Leonard Cohen’s favourite Joan Baez song was a cover of his own
Leonard Cohen has a relatively immovable reputation as one of music’s finest lyricists. Having begun his career as a poet, his welcomed transition into music brought with it some of the genre’s most tender and nuanced pieces of work, conveying the tricky depths of human emotion on top of sophisticated soundscapes.
Across 15 albums, he’s flexed poetic muscles that blend rich imagery, humorous wit, and sensitivity towards romance, which has contributed to his creating the “ladies-man” mythology surrounding him. Because of his lyrical complexity, the texture of the music he chooses is often relatively stripped back – be it a simple piano or acoustic guitar – but always alludes to a sense of theatrics and grandeur that would later come into the production.
While in many ways their styles contrast, it’s an arc not too dissimilar from the great Bob Dylan. Perhaps one of the few artists who sit above Cohen lyrically, Dylan was somewhat of a north star for Cohen, who often spoke of the artist fondly: “We have a particular feeling for the music of our own generation, and usually the songs we courted to are the songs that stay with us all our life as being the heavy ones,” he added. “The singers of my own period, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Ray Charles, all those singers have crossed over the generations. But we have a special kind of feeling for the singers that we use to make love to.”
And when Dylan received his Nobel Prize for Literature, Cohen famously said: “To me, [the award] is like pinning a medal on Mount Everest for being the highest mountain”.
Obviously, Cohen’s admiration for Dylan is rooted in the latter’s pursuit for originality. As someone renowned for his lyricism, it is no surprise that Cohen has a profound respect for lyrically innovative work that speaks to something universal but in a unique way.
But let’s not forget that while Dylan is a trailblazing lyricist, he, like many others cut his teeth in the music industry with the odd cover or two. And famously, he did so alongside his folk revival compatriot Joan Baez. And one of Baez’s strongest covers was her take on Cohen’s ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’ from his 1971 album Songs of Love and Hate.
His melancholic track was paired with Baez’s powerful and deep vocals for a stunning remake of the original that still manages to exude Baez’s own sense of nuanced and observational personality. But it wasn’t a cover of his own track that Cohen regarded his favourite. In fact, it’s unsurprising that it isn’t given the fact he once told Deborah Sprague: “I’ve never gotten over the pleasure of somebody covering one of my songs. My career has really been quite modest in the world, and not many people have done so”.
But his contempt for reworks doesn’t extend further than his own work, because in listing his favourite songs of all time, Cohen named Baez’s take on Dylan’s 1967 track ‘I Shall Be Released’. Such was the brilliance of Baez and her uncanny ability to inject a sense of the unique into her covers, that she made Cohen forget one of his great quotes. Despite declaring her rework as on his all time favourite songs.
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