Leonard Cohen: Songs From a Room 180g Vinyl LP

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Why you'll love it

This Legacy reissue is pressed on 180g vinyl in the EU. Songs from a Room went to No. 2 in the UK, went gold in Canada, and gave the world "Bird on the Wire."

This edition

180g vinyl
Pressed in the EU
Download card included
Stereo mix

About the album

Montreal's poet laureate of the bedsit took his second album to Nashville, which sounds like a mismatch until you hear it. Cohen recorded at Columbia's Studio A with producer Bob Johnston, who kept things spare: Cohen's classical guitar and voice up front, with Ron Cornelius, Bubba Fowler and a young Charlie Daniels adding guitar, banjo, bass and fiddle around the edges.

"Bird on the Wire" began on the Greek island of Hydra, where Cohen watched birds settle on newly strung telephone lines, and he finished it in a Hollywood motel. "Story of Isaac" retells the Old Testament sacrifice with chilling calm, "The Partisan" is his English take on a French Resistance song by Anna Marly and Emmanuel d'Astier (with French voices overdubbed in Paris), and "Seems So Long Ago, Nancy" and "You Know Who I Am" are as hushed as anything he made.

Pitchfork later gave it an 8.8, and "Bird on the Wire" became one of his most covered songs. Cohen liked to rehearse in front of a mirror, and the record has that same quality of a man taking a long, honest look at himself, which is more than most of us manage before our first coffee.

Also at Kops: more Leonard Cohen on vinyl · browse CDN Pop / Rock