Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues

by Paul Abruzzo

Snow fell at a stairway angle. Cats crossed my path as if imbeciles on fire. Moreover, I was in Juarez. I walked straight to a hot bordello. She led me up to her room, the wood loose at my feet. I had a temperature hovering around zero. My best friend the doctor rifled through my wallet for the malaria. I was immobilized, unable to do or undo a single button on my shirt. Naturally, the police arrived. They stood around the bed brandishing nightsticks. A red light blinked in my head. A line of steady moonlight shot through the room like a fallen girder.

A festival came out of the housing project yet I barely lifted my head. The confetti was my loneliness, my memory a goosestep. Jimmy Stewart was going on hysterically in Yiddish about raising the dead from an icy river. A man in a black hat handed out cards declaring Hanukkah a time for restitution. A lone voice repeatedly called out for two hard boiled eggs. Lily, the caretaker's daughter, was literally run off her feet. A shot glass appeared like whispered blackmail.

I went back to New York City, my voice hoarse and distant, where I was launching a new career in rectitude. An uncle on my mother’s side said he could get me in, but all he meant, it turned out, was that the joke was on me, that for the rest of my days I’d be selling electricity at the lip of an abandoned coal mine.

Download:

"Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" mp3
by Ramblin' Jack Elliott, 2007.
available on I'm Not There

top photo:
by Manuel Alvarez-Bravo
El Umbral (Threshold), 1947.

Handful of Dust

by Paul Abruzzo

In the early 90s I rented a ludicrously small room in an apartment on Amsterdam Avenue near Columbia. I was drinking constantly, working as a waiter in a glorified diner in midtown, ensnared in self pity, remorse, and depression. I wrote bad, dark poems, and as I went to sleep I prayed into my pillow for the mercy of death to take me in the night. I was supposed to be writing a master’s thesis on the Antifederalists—people opposed to the ratification of the U.S. Constitution—but I hadn’t even started. Volumes of their political tracts lay on my desk like an accusation.

Mostly, I went to a bar a few blocks down from the apartment called Starry Night. A print of the Van Gogh painting hung over the register, a forever-crooked brass light illuminating it from above. A jukebox sat directly across from the bar, its base lit up with the bright colors of Italian ices. The music on it ranged from “This Is Where I Belong” by The Kinks to “Rock Box” by Run D.M.C. I loved that jukebox.

A fat man who called himself San Juan sat at the end of the bar, resting his pudgy arms on the banister-like lip, insinuating himself into every overheard conversation. He sweat prodigiously, particularly late in the night, when he hustled out into the streets on cocaine runs for regulars in exchange for skimming a few bumps. About once a night he’d play Prince's “Sexy M.F.” on the juke, standing to holler a self-referential version of the chorus, “You sexy FAT motha-fucker!” while hula hooping his rotund midsection, the flabby underside of his chin bringing to mind bags of goldfish I got as a kid from the street fair.

I played the jukebox every night, starting with Neil Young’s “Mr. Soul,” from Unplugged. The first line always put me at ease, “Well hello Mr. Soul I dropped by to pick up a reason.” There’s something particularly charismatic in Neil’s voice in this rendition, like the way he annunciates the word “better.” No one in recorded history ever sang a better better. The riff is a graceful rephrasing of “Satisfaction” by the Stones, proving that in music, as in all art, there's infinite space between simple parameters.

One night I fell for an adorable blond. She had green eyes and a white t-shirt and I bought her a beer in a green bottle. She asked me what I was up to. “I’m working on my thesis,” I lied, “and waiting tables.”

“What do you make a shift?” she asked, touching my forearm, sending a warm feeling up to my head, and then down into my heart.

“I don’t know. About 60 for lunch, maybe 120 for dinner.”

“Shit!” she implored. She shook her little pale fist, “that’s what I was making when I did it years ago. It’s so unfair. Why does it never change—ever?”

“Oh, please,” I said, “everywhere you turn there’s a new injustice to make your head explode.”

She laughed.

We discovered we lived across the street from each other, she over the bodega where I went for my cigarettes. I dug my fingernail into the soggy label on my bottle. The air-conditioner over the door droned and rattled. She had the smallest hands and tough, black boots, which intensified my crush. I felt the rush of hope. I felt like my whole life was about to change.

It was quiet. “I’m gonna play music,” she said, and went to the juke. I ordered and drank a shot of scotch. She came back. A song started. I didn’t know it.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“Lucinda Williams,” she said, raising her eyebrows and smiling.

“Never heard it,” I said.

“What?” she slapped her palm to the forehead. “She’s a genius.”

The song playing was “Six Blocks Away.” She said, “I broke up with a guy and he lived exactly six blocks away and I listened to this song over and over.”

“I like it,” I said. Then Lucinda’s “Pineola” came on, a dark tale of a suicide. It gripped me right away. I learned later that the character “Sonny” in the song is based on Frank Sanford, a poet Lucinda knew who took his own life by shooting himself three times in the heart.

The fiddle remains quiet while the narrator sings, but then cries a lament at the end of each verse. There’s something very brave about this song in its attempt to put into words emotional states which can’t be put into words.

When Daddy told me what happened
I couldn't believe what he just said
Sonny shot himself with a .44
And they found him lyin’ on his bed

I could not speak a single word
no tears streamed down my face
I just sat there on the living room couch
staring off into space

The drums are silent until after the line, “Sonny shot himself with a .44,” when the snare cracks as if a bullet shot. The chorus is only sung once, which adds to the drama of the narrative. The last two lines are a repetition of “I think I must have picked up a handful of dust and I let it fall over his grave.” The “I think” in that line is a clever comment on how shock and fear hamper memory. The “handful of dust” is ultimately from the Bible, but more specifically from a famous line in the first section of T.S. Eliot’s “Wasteland” called “The Burial of The Dead.”

I will show you fear in a handful of dust

The song ends with a rather long musical interlude, led by a fiddle dirge, emphasizing the reduction of the narrator to speechlessness, and the sadness of walking away from someone you have just put into the earth.

“What an amazing song,” I said.

“Yes,” she said, slapping the bar, “amazing.”

Then, after a tad, I got real drunk. Too drunk. I’d been drinking fast, and the scotch pushed me over. Also, my blood rushed from nerves, and my head was whirling from the dark beauty of “Pineola.” I began slurring. She abruptly said she had to go, to meet her boyfriend. “Boyfriend!” I thought, “how did that happen?” I was destroyed. I nearly puked on her. She said goodbye, turned and was gone. Her empty green bottle sat there on the bar, patches of foam slowly creeping downward.

In the week or so that followed, I would stand at the living room window in my apartment and try to catch sight of her in one of the windows over the bodega, but never did. I couldn’t get her out of my head for a while, how I’d fucked up an opportunity. I went nuts for Lucinda Williams after that. I ran out and got her records, and whenever I played “Pineola,” or “Six Blocks Away,” that whole night came back to me, that little pale hand and those green eyes.

I met girls in the Starry Night all the time—mostly unkempt lunatics. One was a stripper in a place near Port Authority, a stunning girl with beautiful black skin, enormous round eyes, and hands that never stopped moving. I spotted her standing near San Juan, parrying his sweaty coked-up advances with half-hearted politeness. She wore a ridiculous hat. I walked right over. “I love your hat,” I lied. She called herself Kellie, but that wasn't her name. She asked after my ethnicity. I told her my father's from the Sicilians, and my mother from the Jews, and she lit up.

“I only go out with Jewish guys,” she said, adding bluntly, “my father hates them.” I took her home.

She also loved the jukebox. Her favorite tune on it was The Beastie Boys’s “So What’cha Want.” I introduced her to Tom Waits. I played “Frank’s Wild Years,” from Swordfishtrombones.

“Listen to this,” I said, “listen to the lyrics.” She laughed to the ceiling, gave me a soggy, crumpled dollar.

“Play it again!” she hollered.

After a few nights with her I realized she was basically homeless, carrying all her possessions in a red duffle bag out of which she pulled all kinds of sex toys, contraceptives, and tawdry underwear. One morning I got up and found her at the kitchen table eating a Butterfinger for breakfast, peeling back the paper bite-by-bite with her nervous fingers while mouthing lyrics to a song in her head. My two Latin American roommates—both studious squares—stood in their neatly-tied flower aprons making brunch, quieted and terrified by Kellie, looking to me for help as soon as I came in.

I broke up with Kellie later that night in the bar, when she came in after her shift. She cried briefly, scrounged around in her bag for lip gloss, went to make a phone call, ordered a sweet red drink, shot a game of pool, and had a new boyfriend way before last call. They left together and I was relieved and jealous at the same time. Next time I saw her I nodded over toward him as he chose songs on the juke, “I see you're with that guy now.”

“Yeah,” she said, “it's good. Jordan. He's Jewish.”

I was thinking, "Look at that face: how could I have let her go?” Then Jordan played Lightnin' Hopkins's “Come Back Baby,” one of my favorites. I’d brought a girl along, Beth. I’d met her in a bagel shop on Broadway a couple of hours before. She was a cute, plumpish Jewish girl studying journalism at Columbia.

“You’re with her?” Kellie asked, gesturing with her head over at Beth, who was chatting with the bartender, flopping her hands around.

“Yeah,” I said. She looked Beth up and down.

“I don’t like her,” she said, and walked away. I never saw Kellie again.

I moved. I sobered up. I finished my thesis. I got a real job. I got a lovely, relatively sane girlfriend. I quit the job, then the girlfriend. I drank again. I sobered up.

Then, a remarkable thing happened one night years later. I met a guy and he wanted to fix me up with an old friend of his, Jennifer. I agreed. It was cold, winter. We were all bundled. She looked vaguely familiar as we met on the street and shook hands. We three got in a cab, me in the middle. We went uptown and came to a stoplight on Amsterdam. I realized where we were and pointed over at the white iron grillwork cage laid over the door of my old building.

“I used to live there,” I said.

“Where?” Jennifer asked, shocked.

“Right there,” I said, pointing.

“I live right there,” she said, turning and pointing to the other side of the street, over the bodega. I froze. I looked at her face again to make sure.

I waited until we got out of the cab and walked a few steps. “Jennifer,” I said, “I know you. We've met.”

She looked at me quickly, her eyes narrowing. “When?”

“Oh,” I said, “about…six years ago, in the Starry Night.”

“Really?” she said.

“Yeah, you played Lucinda Williams’s ‘Six Blocks Away,’ and said you broke up with a guy who lived—”

“—Oh my God,” she said, putting her pale little hand up to her open mouth.

A few weeks later, one night, Jennifer and I went over to the Starry Night. The jukebox was gone, and it broke my heart. Some young guy I didn't recognize was working the bar. He had an iPod hooked up to the sound system. The music playing was stuff you’d expect to hear in a mall in Michigan. The place was empty but for two girls in their 20s who shot pool. No San Juan. No Kellie. These were clearly different times, and I felt sad, nostalgic. I had the unreal demand that the Starry Night be exactly as I'd left it.

“Hey listen,” I said to the bartender, “you have any Lucinda Williams on that iPod?”

“No, sorry,” he said, “What is that—country music?”

Jennifer put her hand on my forearm. She smiled.

“Let's go,” she said. I nodded. We walked out into the night, this time together.


***********

Download:

"This is Where I Belong" mp3
by The Kinks, 1967.
available on The Kink Kronikles

"Rock Box" mp3
by Run D.M.C., 1984.
available on Run-D.M.C.

"Sexy M.F." mp3
by Prince, 1992.
available on The Hits 2

"Mr. Soul" mp3
by Neil Young, 1993.
available on Unplugged

"Six Blocks Away" mp3
by Lucinda Williams, 1992.
available on Sweet Old World

"Pineola" mp3
by Lucinda Williams, 1992.
available on Sweet Old World

"So What'Cha Want" mp3
by The Beastie Boys, 1992.
available on Check Your Head

"Frank's Wild Years" mp3
by Tom Waits, 1983.
available on Swordfishtrombones

"Come Back Baby" mp3
by Lightnin' Hopkins, 1946.
available on The Complete Aladdin Recordings

***********

Photograph: © Christian Patterson
Memphis, February 2005 (Lamplighter Jukebox)

Sound Affects by Christian Patterson available at Photo-Eye

The Minor Fall, The Major Lift

by Paul Abruzzo

A Jewish girl named Jules introduced me to the music of Leonard Cohen. She insisted I meet her father, a law professor, and I agreed because I desperately wanted to make love to her. We went to his apartment one night on the Upper West Side, where he lived alone. The hallways were vast and cold. He was very serious, and bald, and so was the apartment. He wore a large gray sweater that sagged low beneath the arms, like bat’s wings. We sat to dinner; the table was long. He put himself at its head, and Jules and me on one side together near the two long purple candles in the center, leaving the opposite side strangely vacant. The snow was high outside. We had wine. To reassure me—she sensed my nervousness—Jules kept squeezing my upper thigh under the table whenever the bat professor asked me a question.

“Jules tells me you’re Jewish,” he said towards dessert, elbows up on the table.

“Oh, yes,” I responded, “I suppose I am, despite my last name, since my mother is Jewish.” I recalled the only Jewish moment that ever transpired between me and my mother: around the holidays one year she pulled me and my brother aside and said, “This is for Hanukah,” as opposed to the Christmas gifts we’d be getting in few days.

He smiled politely, and nodded. After dinner, he suggested we watch the documentary on the reunion of The Weavers, which concludes with a concert at Carnegie Hall. I’d never heard of The Weavers, but I didn’t want to seem ignorant (one of my great fears, particularly back then), and so when I said that I hadn’t as if I knew not only who The Weavers were, but also of the existence of the film, Jules put her hand to her heart and gasped like the French. The bat got up from the table to find the videotape while we did the dishes. In the living room Jules and I sat together in a deep beige couch as the professor stretched out in a leather recliner after carefully dimming the high hat lights. I of course recognized Pete Seeger, but not the others; I knew the famous Newport story, where he allegedly took an axe to the cables when Dylan came out with Butterfield Blues guys. At the time I was morbidly exclusive in my listening: limited, like a kind of monk, to Pre-Desire Dylan and, for some reason, Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, a record I listened to alone in the dark, wallowing in the waves of heady yet sublimely calming emotions it brought on.

During the documentary, when they pushed one of the Weavers in a wheelchair out onto stage at Carnegie I heard some sniffling and looked over at the bald professor and noticed he was weeping. “This is all not really happening,” I said to myself, now keeping my eyes rigidly on the screen. I imagined he was suffering from some great loss or loneliness there in that bare apartment.

“That was really nice,” I lied to Jules on the way back to her place, though I did like the documentary. My head felt oddly cleansed by it. We talked about folk music. I knew some of the people her father had introduced her to, mostly because of my peripheral Dylan research. She was astonished when I mentioned Phil Ochs and Tom Paxton.

“You must love Leonard Cohen,” she said, stopping dead, in the way people do in their twenties while talking about art, again with her hand on the heart.

Somehow, I had a humble moment: “Who’s that?” I asked. She shrieked. Back at her apartment she put on Songs from a Room, the only Lenny record she had, his second, released in 1969. I liked “Bird on the Wire,” the lead track, but when “Story of Isaac” came on I went nuts, and made her play it again and again, listening intently, almost forgetting completely about trying to make love with her. I had just taken an introductory English class, and we’d read the parable of Abraham and Isaac, from Genesis, and I found it unnerving, the way Abraham takes Isaac, his only son, to the mountaintop for sacrifice.

Dylan, of course, parodied the story a few years before Cohen in the first verse of the song “Highway 61 Revisited,” mocking the parable’s depiction of the ease with which Abraham was willing to murder his only son. In Dylan’s wry jibe, Abe obeys God not out of faith, but rather to save his own ass. And Dylan’s God demands the location of the sacrificial altar to be the road running straight through the country:

Oh God said to Abraham, "Kill me a son"
Abe says, "Man, you must be puttin' me on"
God say, "No." Abe say, "What?"
God say, "You can do what you want Abe, but
The next time you see me comin' you better run"
Well Abe says, "Where do you want this killin' done?"
God says, "Out on Highway 61."

Cohen humanizes both figures, removing them from the field of parable. First, he shifts the narration to Isaac, and then he adds tactile the details of shining blue eyes, and a cold voice.

The door it opened slowly,
my father he came in, I was nine years old.
And he stood so tall above me,
his blue eyes they were shining
and his voice was very cold

In a later verse Isaac turns prophetic. Is he addressing the architects of the Vietnam War? I’m very attached to the morality and psychology in the phrase, “A scheme is not a vision,” and the image evoked in “hatchets blunt and bloody.”

You who build these altars now
to sacrifice these children,
you must not do it anymore.
A scheme is not a vision
and you never have been tempted
by a demon or a god.
You who stand above them now,
your hatchets blunt and bloody,
you were not there before,
when I lay upon a mountain
and my father's hand was trembling
with the beauty of the word.

Later, I came upon the Wilfred Owen poem “The Parable of the Young Man and the Old,” in which he also retells the story. (Owen was British, killed young in the trenches of WWI; his family received word of his death about a week after the local church bells rang to announce the armistice.) In his version the altar is built of “parapets and trenches,” and when the angel appears to stop Abraham’s sacrificial hand, saying he should offer the ram instead of Isaac, the poem ends:

But the old man would not so, but slew his son
and half the seed of Europe, one by one.

I can't write about Leonard Cohen on a Jewish holiday without bringing up “Hallelujah,” which is about, among other things, the mysterious and spiritually nourishing power of music. Cohen’s reference in the first verse is to a tale from I Samuel [16:23]. The “evil spirit” here is depression, which is, interestingly, described as being God given.

Bible:

And it came to pass, when the evil spirit from God was upon Saul, that David took a harp, and played with his hand: so Saul was refreshed, and was well, and the evil spirit departed from him.

Cohen:

Now I've heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord
But you don't really care for music, do you?
It goes like this
The fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major lift
The baffled king composing Hallelujah

The lyrics track and describe the musical changes occurring in the song itself. First, the “secret chord” phrase is delivered right on the introduction of the always-moving A-minor, which is “secret” because of its uncanny emotional effect, how its blueness paradoxically offers us relief from sadness through identification—as in the Bible when “Saul was refreshed.”

Then the chords change exactly with the lyrics describing those very chord changes: “the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall, the major lift.” That device is reminiscent, perhaps consciously so on Cohen’s part, of Cole Porter’s great lyric/chord-change correspondence from “Every Time we Say Goodbye,” where the chords change from major to minor with the lyric, on the beat after the word “change."

But how strange the change
From major to minor
Every time we say goodbye

The “strange change” in Porter is not only about the emotional shift itself, but also the inscrutable nature of music’s effects on the emotions, so uncanny that we may as well just use musical description to name the emotions. Relate that to the king’s bafflement in Cohen, to the mystery of music banishing the evil spirit from Saul in the Bible.

A central theme running through this and other Cohen songs, is the faith/sex connection. It's almost as if Cohen is asking, why is it that even atheists invoke God' name during orgasm?

“Night Comes On,” also from 1984’s Various Positions, is a song that is a reassuring chant against fear, with the beautiful refrain, “go back to the world.” Each verse is sort of free-standing, hinging on the power of a few images. The phrasing is subtly packed with feeling: listen, for instance, to the slightly drawn out annunciation in the single word “die” in the following verse.

We were fighting in Egypt
When they signed this agreement
That nobody else had to die

There is great moral simplicity in these lines. War is about people dying. A treaty is signed, and people stop dying. The use of the anonymous ‘they,’ indicates the interchangeability of figures of authority, no matter their ideology or goals.

The last verse is my favorite, for me it evokes a whole way of life.

Now the crickets are singing
The vesper bells ringing
The cat's curled asleep in his chair
I'll go down to Bill's Bar
I can make it that far
And I'll see if my friends are still there

A few years after my brief encounter with Jules, I met a girl named Linda and we fell in love. I was at the time a drowning mess and Linda pulled me out of the water and I came to live with her in her little Village apartment. The sun spread across the floor in the afternoons. She was beautiful and kind and I loved her and I had not been in love for a long time. In the first months we introduced each other to our music. She brought me Al Green, whom I’d of course heard, but hadn’t registered, particularly “Let’s Stay Together,” and “Still in Love with You.”

Linda didn’t deal well with mornings. I’d get up and make the coffee and bring it to her in a large bowl, and kiss her adorable face to wake her up. She’d smile, yet keep her eyes shut against the day, and sit up slowly, like a little flower unfolding. I’d bring her cigarettes and her big fancy glass ash tray shaped like a shell. Her black mutt would jump up on the bed, lie on his side, beckoning for a scratches. She’d smoke, comb her fingers over the dog, and take hits from the coffee.

I’d put on Lenny’s first record, Songs, take the dog out, and then sit on the bed drinking coffee with her. Probably our favorite was “That’s No Way to Say Goodbye.” I felt LC was talking in my voice with the line “Your hair upon the pillow / Like a sleepy golden storm,” since Linda’s hair was long, reddish blonde. She fell in love with that record, and I re-fell in love with it. I always think of “The Stranger Song,” though, when I remember those days, about a woman who takes in a drug addict, a man “reaching for the sky just to surrender.” I think the smoke metaphor is genius in the description of her discovery of the track marks on the junkie’s neck.

And while he talks his dreams to sleep
you notice there's a highway
that is curling up like smoke above his shoulder

But the lines that really hit home as I sat on the bed with her were in the chorus:

And then leaning on your window sill
he'll say one day you caused his will
to weaken with your love and warmth and shelter
And then taking from his wallet
an old schedule of trains, he'll say
I told you when I came I was a stranger

I was grateful to be there in her apartment, a home, so unlike the places I’d been living in, but I felt also we weren’t right for each other, that I’d be leaving. Maybe that was just terror: I don’t know. Whatever it was, I knew I was being dishonest in not talking about it, and that is why I avoided looking at Linda during the chorus, as if she might intuit what I was thinking.

The evenings were reserved for Al Green.

One night, in the beginning, Linda and I were on the Upper West Side, in a restaurant, and we ran into a couple she worked for in LA, film people. The introductions went around. We left. She said as we walked down Broadway that I’d really like the guy, the husband, if I got to know him.

“Really?” I asked, “why?”

“Oh, he’s done work on interesting films, films you’d like.”

“Really?” I asked, “like what?”

“Well…,” she said, “he did sound or directed that Weavers documentary. You ever see that?”

“Yeah,” I said, “I did,” keeping the coincidence to myself, remembering the night with Jules and her father in the apartment not far from where we were then walking, “I loved it.”

I left Linda ten Hanukahs ago. On our last fight she sat on the couch, cross-legged, crying. “I’m miserable,” she said. I went to stay with my parents on Long Island for a month or so, until I got on my feet, commuting on the Long Island Railroad—proving, after all, the truth of the old schedule of trains in my wallet.

Then, something very odd happened at the end of last summer. I went to visit my uncle in Buffalo and pictures came out. My cousin had one of Linda, and one of me and Linda. I had no pictures of her myself: five years living together and not one picture. I asked to have them. When I got back to the guest room I took them out, entranced. I put them on the night table, and turned the light on and off twice to look at them after I got into bed, each time feeling like I was looking at a bit of life that could only possibly have been mine. “Who was this woman?” I thought, and “Who was I?” and “Whatever happened?” When I came home to New York I put the pictures away, but then, like a drug addict unable to have just a bit, took them out again and looked and looked, going over bits and pieces of the relationship. Lenny in the morning, Al Green at night. I also ran over in my mind all the time I spent trying to get her back, obsessing over her, long after I’d left.

That day I got back from Buffalo I called my girlfriend, Stefanie. We’d been together for about three months. It was the first time I was having strong feelings for a woman since Linda. I met Stefanie and we had a picnic on the west side, on the river. We played Scrabble, which Linda loved too, a game I find unpleasant due to the feelings which accompany the possibility that I’m not seeing or thinking of something that’s obvious. The relationship hadn’t been going well—we could both feel it—and I was tired from my trip, and cranky. When we got up to go, and started walking on the esplanade, out of nowhere she started singing the Al Green song, “Let’s Stay Together.” Stefanie never sang out loud like that—she’s not the type—and she’d never once mentioned Al Green. I didn’t make any connections, but a déjà vu kind of feeling shot through me.

Then it got spooky, I realized only in retrospect, when she said, after I looked over at her, “I don’t know why I’m singing that.”

That was our last time together. It didn’t strike me until later, after we broke up, just what song she’d been singing, the weirdness of it, in light of my just having pored over the pictures of Linda, and thinking so much about her. It was as if Stefanie had become a conduit for a communiqué from God, like the baffled king. Not that I can pretend to know what the message was exactly (a coy, ironic reminder not to hold on?). All I know is how utterly enchanted I was by the strange mystery of the whole thing.

Lifted, like Saul. Refreshed.



Download:

"Story of Issac" mp3
by Leonard Cohen, 1969.
available on Songs from a Room



"Hallelujah" mp3
by Leonard Cohen, 1984.
available on Various Positions

"Night Comes On" mp3
by Leonard Cohen, 1984.
available on Various Positions



"Stranger Song" mp3
by Leonard Cohen, 1967.
available on Songs of Leonard Cohen

************************

"Hallelujah" mp3
by Jeff Buckley, 1994.
available on Grace

"Hallelujah" mp3
by John Cale, 1992.
available on Fragments of a Rainy Season

Painting: Saul and David, 1655-60 by Rembrandt.