Remastering

Songs Of Leonard Cohen - his first album, a remastered
version from Holland - arrived in the mail today.

When I came of age and found my way into the private company
of brilliant and mysterious young women, this album always
seemed to be on in the background. Now, almost forty years
later, I removed it from its lovely black-laquered folding case
and put it on the stereo.

The bass still sounded muddy, the guitar still a bit distorted,
but the overall presence was sharper. Suzanne, The Stranger
Song, Sisters Of Mercy, So Long Marianne, Hey That's No Way
To Say Goodbye, the one about the thin green candle - how
beautiful, beautiful! And I was back in Susan's room out on
Interurban Road overlooking the rain-toppled grasses, and
in Catherine's attic along Admirals Road under the beaded
skylight. I could hear their voices as we discussed Steinbeck,
Orwell, the genius of William Golding. Catherine talked of
the careful mind of Atticus Finch, and I wondered, whatever
happened to Harper Lee.

O the sisters of mercy, they are not departed or gone. They
were waiting for me when I thought that I just can't go on.

Susan's voice lilting with the rising wave of each thought.
Catherine's hair an even more intense red than I recall, as
if she'd stood on a thousand new pennies and willed their
copper upward, through her blood and out her skull.

That must be what writing is for, to bring the past more
carefully into the present, closing time in folded hands,
remastering memory.

DL

Next Stop, Feeling

There aren't many singers who have it, that ability
to get underneath the bed you're laying in and cause
it to shiver, move a little, as though a train were
passing beneath your house.

I'm not talking about the voice as a musical instrument
of beauty and versatility, but of an authenticity. What I
am speaking of is a commitment to the song that allows
you, the listener, no exit.

This is the meaning of extraordinary rendition that we
ought to know. Of being captured, spellbound, by a song
until it is over.

It's in the way Robert Johnson sang his blues line, like
he'd chewed metal into a midnight gum, and the song
is mineral spit.

It's in the way Sandy Denny took up the contradictory
tenderness and ferocity of every woman, and sang
from the place that fracture was grafted back together.

Dick Gaughan, of Scotland, pictured up top, has one of
those voices.

Over the next four weeks of Better Days, my radio
program, I will be sharing music by singers - and an
instrumentalist or two - whose voices stop what you
are doing, lead you down below.

No exit while the train is moving.

Next stop, feeling.

DL