Two years ago this month I fell in love, for about the fourth time in my life, and late-late one night we needed a song to hear before nodding off to dreamland. That’s when I came across Marissa Nadler’s 2007 version of Leonard Cohen’s “Famous Blue Raincoat,” and I’ve heard it dozens of times since.
You can hear a song hundreds of times and not follow its narrative meaning, or let me rephrase that:
I can hear a song hundreds of times and not follow its narrative meaning. Frankly it makes me feel like a big dummy. What was I doing all those years I’d been listening to the original “Famous Blue Raincoat”? Is music just sonic incense to me, a mood enhancer that cues the appropriate feelings?
You can forgive me, I guess, for tuning in exclusively to the atmospherics of Cohen’s version. It is extra rich in what Pádraig Ó Tuama often calls the “furniture” of a poem. “It’s four in the morning, the end of December,” it starts. “New York is cold.” “Jane came by with a lock of your hair.” “Your famous blue raincoat was torn at the shoulder.” “I see you there with a rose in your teeth.” Everything vivid and tangible.
I guess it read to me like a series of unconnected moments till I heard Marissa Nadler sing it. Sometimes it takes hearing an unfamiliar version to tune into the actual meaning of lyrics. Leonard Cohen’s voice, to my ear, was all about New York in the early 70s, bohemians huddled in glamorously cold apartments. In Nadler’s voice the love triangle the song is all about comes front and center:
A man is writing a letter to an old an old friend with whom his girlfriend Jane once cheated on him. An impulsive incident, it nonetheless left a scar, understandably, but it also forced him to appreciate Jane anew. His friend has moved far away, off to the desert, literally we can suppose. Halfway through writing his letter we hear that Jane has woken up, meaning the couple is intact!
“And what can I tell you my brother, my killer? What can I possibly say?/ I guess I forgive you, I guess that I miss you, and I’m glad you stood in my way./ If you ever come by here, for Jane or for me,/ Your enemy is sleeping, and his woman is free./ Yes, and thanks for the trouble you took from her eyes./ I guessed it was there for good, I guess I never tried.”
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Nadler takes some liberties with the lyrics in that last stanza, but keeps the essence of it: gratitude, even for an “enemy.” Love survives, it seems to say, when we give ourselves the time and space to feel all the subtle and conflicted feelings for the people who hurt and get hurt on the way.
