Sad Songs

I recently bought Leonard Cohen's Songs of Love and Hate, one of the first albums I ever owned in the long lost days of vinyl. In those days, around 1971, Mr Cohen was deeply fashionable, only to become deeply unfashionable, as did almost all singer-songwriters, in the later part of the decade. I recall being asked something about him in my interview for university entrance - something on the lines of who was the superior lyricist, Cohen or Joni Mitchell. The interviewer thought it was Ms Mitchell, I plumped for Leonard, citing Dress Rehearsal Rag from Songs of Love and Hate as evidence of a fully crafted lyric. I think the interviewer thought it was all rather pretentious, the lyric, not my answer (I hope.) Anyway, I got the university place I wanted, and duly came in time to think of most of Cohen's songs as pretentious. Now I know I was wrong. It's easy to mistake ambition and depth in popular music as pretence, especially when sometimes the ambition isn't quite realised. But it's important, and difficult given the cynicism of much of our culture, to err on the side of generosity. Listening to Songs of Love and Hate again was a reminder of the power of the singer's melancholy vision of things.

It also put me in mind of how much I'd enjoyed listening to the equally melancholy Devils & Dust during the December break. This was one of three Springsteen albums I took with me to KL, including the most recent Magic. I still haven't quite made up my mind about the new CD, but Devils & Dust really got inside me. It's in the Nebraska, Tom Joad acoustic mode of story songs featuring life's losers - even the small triumphs are equivocal and the failures are usually big ones. In fact, the superb Reno (a lyric so well-crafted its beyond craft) features what I think is the single saddest line of any song I know: Somehow all you ever need's, never quite enough you know. The fulcrum of the song, its throwaway nature is essential to our understanding of what has been thrown away, and why. It's also devastatingly true.

There's little in the way of salvation in Cohen's work; in Devils & Dust it usually comes in the form of a woman to love. Another truth.