I’m Your Fan: The Songs of Leonard Cohen, reviewed

By Simon Cocking, review of I’m Your Fan: The Songs of Leonard Cohen. Available from Bloomsbury here.

Published: 03-09-2020 Format: Paperback
ISBN: 9781501355066

When I’m Your Fan: The Songs of Leonard Cohen hit stores in 1991, Leonard Cohen’s career had plummeted from its revered 1960s high. Cohen’s record label had refused to release his 1984 album Various Positions–including the song “Hallelujah”–in the United States. Luckily, Velvet Underground founder John Cale was one of the few who did hear “Hallelujah,” and he covered it for I’m Your Fan, a collection of Cohen’s songs produced by a French fanzine. Jeff Buckley adored the tribute album and covered Cale’s cover in 1994, never having heard Cohen’s still-obscure original version.

In 2016, Stereogum labeled the tribute album “possibly the most universally derided format in pop music.” However, without a tribute album, you wouldn’t know the song “Hallelujah.” Through Buckley through Cale, “Hallelujah” is now one of the most often-performed songs in the world–and it wouldn’t be without this tribute album. 

I’m Your Fan thus offers a particularly notable example of a much broader truth: Despite all the eye-rolling they inspire, tribute albums matter. They can resuscitate legends’ fading careers, or expose obscure artists who never had much of a career to begin with.

I’m Your Fan: The Songs of Leonard Cohen, reviewed

This is perhaps about as niche as you can go. If you are a fan of Leonard Cohen then the Sylvie Simmonds biography feels like the definitive place to go. It is a great biography and capturs the genius, wisdom, contradictoryness and playfulness of the man. However if want to dive into this particular tangent then I’m Your Fan is a fun and diverting place to go.

It is arguably also the record / album / recording that, eventually brought him to a new, and wider audience. On this French magazine commissioned compilation John Cale covered Halleluiah. Which in turn brought it to the attention of Jeff Buckley, whose near note by note copy of John Cale’s version in turn brought the song to an even greater audience, X-factor and X-has go talent included audiences too. Leonard Cohen himself even began to cover that version too. From there you might say the rest is history.

You might also say the rest of the book is too also. Various tangents and perhaps circuitous alleyways are pursued too.  Some are interesting, some add value, and others definitely felt a bit like the same album filler that the writer themself cautions about including in tribute compilations.

Those areas make it fill like the length has been padded out, but the key chapters are enjoyable, interesting and entertaining. As always you must navigate between the tracks you want to listen to, the ones you should really check out, and those that are probably better skipped.

This version below is hilarious, silly, and inspired too, if you want to go a whole half an hour with the creative ramblings of Nick Cave and his band.

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