‘The Stories of the Street’: Joni Mitchell’s favourite Leonard Cohen song
There aren’t many songwriters in the world who have a great command of the human experience and a surefire way of expressing it with similarly unique humility as Joni Mitchell. Perhaps the leading light of her generation when it comes to lyrics, few scribes are able to make her feel overshadowed. However, if there was one to hold the flame of flagrant wordsmithery, it might be Leonard Cohen.
The two lyricists were at the top of their game when they met and began what would become a decades-long friendship. The relationship between Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen was one of mutual respect and brief romantic involvement. Mitchell was a young and impressionable folk singer who looked up to the older and more experienced fellow Canadian Cohen, even occasionally using him as a guide for her own music.
Mitchell had professed admiration for Cohen’s work, specifically citing ‘Suzanne’ in the book Joni Mitchell: In Her Own Words: “Leonard did ‘Suzanne’, I’d met him, and I went, ‘I love that song. What a great song.’ Really,” she said. “‘Suzanne’ was one of the greatest songs I ever heard. So I was proud to meet an artist. He made me feel humble because I looked at that song, and I went, ‘Woah. All my songs seem so naive by comparison.’ It raised the standard of what I wanted to write.”
The track is perhaps most noteworthy for being about a real person. “The song ‘Suzanne’ is journalism,” Cohen says in the book Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen: Interviews and Encounters. Within the track, he speaks of his deep infatuation with Suzanne Verdal, the wife of his friend, “It’s completely accurate,” he confesses. It is easy, therefore, to draw comparisons between Mitchell’s inspiration from the song and her penchant for confessional songwriting. It would be just one spark that would light up their shared appreciation for one another.
When they were briefly involved in a relationship, it seemed like a perfect meeting of the minds. As it turned out, their romance wasn’t destined to last. At the very least, the two writers managed to get some material out of it: Cohen with the poem ‘Two Went to Sleep’ and Mitchell with ‘Rainy Night House’, which appeared on her third album, Ladies of the Canyon.
As Mitchell remembered, “I went one time to his home, and I fell asleep in his old room, and he sat up and watched me sleep. He sat up all night, and he watched me see who in the world I could be.” There’s a fine line between devotion and desire, and most people agree that this is the threshold one crosses when watching another sleep. However, the duo’s friendship seemed enshrined until Cohen’s passing.
Before his death in 2016, Mitchell would praise Cohen’s work as part of her collection of favourite songs for a 2005 release. When assembling her own Artist’s Choice compilation album in 2005, Mitchell included Cohen among some of her favourite musicians, alongside Miles Davis, Ray Charles, Edith Piaf, and Steely Dan. Mitchell singled out ‘The Stories of the Street’ from Cohen’s 1967 LP The Songs of Leonard Cohen.
In the album’s liner notes, Mitchell’s assessment of Cohen is said from a place of greater maturity. “Leonard – the boudoir poet – the hungry ghost – the perennial penitent. Young girls take him seriously. I did. He seemed so worldly to me as a young woman. He gets funny as you get older. I guess I can call him Lenny now.”
Released on Songs of Leonard Cohen in 1967, the track is an underrated gem that not only reeks of the integral quality Cohen gave to all his work but also of the constant struggle he felt as part of society. A tune that both highlights the special nature of humanity but denigrates the single human’s effect on the world may be, it is archetypal of Cohen’s ability to operate as the ultimate poetic observer. It’s fitting, then, that when asked for her favourite songs, Mitchell would pick a track that more accurately depicts the man Cohen was than any of the more popular hits.
