by Buffy Sainte-Marie
He lacks musical training and whether or not the original quality of his melodies comes from simply not knowing what he is doing is not the point. He is obviously not a product of the G-E-D 7th school of songwriting. Almost all of his melodies start in one key and go through progressively more outrageous modulations, which often end up in a key entirely unrelated to the original one. This asks a lot of a first time listener who will no doubt be so enchanted by the magnificent poetry he's hearing that he may find himself itching to hear the song again and again to be able to absorb all that was going on in the music. Most songwriters use a very simple melodic line if the words are of great merit, and vice versa, but not Leonard Cohen. He has the delicious gall to ask us, who do not even know him, to follow him into a completely original and sometimes scary mind of words without the aid of any of the old folksy musical cliches we are used to holding on to as a guide-rail.
There's something uncomfortable about hearing a Leonard Cohen song for the first time. It seems to lack roots or direction or s something. But be patient; that's you, not him. The melodies are "unguessable," but listen again. When you have gotten used to the idea of chord x following chord y, though it has possibly never dared to do so before, the pattern becomes clear to you, and clearly unique it is.
Cohen's songs are both other-worldly and incredibly "mortal"...as I find Cohen himself to be . Most of his melodies are not immediately "catchy" but you are, you'll find, after hearing him, amazingly sophisticated to a much more extended form than Anglo-Saxon folk and pop music employs. With the exception of "Suzanne," the musical figures inevitably take a long time to repeat themselves as they do in some kinds of Indian and American Indian music. So it is that a casual listener might miss these patterns. I'm sure that Cohen will be criticized for this. He'll be called vague, aimless, cloudy. But I, for one, am grateful to him for lifting me off the familiar musical ground. It's curious to start off in one key and then find yourself in another, and to have no idea how you got there. It's like losing track of time; or realizing you've outgrown your name; or getting off at Times Square and walking into the Bronx Zoo; you don't know how it happened or who is wrong, but there you are.
This article comes from Sing Out! v.17#4, ©1967 Sing Out!. Used by permission. All rights reserved.