Tower of Song

About Tower of Song

"Tower of Song" is a song written by Leonard Cohen that appears on his 1988 album I'm Your Man. In a 2014 reader's poll, Rolling Stone listed it as the 8th favorite Cohen song. The genesis of "Tower of Song" is described in Ira Nadel's 1996 Cohen memoir Various Positions: "Tower of Song" is the keynote work of I'm Your Man. With it, Cohen wanted to "make a definitive statement about the heroic enterprise of the craft" of songwriting. In the early eighties, he called the work "Raise My Voice in Song. " His concern was with the aging songwriter, and the "necessity to transcend one's own failure by manifesting as the singer, as the songwriter." He had abandoned the song, but one night in Montreal he finished the lyrics and called an engineer and recorded it in one take with a toy synthesizer. Cohen revised the song, which contains the rumination, "I was born like this, I had no choice/I was born with the gift of a golden voice." Ever mindful of his reputation as a "flat singer" among critics, audiences often reacted when Cohen sang these lines live. Cohen also cited Hank Williams, a songwriter he had professed great admiration for, in the song ("...a hundred floors above me..."). more »

Year:

1999

4:35

265 Views

Playlists:

#1

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Well my friends have gone and my hair is gray
I ache in the places where I used to play
And I'm crazy for love but I'm not coming on
I'm just paying my rent every day
In the Tower of Song.

I said to Hank Williams, how lonely does it get?
Hank Williams hasn't answered yet
But I can hear him coughing all night long
About a hundred floors above me
In the Tower of Song.

I was born like this, I had no choice
I was born with the gift of a golden voice
And twenty-seven angels from the Great Beyond
They just tied me to this table right here
In the Tower of Song.

Well you can stick your little pins in that voodoo doll
I'm very sorry, baby, doesn't look like me at all
I'm standing near the window where the light is strong
Oh they don't let a woman kill you
Not in the Tower of Song.

I see you standing on the other side
I don't know how the river got so wide
I loved you baby, way back when
And all the bridges are burning that we might have crossed
But I feel so close to everything that we lost
We'll never , we'll never have to lose it again.

Well I bid you farewell, I don't know when I'll be back
They're moving us tomorrow to that tower down the track
But you'll be hearing from me baby, long after I'm gone
I'll be speaking to you sweetly from a window
In the Tower of Song.
I'll be speaking to you sweetly from a window
In the Tower of Song.
I'll be speaking to you sweetly from a window
In the Tower of Song.

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Marianne Faithfull

Marianne Evelyn Faithfull (born 29 December 1946) is an English singer, songwriter and actress whose career has spanned five decades. more »

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