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:

2005

5:39

177 Views

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Well my friends are gone and my hair is grey
I ache in the places I used to play
And I'm crazy for love but I'm not coming on
I'm paying my rent everyday in the Tower of Song

I said to Leonard Cohen: How lonely does it get?
Leonard Cohen hasn't answered me yet
But I can hear him coughing all night long,
A million floors above me in the Tower of Song

I was born like this, I had no choice
I was born like this, with a golden voice
Twenty-seven angels from the Great Beyond,
Well they tied me to this table right here in the Tower of Song

You can stick your needles in a voodoo doll
I'm sorry baby, but it don't look like me at all
I'm standing by the window where the light is strong
They don't let a woman kill you in the Tower of Song

I've grown bitter, bitter, of this you may be sure:
The rich, the rich have got channels in the bedrooms of the poor
And there's a mighty judgement but it won't be long, but I may be wrong
You see, you hear these funny voices in the Tower of Song - oh yeah -
The guitar, the bass, the drums, so nice every hour in the Tower of Song

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

I bid you farewell, I don't know when I'm 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'm speaking to you sweetly from a window in the Tower of Song

Now you can say that I've grown bitter, of this you can be sure:
The rich have got channels in the bedrooms of the poor
And there's a mighty judgement but it won't take long, I may be wrong

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Nick Cave

Nicholas Edward "Nick" Cave (born 22 September 1957) is an Australian musician, songwriter, author, screenwriter, composer and occasional film actor. more »

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