I wonder sometimes about the emotional investment of a singer and their song. I wonder too about the shared resonance of that emotion between singer and listener. Isn’t that what makes the song work? A shared moment of profound commonality? It’s probably too much to ask that a performer recreate, time after time, the mood and emotional setting of composition, but maybe for some songs, some singers, that can stay true.
I’m thinking of a particular song, Leonard Cohen’s ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’, one of his most well-known and enduring. It featured on an album from 1971, Songs of Love and Hate, and it’s an odd piece in that framing, because perhaps it could be a little of either. No, that’s too glib I think.
This is a song about an emotional triangle in which the singer, a man whose female lover finds a moment of deep connection with a close and still beloved male friend, observes this interplay with a sort of frankly honest detachment, touched with gratitude. ‘Thanks, for the trouble you took from her eyes, I thought it was there for good, so I never tried.’ I can never hear that line without being a little lost in it. It’s a statement of our unknowability, the mystery of all of us to each other. But does that universal truth manifest as a troubled corner of the eye ... or is that a sign of some other quietly resigned misalignment? It’s a beautiful and Cheeverishly aching moment. A glimpse of mundane tragedy.
This was the first song of Cohen’s that I ever heard. It stopped me. Changed me then and there I think. It was maybe 1980, AM community radio playing in the bedroom of my little brother, young then, but dead before he was 30. Somehow, for me, the song wraps all that up within itself but carries on with its own mysterious narrative. So there’s a thing: music can have situational resonance, but a deeper layer that is its own intrinsic, truer, unchanging self.
Cohen was fond of this creation by all reports.
In 1994 he spoke about it on BBC Radio 1. ‘The trouble with that song is that I've forgotten the actual triangle. Whether it was my own of course. I always felt that there was an invisible male seducing the woman I was with, now whether this one was incarnate or merely imaginary I don't remember, I've always had the sense that either I've been that figure in relation to another couple or there'd been a figure like that in relation to my marriage. I don't quite remember but I did have this feeling that there was always a third party, sometimes me, sometimes another man, sometimes another woman. It was a song I've never been satisfied with. It's not that I've resisted an impressionistic approach to song writing, but I've never felt that this one, that I really nailed the lyric. I'm ready to concede something to the mystery, but secretly I've always felt that there was something about the song that was unclear.’
Perhaps that lack of clarity, of lyrical precision I guess, makes a space for the listener’s investment? I wonder whether we all come away from this tune with the same pang of quiet ennui, a touch of the universal. And do we feel it as the singer felt it?
Is deep in my heart and personal. Knowing that someone can take the trouble from the eyes. A time of peace, joy whatever but nit trouble
I’ve always imagined the letter recipient to be a woman! Love the song. Enjoy your posts.