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The other day I had a yearning, very specific in its musical nature. I wanted/needed to hear “Dance Me to the End of Love,” à la Leonard Cohen when he first recorded it. Maybe not an anthem song in the way “Hallelujah” is, but there was every good reason that the set list of his final concert tours opened with a song of longing and loss transformed into a wistful tango.
And I needed to cry.
I’m talking about a good cry. A really good cry. A cathartic purge.
He was 78 when I last saw him perform in 2012, dapper as ever, even if his voice was a whispery incarnation of the younger, stronger version of the singer/songwriter who hooked me with his very first album. Don’t ask how many nights I found solace from those “Sisters of Mercy” or slipped into the longing of “Suzanne.” Or told a boyfriend that’s no way to say good-bye.
God knows there are other Leonard Cohen songs of love that make me tear up but none that bring on the waterworks in the way that “Dance Me to the End of Love” can. The roots of the song, in Cohen’s own words, were a photograph he saw as a child, concentration camp prisoners in striped pajamas playing music outside a crematorium where fellow prisoners were gassed and cremated.
Then there’s Pavarotti belting out “Nessun Dorma,” Ben Webster’s saxophone crooning, “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning,” the stirring cadence Brandi Carlisle brings to her breakout song, “The Story.”
The list goes on. And what threads it is the triggering power of music coursing through my body, taking me back, no line between today and yesterday.
