If I Didn’t Have Your Love is the first song to appear here from Leonard Cohen’s final album You Want It Darker. When this album came out, I was enchanted by it. I wrote in the Dylan forum Expecting Rain analyses of each song, which regrettably I no longer possess. The fusion in many songs between interpretations of theology Judaism, Christianity and Buddhism is on another level. I couldn’t recommend this record any more to fans of Leonard, contemporary spiritual music or poetry in general. This is Leonard at his confessional as death regrettably comes a’ knockin‘.
Today’s song If I Didn’t Have Your Love is analogous to a recent post I wrote – Some Observations about Space – Time which hypothesised if the earth stood still at midnight as well as everything else in the Universe then there would be no time to observe. Leonard seems to superimpose ‘Love‘ as the 5th dimensional vantage point of Space -Time in our current reality. The song seems to be in some form a reconciliation process between Science and Faith.
If the sun would lose its light
And we lived an endless night
And there was nothing left that you could feel
That’s how it would be
What my life would seem to me
If I didn’t have your love to make it real
If the stars were all unpinned
And a cold and bitter wind
Swallowed up the world without a trace
Ah, well that’s where I would be
What my life would seem to me
If I couldn’t lift the veil and see your face
You Want It Darker is Cohen’s 14th and final album released on October 21, 2016, 17 days before his passing. Most of the songs on the album will be presented here. I remember being so shook up by his death and I played his music for days on end and wrote about them in remembrance. The title track was awarded a Grammy Award for Best Rock Performance in January 2018. You Want It Darker (album) was recorded in the living room of his home in Mid-Wilshire, Los Angeles and then sent by e-mail to his musical collaborators. His son, Adam Cohen recalled that “occasionally, in bouts of joy, he would even, through his pain, stand up in front of the speakers, and we’d repeat a song over and over like teenagers“.
References:
1. You Want It Darker – Wikipedia
“The more I live, the more I learn. The more I learn, the more I realize, the less I know.”- Michel Legrand
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