Songs from a Room

Recorded in Nashville with Bob Johnston, who’d produced Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, Songs from a Room is far from a country record. As the Canadian poet’s second album, it is a sparse and dark meditation on lives being lived with great guilt and spiritual conflict. There is a heavy weight contained in Cohen’s bare-knuckled voice. “Bird on the Wire,” the album’s best-known track, has been frequently covered. (Kris Kristofferson has said the song’s opening lines will be his epitaph.) That song’s existential frustrations spill over into the biblically-inspired “Story of Isaac,” the bleak suicide of “Seems So Long Ago, Nancy” and the not-quite right love of “You Know Who I Am.” Only the vaguely countrified “Tonight Will Be Fine” exudes optimism. The arrangements are stripped to a chilling core, minimalist with acoustic and bass guitars emitting a 3 a.m. gloom. For those drawn to his vision, Cohen is beyond compare. The 2007 reissue includes an earlier take of “Bird on the Wire” and “Nothing to One,” an early version of “You Know Who I Am” that considering Cohen’s perfectionism are fascinating discoveries.