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:: Track list & details
Cohen's second album opens with "Bird on a Wire," another of his greatest hits. Those that found Songs of Leonard Cohen depressing wouldn't get any relief here. As implied by the black and white cover photo, these songs were darker, more hopeless and more violent than anything on the first collection. The Vietnam War was raging, the Civil Rights movement was boiling over, hippies were running wild in the streets, draft age boys were fleeing to Canada and psychedelia was at its height, both in recording studios an on the youthful streets of the planet Earth. With 20/20 hindsight and a bit of poetic license it's easy to imagine these songs of war, revolution, religion and suicide as an answer to the chaos of the times. The tunes seem full of ominous portents, haunted by ghosts and steeped in unbearable anxiety.
"Bird on a Wire" looks into the brooding heart of a man desperate for love, even as he acknowledges the impossibility of ever finding it. Its aching melody and plodding arrangement pull us ever deeper into the singer's pain and alienation. "Story of Isaac," "A Bunch of Lonesome Heroes," "The Old Revolution," "The Butcher" and "The Partisan" (a song popular with the French underground during the Nazi occupation of WWII), could be addressing the situation in Vietnam, eulogizing the senseless sacrifice of youth, the burden of war carried by ordinary soldiers and the random killing of innocents that is inescapable in any violent conflict. The arrangements as spare, keeping the focus on Cohen's dejected vocals and the forlorn poetry of the lyrics.
With the exception of "Tonight Will Be Fine," an almost cheerful love song that rides a Johnny Cash-like boom-chucka-boom rhythm, the love songs on Room are just as wrenching and austere as the war songs. "Seems So long Ago, Nancy" is a tribute to a friend who committed suicide; "You Know Who I Am" is full of alienation and could be the song of an aloof lover or perhaps the song God sings to humankind, a seemingly tender expression with a subtext of callous indifference; and "Lady Midnight" finds the poet spinning in an uncomfortable minuet with another absent lover or maybe even death herself.
Songs from a Room isn't your usual pop, or even singer/songwriter album, a clear indication that Cohen had his own unique voice, one that he was going exercise without regard for anything but his own personal vision. Bonus tracks: "Like a Bird," possibly a studio demo or an early arrangement of the song, with an overly busy bass line and more prominent, country flavored piano and "Nothing to One" with overdubbed vocal harmonies on the chorus and a mix that gives the vocals a bright high end. Neither one of them adds anything to our understanding of the man and his music.
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