SONG OF THE DAY

“Who By Fire” by Leonard Cohen (New Skin For The Old Ceremony, Columbia Records, 1974). Written by Leonard Cohen.

WHERE I HEARD IT

http://heardontv.com/tvshow/Criminal+Minds/Season+6/The+Longest+Night

INTERESTING FACTS (a la wikipedia)

– Leonard Norman Cohen, CC, GOQ (born 21 September 1934) is a Canadian singer-songwriter, musician, poet and novelist.

– Cohen published his first book of poetry in Montreal in 1956 and his first novel in 1963. His work often deals with the exploration of religion, isolation, sexuality and interpersonal relationships.

– Famously reclusive, having once spent several years in a Zen Buddhist monastery, and possessing a persona frequently associated with mystique, he is extremely well-regarded by critics for his literary accomplishments, for the richness of his lyrics, and for producing an output of work of high artistic quality over a five-decade career.

– Musically, Cohen’s earliest songs (many of which appeared on the 1967 album, Songs of Leonard Cohen) were rooted in European folk music. In the 1970s, his material encompassed pop, cabaret and world music. Since the 1980s, his high baritone voice has evolved into lower registers (bass baritone and bass), with accompaniment from a wide variety of instruments and female backup singers.

– Over 2,000 renditions of Cohen’s songs have been recorded.

– Cohen has been inducted into both the Canadian Music Hall of Fame and the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame and is also a Companion of the Order of Canada, the nation’s highest civilian honour. While giving the speech at Cohen’s induction into the American Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on March 10, 2008, Lou Reed described Cohen as belonging to the “highest and most influential echelon of songwriters.”

– He told Richard Goldstein in 1967. “I was told I was a descendant of Aaron, the high priest.” Cohen attended Herzliah High School, where he studied with poet Irving Layton.

– As a teenager, he learned to play the guitar, and formed a country-folk group called the Buckskin Boys.

– His father, who died when Cohen was 9, left in his will a modest trust income, sufficient to allow him to pursue his literary ambitions, without having to worry about where his rent would come from.

– In 1951, Cohen enrolled at McGill University, where he became president of the McGill Debating Union. His literary influences during this time included Yeats, Irving Layton, Whitman, Federico Garcia Lorca and Henry Miller.

– His first published book of poetry, Let Us Compare Mythologies (1956), was published under Louis Dudek as the first book in the McGill Poetry Series while Cohen was still an undergraduate student.

– Cohen’s book, The Spice-Box of Earth (1961) made him well known in poetry circles, especially in his native Canada.

– After completing an undergraduate degree, Cohen spent a term in McGill’s law school and then a year (1956-7) at Columbia University.

– Cohen wrote poetry and fiction throughout much of the 1960s. He preferred to live in quasi-reclusive circumstances, at the time. After moving to Hydra, a Greek island, Cohen published the poetry collection Flowers for Hitler (1964), and the novels The Favourite Game (1963) and Beautiful Losers (1966).

– Cohen’s writing process, as he told an interviewer in 1998, is “…like a bear stumbling into a beehive or a honey cache: I’m stumbling right into it and getting stuck, and it’s delicious and it’s horrible and I’m in it and it’s not very graceful and it’s very awkward and it’s very painful and yet there’s something inevitable about it.”

– In 1967, Cohen moved to the United States to pursue a career as a folk music singer-songwriter. During the 60s, he was a fringe figure in Andy Warhol’s “Factory” crowd. Warhol speculated that Cohen had spent time listening to Nico in clubs and that this had influenced his musical style.

– His song “Suzanne” became a hit for Judy Collins and was for many years his most covered song.

– After performing at a few folk festivals, he came to the attention of Columbia Records representative John H. Hammond.

– Cohen’s first album, Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967), was widely acclaimed by folk music buffs. He became a cult name in the U.S., as well as in the UK, where the album spent over a year on the album charts. Several of the songs on that first album were covered by other popular folk artists, including James Taylor, and Judy Collins.

– In 1971, Cohen’s music was used in the soundtrack to Robert Altman’s film McCabe & Mrs. Miller. When Cohen was on a stay in Nashville, Altman phoned to ask permission to use some tracks off Songs of Leonard Cohen. Coincidentally, earlier that same day, Cohen had seen Altman’s then-current film Brewster McCloud in a local theater. He hadn’t paid attention to the credits so when Altman asked permission to use Cohen’s songs in his new film, Cohen had to ask him who he was. Altman mentioned his hit film MASH, but Cohen had never heard of it. When Altman mentioned his lesser-known Brewster McCloud, Cohen replied, “Listen, I just came out of the theater. I saw it twice. You can have anything of mine you want!”

– Cohen toured twice with Jennifer Warnes as a back-up singer (in 1972 and 1979). Warnes would become a fixture on Cohen’s future albums and she recorded an album of Cohen songs in 1987, Famous Blue Raincoat.

– Cohen’s book of poetry and drawings, Book of Longing, was published in May 2006; in March a Toronto-based retailer offered signed copies to the first 1500 orders placed online. All 1500 sold within hours. The book quickly topped bestseller lists in Canada. On May 13, 2006, Cohen made his first public appearance for thirteen years, at an in-store event at a bookstore in Toronto. Approximately 3000 people turned up for the event, causing the streets surrounding the bookstore to be closed. He sang two of his earliest and best-known songs: “So Long, Marianne” and “Hey, That’s No Way To Say Goodbye”, accompanied by the Barenaked Ladies and Ron Sexsmith.

– The most famous song Leonard Cohen has written is “Hallelujah”. In 1996, John Cale’s cover of this song first appears in the independent film Basquiat. John Cale also performed this song in the 2001 film Shrek. The cover when watching the actual movie was by John Cale, but the original soundtrack for the movie had a Rufus Wainwright version. John Cale’s version was also featured on the television series Scrubs.
In 2004, fellow Canadian k.d. lang released the album Hymns of the 49th Parallel which featured a cover as well. She subsequently performed the song live, on February 12, 2010, at the 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver, Canada. Jeff Buckley recorded one of the best-known versions of “Hallelujah” for his debut album Grace in 1994. to critical acclaim. It was used during the final minutes of the West Wing episode “Posse Comitatus”, the last episode of season 3. On March 7, 2008, Jeff Buckley’s version of Cohen’s “Hallelujah”, went to #1 on the iTunes chart after Jason Castro performed the song on the 7th season of the television series American Idol. Another major boost for Cohen’s song exposure came when singer-songwriter Kate Voegele released her version of “Hallelujah” from her 2007 album Don’t Look Away. In March 2009, the movie Watchmen, used Leonard’s version of the song to underscore the sex scene between two of the superheroes, Nite Owl and Silk Spectre II. The director, Zack Snyder, had originally intended to use Allison Crowe’s version of the song, but he said he felt that Leonard’s version is “a little sadder of a song, it’s a little bit more twisted, it’s a little more broken, which expresses to me what’s going on in that scene, between those two characters.” In 2010, singer/Songwriter Neil Diamond included “Hallelujah” on his latest album, Dreams, a compilation of some of Diamond’s personal favorite songs by other writers–a “dream” album, hence the title. Diamond had previously covered “Suzanne.”

– Cohen has released 11 studio albums and 6 live albums during the course of a recording career lasting over 40 years, throughout which he has remained an active poet.

– All of his releases have been on Columbia Records.

– New Skin for the Old Ceremony was Leonard Cohen’s fourth studio album.

– On this album, he begins to evolve away from the rawer sound of his earlier albums, with violas, mandolins, banjos, guitars, percussion and other instruments giving the album a more orchestrated (but nevertheless spare) sound.

– The album is silver in the UK, but never dented the Billboard Top 200.

– A remastered CD was released in 1995 and in 2009 it was included in Hallelujah – The Essential Leonard Cohen Album Collection, an 8-CD box set issued by Sony Music in the Netherlands.

– The original cover art for New Skin for the Old Ceremony was an image from the alchemical text Rosarium philosophorum. The two winged and crowned beings in sexual embrace caused his U.S. record label, Columbia Records to print one early edition of the album minus the image substituting instead a photo of Cohen. The image originally came to public attention in C.G.Jung’s essay, “The Psychology of The Transference” (2nd ed.1966) where it is held by Jung to depict the union of psychic opposites in the consciousness of the enlightened saint. The sexual embrace as a symbol for this condition of psychic unity is also found frequently in Tibetan thangkas (sacred paintings).

– “Who by Fire” explicitly relates to Cohen’s Jewish roots, echoing the words of the Unetanneh Tokef prayer and sung as a duet with Janis Ian (also Jewish; her birth name was Janis Eddy Fink).

– Janis Ian performs vocals on the album.

– “Who by Fire” was covered by The House of Love on I’m Your Fan, a play on Leonard Cohen’s I’m Your Man album title.

– “Who by Fire” was also covered by industrial band, Coil on their 1986 album, Horse Rotorvator.

VIDEO OF THE DAY

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