Leonard Cohen brought poetic sensibilities to the singer/songwriter genre like few other artists before or since. But he looked at his skills with humility, while also seeing songwriting as a kind of calling that he couldn’t have avoided if he wanted.
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On his 1988 track “Tower Of Song”, Cohen addressed his relationship with his vocation in typically striking fashion. Filled with humor and heart, it stands as one of the most engaging songs in his catalog.
Constructing the “Tower”
It was all about quantity over quality in the 80s for Leonard Cohen. His output in the 70s became a tad ragged as the decade progressed. As he bounced between different producers and tried on different styles, Cohen occasionally seemed to lose the plot. While individual songs stood out, his albums as a whole at the end of the 70s skewed a bit erratic.
Cohen slowed his pace down significantly in the 80s, releasing just two albums in that span. He also began to veer away from the simple acoustic guitar-and-vocal approach that had been his stock-in-trade for much of his career. Instead, he began putting his narratives in front of beds of synthesizers.
His 1984 album Various Positions, which included his classic “Hallelujah”, found him taking tentative steps in this newfound direction. By the time he came back with I’m Your Man in 1988, he had fully incorporated the modern sounds of the era in clever ways. “Tower Of Song” stands out as one of the most memorable songs from that record.
Cohen had been struggling with the song until he found a new way into it all at once. He quickly commissioned someone to help him record it, which he did with a synthesizer that sounds like it was picked up for less than $100 at a department store. The modest backing allows full attention to be paid to the brilliant lyrics.
Examining the Lyrics of “Tower Of Song”
The song’s titular edifice brings with it a kind of dual meaning. On the one hand, it’s a bit of a flex by Cohen, hinting that the songwriter’s life is an exalted one. Leonard even has a bit of fun with his reputation as a monotone singer. “I was born like this, I had no choice / I was born with the gift of a golden voice.”
But the tower also acts as a kind of prison, tormenting Cohen with its demands. You can hear that in the opening lines. “Well, my friends are gone and my hair is grey / I ache in the places where I used to play.” He shrugs his shoulders at it, because there’s no alternative for him. “I’m just paying my rent every day / In the Tower of Song.”
Cohen, famously literate and sometimes inscrutable, compares himself to Hank Williams, one of the most strikingly direct writers in music history, and comes up lacking: “Oh, a hundred floors above me / In the Tower of Song.” He even seems to reference critics who get him all wrong. “So you can stick your little pins in that voodoo doll / I’m very sorry, baby, doesn’t look like me at all.”
In between his laments, Cohen slips up in some social commentary. “The rich have got their channels in the bedrooms of the poor,” he sings. The middle eight speaks to the regrets that such single-minded devotion to one’s craft might bring. “And all the bridges are burning that we might have crossed,” he sings. “But I feel so close to everything that we lost.”
In the last new verse, Cohen implies that his music and lyrics will have an impressive shelf life. “But you’ll be hearing from me, baby, long after I’m gone.” How prophetic that turned out to be, in part because the “Tower Of Song” built by Leonard Cohen soared so high.
Photo by Michael Putland/Getty Images
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