Songs From A Room

Songs From A Room is Leonard Cohen's second album, recorded in Nashville after sessions begun in Hollywood with David Crosby were abandoned, with producer Bob Johnston bringing in a leaner country-inflected band to frame Cohen's increasingly austere songwriting. Cohen had emerged from the Montreal and New York literary scenes as a published poet and novelist before turning to songwriting in his thirties, and this second record consolidated the persona of weary troubadour-prophet established on his 1967 debut. The album includes 'Bird on the Wire,' which Cohen would later call something close to a personal credo, and 'Story of Isaac,' a meditation on war and sacrifice drawn from the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac; it also features his stark reading of the resistance-movement song 'The Partisan.' Sparer and starker than its predecessor, with Cohen's voice set against minimal guitar, banjo and bass rather than lush orchestration, the album marked a deliberate move toward plainness that would define much of his subsequent work. It was received by critics as a bleaker, more disciplined successor to the debut, cementing Cohen's reputation as one of the era's most distinctive and uncompromising singer-songwriters. Decades on, it remains a touchstone of the confessional folk tradition and a key entry in the Cohen catalogue for the songs it introduced into his permanent repertoire.