Elvis Costello’s three favourite Leonard Cohen songs
If someone were to present a list of their 500 favourite albums of all time, it would likely be met with some scepticism. Compiling such an extensive and varied list requires an extraordinary level of dedication and breadth of musical knowledge. Yet there are individuals whose encyclopedic understanding of music makes such a feat believable—Elvis Costello is undoubtedly one of them.
One might associate the bespectacled wonder with his brand of literate, melodic post-punk, but his career has detours every which way you look. This is a man who has collaborated with everyone from The Roots and Allen Toussaint to Burt Bacharach and Paul McCartney. He has had his work covered by everyone from Linda Ronstadt, Chet Baker and actual Johnny Cash and produced records by The Pogues and The Specials. He has also made records in genres from classical to Tin Pan Alley to Broadway and everything in between.
So, when he tells you he can list 500 essential albums, he’s almost certainly talking about records that he lives and breathes. So you can forgive the smattering of ‘Best Of’ Compilations that find their way onto the list, published in Vanity Fair in 2000, especially because its two ‘Best Of’ records that allow the man born Declan MacManus to talk about one of the great songwriters of all time, Leonard Cohen.
The link between Costello and Cohen is one that Costello rarely seemed to talk about. It’s there in the way both of them manage to balance poetry and a down-to-earth frankness in their lyricism, but Costello is more likely to rhapsodise about Bob Dylan or fellow Canadian demi-god Joni Mitchell than Laughing Len. However, on November 6th, 2017, the first anniversary of Cohen’s passing, a tribute concert was held in his honour. One that Costello himself, along with the likes of Lana Del Rey, Sting and Courtney Love, performed at.
Poignantly, one of the songs he performed was one that, 17 years prior, he’d listed as one of the great achievements in music. In between Ron Sexsmith and Damien Rice, Costello performed the opening title track to Cohen’s 1992 album The Future. The song in question, ‘The Future’, was terrified that the world’s destiny seems to contain nothing but murder and extremism, proposing that we may have been better off with the sharp lines we drew in the sand with the likes of the Berlin Wall.
Costello’s taste for the dark side of Cohen’s work continues with another pick of his in the Vanity Fair article. Despite “the dark side of Cohen’s work” sounding like “the fast side of the Ramones’ work”, ‘Who By Fire’ from 1974s New Skin For Old Ceremony receives special mention from Costello. It’s a song inspired both by the Un’taneh Tokef prayer recited in synagogues during the Days of Awe and Cohen’s own experiences entertaining Israeli combat troops in the Sinai during the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
His final pick of Cohen’s storied career, though, is one of his most famous and most strangely joyous. I mean, what better example of the man’s sense of humour is there than the line: “I was born like this, I had no choice. I was born with the gift of a golden voice.”
‘Tower of Song’ shows the mixed blessing of a life in music, one where they are trapped, constantly aware of their place in the pecking order (Cohen himself considers Hank Williams “a hundred floors above me”), and yet strangely proud of their place in the Tower of Song.
It must be a track close to the heart of songwriters everywhere. However, as a man who has said many times that he can’t stop making music, there are probably few people in this world who understand it at the level Elvis Costello does.
