The song Leonard Cohen wished he had written: “That’s beautiful”
Could this be one of the finest metaphors ever woven into a song: “I’m standing on a ledge and your fine spider web is fastening my ankle to a stone.” Well, when it comes to Leonard Cohen, it’s not even the finest composite metaphor in ‘So Long, Marianne’, eclipsed by, “You held onto me like a crucifix,” in the non-too-esteemed opinion of this daft lad.
But one thing is for certain: you have to travel far and wide in the annals of pop to find poetry as perfectly crafted as that in song – and you barely need a daft lad to point that out. Such poignancy takes craft, and most musical offerings are too crass to consider such a word. But Cohen relished being a painstaking craftsman… even to his detriment.
He would spend years pruning and perfecting a song, in the end, growing so weary with the work that he had to retreat to a Buddhist monastery where he was told to “lighten up”. He’d spent so long with his ample nose in a notebook, toiling over turns of phrase that he was informed that he “knew how to work but not how to play.”
Alas, his art stands up as the worthy result. The world is the beneficiary of his benevolent work. And this is something that he admired in others, too. For him, evidence of craftsmanship was an honorary bestowment on any piece of art, and he found that ‘Blueberry Hill’ by Fats Domino was resplendent with it.
The song was originally written way back in 1940, 16 years before Mr Domino planted his Fats flag in it. Back then, Vincent Rose, who composed the music, and the duo of Larry Stock and Al Lewis, who wrote the lyrics, weren’t too sure what to do with their gilded bramble-bluff-based ballad. It was recorded countless times, but nobody was quite making it stick.
It was Fats who found a way of presenting the poetry in a simple enough way to make it shine. In this regard, it is similar to Cohen’s unabashed, natural style. With lines like “You held onto me like a crucifix,” you can tell that the Canadian folk crooner has coerced them under his command over the years, but in song, he just breezes them out as though it’s over breakfast with booze on his breath.
That’s the sentiment he seems to see reflected in Fats’ version. “Over the years, I have discovered that a song eventually surrenders; it just needs enough time,” he said. “But the amount of time is beyond any reasonable conception of how much time you should spend. You might think that it is going to take the rest of the day, the week or the month. But in my case it takes years.”
He continued to tell Cohencetric that it’s a song he would’ve happily put his name alongside, “One of the greatest songs in history is ‘Blueberry Hill’,” he said, “‘The moon stood still on Blueberry Hill.’ I would be happy to have written that line. I don’t know how long it took the guy to write it, but it probably didn’t take years.”
Waxing lyrical about this charming tune and how he wishes he had written it, Cohen continued, “I think when you get really good, you write a line like, ‘I found my thrill on Blueberry Hill’, or, ‘The moon stood still on Blueberry Hill’. That’s beautiful, isn’t it? ‘The moon stood still’.” Aye, it’s not too shabby. So good, in fact, that aside from the poetry, it was well worth nabbing the melody for the masterful ‘Memories‘, too.
