Leonard Cohen

Cohen placed exactly one contemporary songwriter's name inside "Tower of Song" (1988): "I said to Hank Williams, how lonely does it get? Hank Williams hasn't answered yet, but I hear him coughing all night long, a hundred floors above me." He meant it as measurement, not decoration. Asked about the line in a 1994 interview, he said flatly: "Your Cheatin' Heart, songs like that, are sublime, in his own tradition, and I feel myself a very minor writer." Two decades earlier he had tested that admiration directly, renting a cabin outside Nashville and recording alongside the country session players who worked Williams' own tradition.

listen: upstream & heresource: A Hank Williams Journal — Leonard Cohen and Hank Williams, Part 2 (1994 interview quote on Williams' sublimity) ↗share

1953

Your Cheatin' HeartHank Williams

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1988

Tower of SongLeonard Cohen

listen forHank Williams' 1953 "Your Cheatin' Heart" is bare-bones honky-tonk — three chords, a steel guitar sob, and a voice that breaks exactly where the lyric hurts most. Cohen's "Tower of Song," cut on a cheap synthesizer thirty-five years later, sounds nothing like it on the surface, but listen to how his talk-singing catches and drops on "a hundred floors above me" — the same plainspoken ache, pushed through age and irony instead of pedal steel. Williams sings the wound directly; Cohen sings about admiring someone who could.

Far Out Magazine's profile of Cohen's listening habits puts a number on his devotion: for one long stretch he played the same Ray Charles records until they warped, and Cohen named Charles his biggest singing influence more than once. The habit outlived his youth — he wrote his 1966 novel Beautiful Losers on Hydra with a record player running Charles' The Genius Sings the Blues, and the book's final page dissolves its narrator into a Ray Charles movie. When Cohen finally recorded his own songs, the debt surfaced in the arrangements: a female chorus answering his verses, the same trick Charles had leaned on for two decades with the Raelets.

listen: upstream & heresource: Far Out Magazine — Ray Charles ↗share

1960

Georgia on My MindRay Charles

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1967

So Long, MarianneLeonard Cohen

listen forRay Charles cut "Georgia on My Mind" in 1960 with the Raelets behind him, their voices answering and cushioning his own lines with a warm, gospel-trained ache. Cohen's "So Long Marianne," recorded seven years later on a fraction of Charles' range, borrows the same structural move: a female chorus rises behind his talk-singing on every chorus. Far Out Magazine described that chorus as sounding like "a white version of" Charles' backup singers, the Raelets. Listen for the hand-off — Cohen states the line alone, then the women carry the feeling his voice can't reach alone.