I always sleep poorly this time of year. Between the impossibly short nights at this latitude and the mounting heat, I feel languid all day, crawl into bed shortly after sundown, and am often up at 5:30 or 6. This morning, the sun rose before 5 and I was awake not long after. Even with a decent shade on the one small window in my bedroom, I had the circadian sense that my day was begun, and that there was no use fighting it.
I don’t think my sleep was always this sensitive to seasonality. I suppose it’s just a quirk of aging, but it seems an inconvenient one, given that I have a job that doesn’t particularly care if I’m sleep deprived because the nights are too short. It’s probably also why I’ve become much more interested in the Wheel of the Year, both as a set of holidays and as a concept. It makes deep, biological sense to me that we’d invest a lot of significance (at least in the more extreme latitudes) in the hinge-points of the solar calendar. With the solstice only a few days away, perhaps I should try to enjoy the early mornings, knowing that it will only be a month or two until I can reliably get a full night’s sleep, and it six month’s time, I’ll be bemoaning the 4pm sunsets.
I’ve been listening to a lot of Leonard Cohen these days. (Don’t worry, I’m fine, no need to call in a wellness check.) Or rather, I’ve been listening to a lot of Leonard Cohen covers. Cohen is a brilliant composer, but he has a bit of Bob Dylan Syndrome. That is, of course, the tragic condition of being a world-class songwriter and merely an average-or-worse performer. Cohen’s case isn’t fatal like Dylan’s, but it still means that I generally prefer other musician’s versions of his songs.
One of Cohen’s great strengths is that, even though his music is deeply personal and confessional, he can lie to us and we’ll always forgive him. Cohen confides in us in a way that wins us over and causes us to see our own human frailty in his work. This means that he can tell us self-serving untruths and we’ll see through them and love him more for the human desire to protect himself. The closing line of “Hotel Chelsea No. 2” is clearly a lie. It’s trying to seem unaffected when thinking about the loss of someone who mattered very deeply. We forgive Cohen his self-preserving bluffs the same way we would a friend who says “I don’t think about them that often” about any ex.
But the fact is, you don’t write something that heart-achingly fragile about someone you don’t think about.
Ryan Adams’ heart-broken, Hotel-Chelsea-themed love song, is an interesting juxtaposition. Whereas Cohen’s heartbreak comes from connection and loss, Adams’ comes from a desire for connection that seems impossible. Cohen comes across as wistful and fragile. Adams seems selfish, or at least self-centered.
Perhaps the most significant difference is the object of the sorrow in each song. Cohen’s song is a lament for the loss of someone he loved, even if only briefly. The sorrow in Adams’ “Hotel Chelsea Nights” is the self-pitying sorrow of a junkie. It’s not about the love interest at all, really, but about the narrator’s feelings for their own pitiable state.1
Adams’ bluesy meditation on obsessive isolation is legitimately a great track, but it speaks to something smaller inside all of us. I think I love both of these songs because they evoke two very different sides of yearning. Cohen gives us a simple and earnest expression of the wistful reminiscence of a lost, if transient, lover. Adams invites us to wallow in self-pity over the one we want but can’t have. In both of them, the Chelsea Hotel is the intersection of the ley lines of the lives of lover and beloved.
I’ve never really been the kind of person to seek out significant places in the lives of musicians,2 but that I have such a fondness for these two songs makes me want to go stay in the Chelsea Hotel just to see what all the fuss is about. Wikipedia tells me that it’s much changed since its heyday as a mecca for resident musicians, but it would still be interesting to go and see how much of its power is still latent in the walls.
I’ll try my best not to write any maudlin songs about my stay.
Here seems as good a place as any to include the standard post-modern disclaimer. Yes yes, I should be saying “the narrator” throughout, rather than attributing the contents of the song to the feelings and character of Cohen and Adams. That gets clunky and part of the impact of confessional music comes from the fact that the listener conflates it with the artist. Taylor Swift would not be half as popular if her fans truly believed in the contemporary Barthean separation of art and artist. Add in that both Cohen and Adams have been very public about their lives and struggles and the way that they impact their music, and I think that there’s a point in which the separation does more damage to criticism than it spares.
My inner obsessive is much more drawn to the biographical ephemera of the lives of authors.