Tower of Song - Leonard Cohen

So my thing with music is less extreme than a lot of other people's seem to be and my interest in finding new bands/musicians/etc is a fleeting, whimsical thing and I am a musical magpie who picks out shiny things she likes, listens to them a few dozen times and kind of scutters glibly onwards. New music is largely either recycled old music, wildly inaccessible to anyone who hasn't got the time to go to a garage show in a small town deep in rural America in 1999, absolutely fucking awful, or a combination of those things. This is my experience. This is my attitude. For future reference? I dunno?

So anyway Leonard Cohen, is what I'm getting to.

For the most part he's a poet who has a fixation on love and death and living, as most of us do I suppose, and for a little part he writes songs. He is so clearly not comfortable with the fact that he is singing and there are instruments around the place that it delights me, and he has the most lovely, effortless voice. His poetry is also great. If you're wondering why you've heard of him, he wrote Hallelujah, and the original version is worth listening to if only because it proves that sometimes cover versions can make a song so much better.

Anyway, this is Tower of Song, which I like for the determinedly simple words and the determinedly simple rhythm and the fact that it sounds like a kind of mournful reflection on the fact that he does songs now and he doesn't really know why. Also rad are the fragments of piano solo which fall like, a fraction ahead of the beat, I don't know why I like that but I do. This is the original, with pictures of flowers (youtube in its infinite wisdom, etc), but I'll embed a live version which I think is cool because he talks and plays the piano live, even if the audience (rightly enough) starts screamin' in the middle for a bit.

Anyway, there is the song I have been listening to over and over like a loser.

If anyone wants to edit this to put a cut in, feel free, I can't work out how to do it 'cos I don't really know, how to use the computer. (Press the button on the far right that looks like a page being ripped in half, hover-text is 'Insert Jump Break' - Nels)