Debbie Harry’s favourite lyric of all time
There have been many examples throughout the history of contemporary music where the artist has gone beyond the call of duty and delivered more than just simple placeholder lyrics and gifted the world with pure poetry. Some artists do this so naturally, with their lyrical content seemingly coming ahead of the music in terms of importance – Phil Elverum of The Microphones and Mount Eerie springs to mind as a perfect example of someone whose lyrics are so poignant that the musical accompaniment is often the last thing you notice.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, there are plenty of artists who just don’t have the knack for writing beautiful flowing words, and while you’re able to defend their melodies and musical abilities, the lyrics that are attached to their songs are absolute dross. As much as I love Metronomy, Joe Mount was at his absolute low point on 2019’s Metronomy Forever as he vomited out lines like “she’s sparkling like a fresh glass of Perrier, she’s happy like my birthday”. I still derive pleasure from their music an immense amount, but this is truly scraped from the bottom of the lexical barrel.
Back to great wordsmiths, Leonard Cohen was undoubtedly one of the greatest, and he most definitely fits into the camp of ‘poet first, musician second’. He was celebrated as a poet during his time enrolled at McGill University in Montreal during the early 1950s, and his work was first published in this capacity in 1954. He wouldn’t release his debut album, Songs of Leonard Cohen, until 13 years later, by which time he was already 33 years of age and was feeling disenchanted by his lack of success as a poet and fiction writer.
The rest is, of course, history, and for the rest of his life, he would become revered in both fields, releasing a total of 14 albums, 14 poetry collections and two novels prior to his death in 2016. While he had a number of breaks from recording music, his songs from every era of his career are almost universally decorated with praise, and one particular song from his 1992 album The Future seemingly struck a chord with another celebrated artist for how beautiful its final verse is.
As part of HMV’s podcast series My Inspiration, Blondie’s lead vocalist Debbie Harry spoke about how much she was affected by the lyrics to Cohen’s song ‘Waiting For the Miracle’, singling out the closing stanza of the track. It is an idiosyncratically funereal track that wallows in both themes of spirituality and longing for love to come into his life.
There’s a real sense of desperation in Cohen’s words and vocals throughout the song, but the way in which it comes to a close is especially sentimental:
“When you’ve fallen on the highway
And you’re lying in the rain
And they ask you how you’re doing
Of course you say you can’t complain
If you’re squeezed for information
That’s when you’ve got to play it dumb
You just say you’re out there waiting
For the miracle, for the miracle to come“.
While the entirety of the song holds importance to Harry, who would go on to cover the song in live performances and name it as part of one of her favourite film soundtracks after it was used in Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, it was this verse in particular that she would select as her favourite lyric and one that inspired her after hearing it.
Even though Harry herself was not known as the primary lyricist for Blondie, leaving large amounts of the writing to other members or collaborating with guitarist Chris Stein, this particular effort from Cohen stood out as an evocative number that has remained one that renders her speechless.
