| Live Songs |  | Artist: Leonard Cohen
Category: Music
List Price: $26.99
Buy Used: $22.80
You Save: $4.19 (16%)
Used (2) Collectible (1) from $22.80
Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 1069222
Format: Live, Import
Media: Audio CD
Discs: 1
EAN: 4988009644424
ASIN: B0000562KZ
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
Raw or reverential, every track a gem September 6, 2008
Pieter (Johannesburg)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Live Songs, released in 1973, is a compilation of live performances at London & The Isle of Wight in 1970, and Berlin, Brussels, London, Paris & a "room in Tennessee" in 1972. The stirring female backing vocals that characterize Cohen's best work are prominent throughout and come from Donna Washburn & Jennifer Warren on the 1972 tracks and from Aileen Fowler & Corlynn Hanney in 1970. The album with its mix of rare songs and material from Songs From a Room is one of Cohen's early classics and ought to be in every fan's collection.
The brief intro Minute Prologue & the songs Passing Thru, Please Don't Pass Me By & Queen Victoria are rare, if not unique to this album. The existence of studio versions would be wonderful news. The prologue will mean a lot to devoted fans, the yearning Passing Through ("glad that I ran into you") is tuneful and rhythmic, rich with scriptural imagery & illumined with humor through a clever pun or two, whilst the mystical masterpiece You Know Who I Am gets a delicate & reverential treatment.
Bird On A Wire has a brief spoken introduction in French and the lyrics slightly diverge from the original in a few lines. The highlight of the album is the 14-minute long Please Don't Pass Me By with its spoken intro & interjections and its distressing, almost unbearably painful message. Some intolerable truths about the human condition are conveyed in this anguished performance. A more digestible treatment of a somewhat similar theme is The Captain on Various Positions.
The romantic Tonight Will Be Fine with its appealing fiddle and banjo appears in an up-tempo, rhythmically lilting rendition. I think this live version has an additional stanza not found on the original from Songs from a Room. In classical acoustic style Story of Isaac and Seems So Long Ago Nancy are tenderly interpreted and there is also a gentle acoustic instrumental titled Improvisation. Live Songs concludes with Queen Victoria that appears as a poem in his poetry books like Selected Poems 1956 - 1968.
Subtle or raw, these performances re-interpret the familiar songs in a different light; a side of early Cohen that fans will miss out on if they don't own this album. This rawness of e.g. Please Don't Pass Me By later manifested on the Phil Spector-produced Death of a Ladies' Man to the consternation of many of Cohen's fans, but it was always a part of his musical make-up as also proved by tracks like Diamonds in the Mine on Songs of Love and Hate. Live Songs is an exceptional album of great splendor and power, an essential recording in Leonard Cohen's career.
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