane ("treated my woman/to a flake of your life”) , his personality (complex and compelling in part due to his illness) awakening a passion she never experienced before with the singer, and making her realize that she must therefore leave her husband, even though the brother had no plans to stay with her. Which yields the tragic sense infusing the song - the singer is made aware of his own inadequacy, shallowness, or humanity, by the way just a "flake" of his brother's life transformed Jane. "And when she came back she was nobody's wife" seems to reference a spiritual or psychological journey and awakening, rather than a separation in time or space. The singer’s resigned acceptance of the "good" this did Jane implies that he has acknowledged to himself that he would never have been able to touch her - "I'm glad you stood in my way", "Thanks, for the trouble you took from her eyes/I thought it was there for good so I never tried." Jane is no longer the singer's wife or his woman, and only dallies with him for companionship and the distant link to his brother ("Jane came by with a lock of your hair"). Near the close of the song is a cryptic line that feels like the key to understanding why the brother, the powerful figure who has touched and shaken so deeply the lives of others, seems so lost himself ("You’re living for nothing now" "Just to see if you're better"): "If you ever come by here, for Jane or for me [While] your enemy is sleeping, and his woman is free." The brother's enemy is not the singer - the brother clearly won Jane's affection with a "flake" of his life - almost incidentally - with the singer's hold on her nothing of consequence and the object of desire (Jane) clearly transitory. The brother's enemy is his illness, which drives him to build a house in the desert and live for nothing, which he planned to escape by "going clear", the illness that is so integral to his mythic and transformative character that it, "the enemy," is what took the trouble from Jane's eye, and made her "his woman". I can find no other way of interpreting this line, or the whole song, of reconciling the brother's tragic emptiness and aimlessness with his dramatic impact on Jane and others without acknowledging the hulking shadow such an enemy. I do know that L. Cohen has made multiple and somewhat conflicting references to love triangles, to him being the owner of the famous blue raincoat, to going clear alluding to scientology (which he has rejected), and the official lyrics do not include the “While” in “While your enemy is sleeping (though I hear it in the song, and others hear the word “well”), so I may be literally wrong about the intended meaning. But the story in the words rings true to life, something that could or did or must have happened. |
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