A THOUSAND KISSES DEEP
LEONARD COHEN
SONGWRITERS: LEONARD COHEN & SHARON
ROBINSON
COUNTRY: CANADA
ALBUM: TEN NEW SONGS
LABEL: COLUMBIA
GENRE: CONTEMPORARY FOLK
YEAR: 2001
Ten New
Songs is Leonard Cohen's tenth studio album, released in 2001. It was
co-written and produced by Sharon Robinson. It was produced in Cohen's and
Robinson's home studios in Los Angeles. It was also his first album in nearly 10 years. The
album peaked at #143 on the Billboard 200, #4 in Canada (where it went
platinum), #1 in Poland (where it went platinum) and #1 in Norway.
Robinson
produced, co-arranged, co-wrote and sang on Ten New Songs, making it a true
collaboration. Cohen
gave Robinson some lyrics he had written and she built the music around them.
Cohen was so impressed with Robinson's demos that she ended up singing all the
songs with him, including several leads. "At
his insistence", Robinson clarified to Mojo's Sylvie Simmons. "It's
ironic, isn't it, that the man who's got this voice that women swoon over just
wants to hide it away?" The album was recorded by Robinson and Cohen in
near isolation, with Leanne Ungar engineering and Bob Metzger adding guitar to
the LP's first single, "In My Secret Life". In 2010, Robinson spoke about the
recording with Cohen biographer Anthony Reynolds:
The way the album came about is linked to the actual
sound of it. The album had a unique path and it wasn't done in the way an album
is normally done. It was also recorded pretty much in the order it plays
in...The recording was some kind of extension of his time at Mount Baldy. He
was still very reclusive during this time...I would initially sing and play
everything, at the time not knowing if we were bringing in other musicians or
singers. Of course as it turned out, we didn't so my voice stayed because Leonard
liked what he was hearing.
Robinson also divulged to Reynolds that most of the album
was recorded in her three-car garage that was adjoined to her house (which she
had converted to a studio) and that she would take the raw audio on a portable
hard drive to Cohen's converted studio above his garage. The album was Cohen's
first to be recorded completely digitally. "There's
a sense of relaxation in the tunes that comes through", the singer enthused
to Nick Patton Walsh of The Observer in 2001, "there's a kind of pulse, an
invitation to get into it - a groove." Although the album has an adult
contemporary, R&B feel ("Boogie Street" and "That Don't Make
It Junk"), several songs contain themes of unspeakable desolation and
loneliness, including "By the Rivers Dark" and the brooding "A
Thousand Kisses Deep", reinforced by the album's contained, almost
womb-like feel and sound. Several of the tracks on Ten New Songs existed
in some form or another long before they appeared on Cohen's tenth studio
album; Cohen first revealed he was working on a new song called "My Secret
Life" in 1988, and, in 1995, Melinda Newman of Billboard reported
that two tracks, "My Secret Life" and "A Thousand Kisses
Deep", were "close to completion..." "I’d like to have a
very intimate kind of record," the singer confided to Newman at the time,
"of a very different nature than actual songs." "In My Secret
Life", a song that wound up being an ode to unrequited love, became the
album's first single with an accompanying music video that was filmed in Montreal
at Habitat 67 Other songs, such as "Alexandra Leaving" (based on
"The God Abandons Antony", also translated as "The God Forsakes
Antony", a poem by Constantine P. Cavafy, published in 1911) and "You
Have Loved Enough", imply departures of some sort or another.
Ten New
Songs was remastered and reissued on vinyl by the Netherlands label Music
On Vinyl in 2009.
Leonard
Norman Cohen CC GOQ (September 21, 1934 – November 7, 2016) was a Canadian
singer, songwriter, poet, and novelist. His work explored religion, politics,
isolation, depression, sexuality, loss, death and romantic relationships. Cohen
was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame, the Canadian Songwriters
Hall of Fame, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He was invested as a
Companion of the Order of Canada, the nation's highest civilian honour. In
2011, Cohen received one of the Prince of Asturias Awards for literature and
the ninth Glenn Gould Prize.
Cohen pursued a career as a poet and novelist during the
1950s and early 1960s; he did not launch a music career until 1967, at the age
of 33. His first album, Songs of Leonard Cohen(1967), was
followed by three more albums of folk music: Songs from a Room(1969), Songs of
Love and Hate(1971) and New Skin for the Old Ceremony(1974). His 1977 record Death
of a Ladies' Man, co-written and produced by Phil Spector, was a move away from
Cohen's previous minimalist sound. In 1979, Cohen returned with the more
traditional Recent Songs, which blended his acoustic style with jazz, Oriental,
and Mediterranean influences. Perhaps Cohen's most famous song, "Hallelujah",
was first released on his studio álbum Various Positions in 1984. I'm Your Man in
1988 marked Cohen's turn to synthesized productions. In 1992, Cohen released
its follow-up, The Future, which had dark lyrics and references to political
and social unrest.
Cohen
returned to music in 2001 with the release of Ten New Songs, which was a major
hit in Canada and Europe. His 11th album, Dear Heather, followed in 2004.
Following a successful string of tours between 2008 and 2013, Cohen released
three albums in the last five years of his life: Old Ideas(2012), Popular
Problems (2014) and You Want It Darker(2016), the last of which was released
three weeks before his death. A posthumous album titled Thanks for the Dance was
released in November 2019, his fifteenth studio album.
The ponies run, the girls are young,
The odds are there to beat.
You win a while, and then it’s done –
Your little winning streak.
And summoned now to deal
With your invincible defeat,
You live your life as if it’s real,
A Thousand Kisses Deep.
I’m turning tricks, I’m getting fixed,
I’m back on Boogie Street.
You lose your grip, and then you slip
Into the Masterpiece.
And maybe I had miles to drive,
And promises to keep:
You ditch it all to stay alive,
A Thousand Kisses Deep.
And sometimes when the night is slow,
The wretched and the meek,
We gather up our hearts and go,
A Thousand Kisses Deep.
Confined to sex, we pressed against
The limits of the sea:
I saw there were no oceans left
For scavengers like me.
I made it to the forward deck.
I blessed our remnant fleet –
And then consented to be wrecked,
A Thousand Kisses Deep.
I’m turning tricks, I’m getting fixed,
I’m back on Boogie Street.
I guess they won’t exchange the gifts
That you were meant to keep.
And quiet is the thought of you,
The file on you complete,
Except what we forgot to do,
A Thousand Kisses Deep.
And sometimes when the night is slow,
The wretched and the meek,
We gather up our hearts and go,
A Thousand Kisses Deep.
The ponies run, the girls are young,
The odds are there to beat.
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