180 Gram Vinyl! Includes Insert Lyric Sheet!
Recent Songs is the sixth studio album by Leonard Cohen, released in 1979. It was a return to Cohen's acoustic folk music after the Phil Spector experimentation of Death of a Ladies' Man, but now with many Jazz and Oriental influences.
The album includes Gypsy violin player Raffi Hakopian, and even a Mexican Mariachi band. Long-time Cohen collaborator Jennifer Warnes prominently appears in vocal tracks. Members of the band Passenger play on four of the songs and Garth Hudson of The Band also appears on the album. "Came So Far for Beauty" seems to be an unaltered outtake from the unfinished 1975 album Songs for Rebecca, which also included early versions of "The Traitor" and "The Smokey Life" (then with music by John Lissauer).
The metaphoric lyrics of "Ballad of the Absent Mare" are based on the twelfth-century Ten Bulls (or Ten Ox-herding Pictures). The song has been covered by several artists, notably Emmylou Harris on the album Cowgirl's Prayer (as "Ballad of a Runaway Horse").
"Cohen's couched his compositions in a musical vocabulary itself eerily alien: the half-breed flavor of mariachi, the not-quite-mandolin sounds of John Bilezikjian's oud. The accents of the East spice the rhythms of the West, while medieval symbols and modern language combine to let the songs swing free in time as well as space. The haunting strains of Raffi Hakopian's violin braid beauty and instability to give a name to the whole. What Cohen's come up with (he's been close before) is the gypsies' Romany, the nation that lives in the blood." - Rolling Stone
Features:
180 Gram Vinyl
Import
Includes Insert Lyric Sheet
Selections:
Side A:
1. The Guests
2. Humbled In Love
3. The Window
4. Came So Far For Beauty
5. The Lost Canadian (Un Canadien Errant)
Side B:
1. The Traitor
2. Our Lady Of Solitude
3. They Gypsy's Wife
4. The Smokey Life
5. Ballad Of The Absent Mare
Recent Songs is the sixth studio album by Leonard Cohen, released in 1979. It was a return to Cohen's acoustic folk music after the Phil Spector experimentation of Death of a Ladies' Man, but now with many Jazz and Oriental influences.
The album includes Gypsy violin player Raffi Hakopian, and even a Mexican Mariachi band. Long-time Cohen collaborator Jennifer Warnes prominently appears in vocal tracks. Members of the band Passenger play on four of the songs and Garth Hudson of The Band also appears on the album. "Came So Far for Beauty" seems to be an unaltered outtake from the unfinished 1975 album Songs for Rebecca, which also included early versions of "The Traitor" and "The Smokey Life" (then with music by John Lissauer).
The metaphoric lyrics of "Ballad of the Absent Mare" are based on the twelfth-century Ten Bulls (or Ten Ox-herding Pictures). The song has been covered by several artists, notably Emmylou Harris on the album Cowgirl's Prayer (as "Ballad of a Runaway Horse").
"Cohen's couched his compositions in a musical vocabulary itself eerily alien: the half-breed flavor of mariachi, the not-quite-mandolin sounds of John Bilezikjian's oud. The accents of the East spice the rhythms of the West, while medieval symbols and modern language combine to let the songs swing free in time as well as space. The haunting strains of Raffi Hakopian's violin braid beauty and instability to give a name to the whole. What Cohen's come up with (he's been close before) is the gypsies' Romany, the nation that lives in the blood." - Rolling Stone
Features:
180 Gram Vinyl
Import
Includes Insert Lyric Sheet
Selections:
Side A:
1. The Guests
2. Humbled In Love
3. The Window
4. Came So Far For Beauty
5. The Lost Canadian (Un Canadien Errant)
Side B:
1. The Traitor
2. Our Lady Of Solitude
3. They Gypsy's Wife
4. The Smokey Life
5. Ballad Of The Absent Mare
