There’s a crack in everything… Our collection of stories stemming from songs by Leonard Cohen looks at rehabilitation, mental health, love, even the moon landing. Plus a fun jazz poem from Canada, filmed while the author is driving. Luke Davies says in his piece about Tonight Will Be Fine, ‘Listening to most music has been [...]
Listening to most music has been so much harder for me since the stroke and I had not been keen on revisiting older recordings and demos of ideas stashed away on various hard drives.
Reading Cohen on Christmas morning/Poems of love and loss and yearning
Every morning he switches on the radio to my favourite station. He hopes it will help. Most of the time I barely notice it.
Flashback to the sixties, people living in the cities you got beatniks crossed with hippies sporting horizontal stripes and small goatees play a jazzy, minor chord, learn to smoke, renounce the lord
It’s a raucous, shambolic, ranting wreck of a song, which ends with a well-oiled Leonard chanting.
It was a restless, fitful time. At one or two or three in the morning I’d carefully ease out of bed and head for the loungeroom, well away from the sleeping family.
Vin Maskell Palliative care hospital ward, Melbourne, 2014The yellow line takes you to the Multiple Sclerosis ward. Green for Motor Neurone Disease. Blue for Parkinson’s Disease. You keep an eye on the yellow line as you side-step trolleys and wheelchairs, patients and nurses, volunteers and other visitors.
Rijn Collins Melbourne, 2016I know little about Cohen, but I’m learning about you. You tell me a story as we drive, and I turn towards you, my hands out to catch the falling words.
Vin Maskell Café, La Trobe St, Melbourne. Lunchtime June 2010Some songs need fresh air. They need to be able to breathe again. They need to be able to float away into space and not come into our orbit for a good while.