The album Leonard Cohen called a “failed” experiment
The work of Leonard Cohen is unlike the work of many other musicians. Where a lot of people are driven by sound and melody, Leonard Cohen has always looked at things differently. Narrative remains at the forefront of his ideas; his words are his superpower, and his music has always been a way to bring the best out of those words and allow him to tap into different parts of the human psyche as a result.
In that sense, Cohen listening to a finished piece of work was a lot different to other artists listening to a finished piece of work. He didn’t hear how a record sounded and use that sound to decide whether or not he was happy; instead, he would listen to how a record sounded, analyse whether the sound matched the tone of the track, whether the words were doing the emotion trying to be conveyed justice, whether the words were good enough, and so on and so on. Essentially, no stone was left unturned, and he remains one of the most self-critical musicians because of it.
Consider the track ‘Hallelujah’. This is a song that has a real intimacy and intense poetic nature to it; the song didn’t just happen overnight. Leonard Cohen needed to ponder over many different aspects at many different times. It didn’t help that the first time he pitched the track to Columbia Records, they turned it down. Eventually, when the song was finally complete, the finished product took over 180 attempts to get right.
The fact of the matter is that Cohen is an artist with so many layers to what he creates that he can find things to critique even if they aren’t there. One of his albums that he does this on is his 1971 LP, Songs of Love and Hate. Featuring tracks such as ‘Avalanche’ and ‘Joan of Arc’, the record is perceived as a classic by many, but Cohen disagrees.
“I suppose you could call it gimmicky if you were feeling uncharitable towards me. I have certainly felt uncharitable towards me from time to time over that record and regretted many things,” he said. These seem like harsh words, but Cohen maintained that the album’s sound came across as inauthentic in the end.
He continued, “It was over-produced and over elaborated… an experiment that failed.”
It’s only fitting that Cohen wanted to play around with his sound a bit throughout his career; he was no stranger to incorporating different instruments and working with a variety of musicians, but if that process ever took away from the message he was trying to get across in his writing, then he would look at those albums with a tinge of regret.
Though many people listen to Songs of Love and Hate and hear classic Cohen, with his brooding sound and poetic lyricism, the man himself thought the over-production of the record took away from what he was trying to say.
