Leonard Cohen, Take This Waltz

I’ve said before that I like the voice of this musician much better as he grew older than when he was young, as it’s got a gravitas that it didn’t have when he was younger. And it’s perfect for such songs of his as ‘Take Take Waltz’ which I’m discussing here.

It was originally released as part the 1986 Federico García Lorca Poets in New York tribute album. The song’s lyrics are a somewhat loose translation into English by Cohen of the poem ‘Pequeño vals vienés’ by the late Spanish poet F. G. Lorca is one of Cohen’s favorite poets. The poem was first published in Lorca’s seminal book Poeta en Nueva York.

It’s got lyrics that would make the story for a terrifically macabre urban fantasy as it starts out this way: “Now in Vienna there are ten pretty women / There’s a shoulder where Death comes to cry / There’s a lobby with nine hundred windows / There’s a tree where the doves go to die / There’s a piece that was torn from the morning / And it hangs in the Gallery of Frost.” Cohen’s voice is spot-on perfect for the words, sounding as if he was a storyteller late at night, telling it to an intimate group of listeners.

I won’t tell you more much about this song other than the refrain is “Take this waltz, take this waltz / Take this waltz, it’s been dying for years” as you deserve to hear it first without knowing what happens, so you can hear it Take This Waltz as done in Hamburg, German on the 14th of April 1988.