Leonard Cohen by Maurice Ratcliff

Author:Maurice Ratcliff [RATCLIFF, MAURICE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-85712-822-5
Publisher: Music Sales Limited
Published: 2012-10-24T16:00:00+00:00

I CAN’T FORGET

Following a song that began in a spirit of jeu d’esprit, ‘I Can’t Forget’ could not have begun its life more seriously. Originally entitled ‘Taken Out Of Egypt’, it dealt with no less a subject than the Jewish Exodus, which Cohen intended to treat as “a metaphor for the journey of the soul from bondage into freedom”. The song took months to write. Alas, when Cohen came to record it he ‘cracked’, finding himself unable to sing it as written. Whether he found the subject too highfalutin’ or whether he felt too personally burdened to sing about release from slavery, Cohen realised he had to recast the song.

Knowing he had a good melody on his hands, he rewrote the lyrics with a much less cataclysmic and more personal theme. The song became a slightly wistful, often humorous, self-mocking portrait of the poet as an old man. Stumbling out of bed, smoking a cigarette, pulling his stomach in, preparing himself for the struggle ahead, he feels “This can’t be me, must be my double”. He is acting from instinct, driving a “rig that runs on memory”. He has so much history; he “can’t forget”, but when it comes to the crunch, he can only recycle an old joke and claim “but I don’t remember what”.

Although it is wistful, “I Can’t Forget’ is far from despairing. Winter may be, in a felicitous phrase, “tuning up”, but “a lot goes on forever”. The love he has had all his life he intends to keep alive till the end. He is ageing, but he is not ready to be buried yet. And in his defiance, Cohen has created what must be the best serious song to have been constructed around what is essentially a rather trivial play on words.

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