Sunday, January 29th, 2012
"Tower Of Song"
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds cover Leonard Cohen
WikipediaI was having a little trouble coming up with something to say about this week’s selection by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds and taken from the 1991 Leonard Cohen tribute album I’m Your Fan, but happily a little plumbing around the tubes of the internet turned up this little piece at chromehorse (chrome solidarity!) that corroborates the bit at Wikipedia on the song. Which is basically that Cave and company got wrecked before recording a marathon-length jam on “Tower Of Song” that was left to the engineers to splice it all together into something usable. The raucous end result/pastiche is a far, far cry from Cohen’s meditative original, but I kind of love it and the backstory just adds to it.
Nick Cave has put Grinderman to bed and reconvened with The Bad Seeds to work on their fifteenth album, the follow-up to 2008’s Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!. Cohen releases his twelfth studio album Old Ideas on Tuesday. NPR has a feature piece on Cohen. And while on the topic of Cohen covers, Old Ideas With New Friends is a series of web videos of artists doing reinterpretations of the old master’s tunes – head over to Rolling Stone for Greg Dulli of The Afghan Whigs doing “Paper Thin Hotel” and Consequence Of Sound for Cold War Kids doing “There Is A War”. More is still to come.
MP3: Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – “Tower Of Song”
Video: Leonard Cohen – “Tower Of Song” (live on Night Music)
Video: Leonard Cohen – “Tower Of Song” (live in London 2009)
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1/30/12 2:49 am
Those covers are awesome! Leonard’s amazing. “Darkness” is a great single, too. Pitchfork’s got a full stream
http://pitchfork.com/news/45048-listen-to-the-new-leonard-cohen-single/
1/30/12 7:01 pm
This is just one gem among a slew of gems on the I’m Your Fan album, which has been played many many times at our house since it came out in the early 90s. Highly recommended, start to finish, even for non-Cohen fans (if you can find it). And a terrific document showcasing some of the best bands at that time.