Songs From A Room

Songs From A Room is Leonard Cohen’s second album, recorded in Nashville in 1968-69 with producer Bob Johnston after Cohen had grown dissatisfied with the lush arrangements of his debut. The sessions aimed for a sparer, more austere sound built around Cohen’s voice and guitar with understated backing, matching the stark, almost liturgical tone of the songs. It opens with ‘Bird On The Wire’, which Cohen later called close to a personal credo, and includes ‘The Partisan’, a French Resistance song he adapted into English, and ‘Story Of Isaac’, a meditation on sacrifice and war. The album arrived as Cohen was establishing himself as one of the defining singer-songwriters to emerge from the late-1960s folk scene, prized as much for his literary background as a poet and novelist as for his music. Its severity and restraint influenced the minimalist, confessional strain of folk and singer-songwriter music that followed through the 1970s. Critics at the time and since have praised its unflinching, plainspoken lyricism and its refusal of the ornamentation common to the era’s folk-rock. It remains one of the most discussed and covered records in Cohen’s catalogue, anchoring his reputation as a songwriter of unusual gravity and precision.