Philwilli wrote:Only 2 years ago Fljotsdale?Hmm, you must be very young.
I'm 69. But I was interested in more 'classical' music, never listened to much else, though I liked a few of the more popular songs my children liked. Cohen wasn't one they listened to. In fact, I had only a vague idea I'd heard the name somewhere when I first 'discovered' him. I regret all those years! But at least I had an orgy of buying Cohen discs when I DID discover him!
Fljotsdale,i'm sorry about my mistake.I'm glad you have had a orgy
buying and listning to Leonard.
I have had a orgy myself these last 2 months with all the bootleg
DVD's and cd's i have got.I can't make up my mind what to play
and the machines only take one cd or DVD at a time.
Heh! Well, I hope Cohen got the royalties for everything I bought!
But I have the same problem about what to listen to! Which is why I keep 'em in date order, so as to play a different one every day... but I end up mostly listening to a few favourite CDs, all the same, lol!
1988, my first year in college, someone made me a Fairport Convention mixed tape and my favorite song on it was Bird on a Wire with Sandy Denny singing. I asked my friend about it and he said LC wrote it, then i didn't run into LC again until around 1992 when another friend told me to watch this Austin City limits show he had taped of Leonard singing songs from "Everybody Knows" with the oud backup. Thats when I became a fan.
Where: In the living room in my home in Rockville, Maryland, at night, when I would practice yoga and listen to psycadellic music from an alternative music program called Spiritus Cheese.
What: One night they played Susanne, I was glued to the speaker - it
was different than anything I heard before!
There really is a Hicksville, LI - I lived there 9 years before we moved to Maryland. I'm so glad we moved and was saved from the fate of going to
Hicksville High with Billy Joel.
In bed with my future wife, then girlfirend listening to Jenny does Lenny.
I remember thinking to myself "I gotta get behind this music". I had a tremendous emotional pull on me. So that week I bought Various Positions and from "Dance me" I was floored. So I suppose "Dance me" is the first but Jennifer signing "Famous Blue Rain Coat" was the first clue I got from the Universe that there was someone I needed to hear.
I was young and my older brother had just returned from a trip to Nova Scotia with the sea cadets. He called out siblings together and got out the tape player. Then he pulled out a tape with the title -Songs from a Room.
Listen to this he said. Like a bird on a wire, like a drunk in a midnite choir, I have tried in my way to be free--Leonard's deep voice floated out into the room. My brother joined in. his voice sounding very much like leonard's, while he strummed his guitar. I was delighted. I swear by this song and by all that I have done wrong, I will make it all up to you. hahaha and he has, he has.
Autumn 1969, at a party in Hampstead. I was alone, feeling lonely, without a girlfriend at a party full of happy couples. I had just left school and had spent the entire summer holiday on Hydra, where I had fallen in love for the first time with (in my impossible romantic way) a girl who just had to live in New Jersey, the other side of the planet. Great!
I was sitting morosely on the floor with my back to the wall, wondering why we always fall in love with totally impractical people (as LC was later to write "So let's leave these lovers wondering why they cannot have each other"), when someone put on either Songs of LC or Songs From a Room (can't remember which).
I found his music very companionable, very comforting. But mostly I was thinking "Oh yes, he's the one from Hydra, isn't he".
Incidentally, the girl I was in love with was not interested in me beyond friendship, but she let me down gently ... and 37 years later, we still exchange emails.
“If you do have love it's a kind of wound, and if you don't have it it's worse.” - Leonard, July 1988
In the mid 60's I first heard a Leonard Cohen song at a place called Cafe Andre in Montreal. It was before Leonard had recorded anything and it was sung by Penny Lang.
She spoke so highly of Leonard Cohen that it encouraged me to get his first album when it finally came out.
Penny was a very enjoyable singer who quit singing publically just around the time when singers like her started becoming popular. These days she has a few interesting tales to tell about Leonard, like the time he called her and asked her to teach him how to play the guitar and she responded "Not today, I'm too depressed" Another time when she was singing Suzanne at Gerde's in New York someone from Warner Music offfered her the opportunity to record a record of Suzanne and she refused because they insisted that she add a lot of electrical sound to it and she felt that that would not be fair to the sound.
I would like to share some of mine impressions of first meeting with LC.
I was a schoolgirl mad with English, it was somewhen in the late 1980s. Once my English teacher told me - I would like to introduce you with one beautiful singer, and we listened to some Leonard`s songs and I appreciated the "Dance me" as the greatest one, and I guess it is still one of my famous one. Later I met with "Famous blue raincoat" - an another gretest one to my mind. After that I met with different Leonard`s songs and they all are fantastically marvellous! Among my favourite is the Bird on the wire (I think it is so close to us `cause we all are like the birds on the wires in our ives , aren`t we?), but I`m still in the way of getting acquaintance with LC work, and I think I have a lot to find out yet, and I am in astonishment with his work.
And some of you are lucky to see LC alive - I guess it is something unbelivable - such persons as Leonard are sent us from Heavens.
Thank you for wellcoming.
I find Jarkko's site very nice and guess you all are nice, too, it couldn`t be otherwise, because Leonard should be surrounded only by excellent company
Which is why I keep 'em in date order, so as to play a different one every day... but I end up mostly listening to a few favourite CDs, all the same, lol! 
.
, aren`t we?), but I`m still in the way of getting acquaintance with LC work, and I think I have a lot to find out yet, and I am in astonishment with his work. 
Now, how did you find Jarkko's site 
?