So Pulp will be playing Radio City on April 11th. While you sit around waiting to buy tickets (they go on sale Friday), please enjoy a few live performances. Meanwhile, NPR is streaming Leonard Cohen's new album, Old Ideas. This day is actually shaping up a lot better than I thought it would when I woke this morning. I wonder what's going to happen to screw it up.

There are at least some white guys still singing: Leonard Cohen, for instance, whose Old Ideas is out at the end of the month. Here's another track from the album ("Show Me The Place" came out at the end of November). Two listens in and my verdict is: I very much enjoy it! [Via]

Show Me The Place by leonardcohen READ MORE

Mr. Leonard Norman Cohen, an artist out of Montreal, turns 77 today. I suppose that's reason enough to make it through another grim box on the calendar. If I had 139 disposable dollars I would absolutely drop them on this, but I've got all the material anyway and until they start handing out bourbon for free on street corners I need to be responsible with how I spend what I've got. In any event, I am hopeful that the rumored new record comes to fruition, and I am wishing the man many, many, many happy returns on the day.

I guess it shouldn't come as any surprise that a list of rock songs with the word "bird" in the title would be a list of great songs. After all, birds fly (or, well, they used to) and rock stars like to pretend to fly by using drugs and airplanes. Anyway, with the recent planetary news, birds are on the brain. It's not hard to connect the dots (though it is very hard to do so as wonderfully as some other people do): the world needs a soundtrack to end to. And, actually, we could do worse. READ MORE

Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” has had a weird history. From the schmaltzy (but great!) original recording through John Cale’s lyrical rearrangement and Jeff Buckley’s radical reduction, it’s become an object of abstract emotional grammar, used less for its words than for its gestalt feeling and its ability to convey meaningfulness even in the absence of actual meaning. Its aesthetic beauty feels so timeless that it’s like being in the same room with the Mona Lisa: you just sense you’re in the presence of something important, and you should pay attention, even if you miss the point of the original object. I had always thought that this progression represented a kind of emotional flattening, a removal of meaning rather than a supplantation of meaning. But Susan Boyle’s version makes it clear that, in the eyes of the world, “Hallelujah” is now about Jesus. Which is weird, since it’s about the Old Testament. READ MORE