FORGETTING/REMEMBERING PLAYLIST

our very first foray into music together, friends!!!

While I was putting together this playlist for you good people (seriously, how do you exist? I’m genuinely in shock?), I was thinking about what it means to forget and what it means to remember and how so many songs about forgetting are just absolute walls of sound. I mean this in the literal sense. 

There’s one Leonard Cohen song on here, the unconventional “Memories” from the album “Death of a Ladies Man.” The album is almost universally hated by critics, which has just made it all the more endearing to me. It was produced by Phil Spector, whom you may know from “Be My Baby” by the Ronettes, “Let It Be” by the Beatles and the fact that he killed a nightclub hostess and said she “kissed the gun.” During the recording of the album, drugs were snorted, booze was guzzled and guns were pulled (according to some biographers, one at Cohen’s throat). The recording sessions were, to put it mildly, a disaster. And a process that Cohen hated. He detached from the project and distanced himself from the album. 

But still, I love it. It’s arguably one of Cohen’s horniest albums (which is saying something, the man wasn’t exactly known for his sexual restraint) and I keep coming back to the palpable haunting that crawls throughout its songs. Cohen’s voice is strained, pained and desperate as he cries, “Won’t you let me see your naked body?” Behind him, a choir sings elegiacal and slow, like it’s Sunday service for a hungover congregation. Cohen is a man backed into a corner, begging for sex – any sex – and thrashing as the wall of sound grows louder around him. But Cohen isn’t exactly resisting the chaos. There’s the sense that he might even allow himself to collapse into it soon.