Customer Reviews

I'm Your Man

5 star:		(44)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I was introduced to Leonard Cohen nearly a decade ago in my college freshman rhetoric class. The professor asked us to bring in samples of something that we considered poetry. Someone brought in Everybody Knows, and I have been a Cohen fan ever since.

Cohen's voice fits his dry, black, sense of humor and his grasp of the power of bitter irony like the right pair of sunglasses fit a Mafioso kingpin. They become one and the same.

My favorites on this album have changed over the years, a testament to the longevity of this work. Everybody Knows is one of the best songs ever written, and Tower of Song is pure brilliance. Feel free to skip Jazz Police, but have patience with Take This Waltz and I'm Your Man. You will be rewarded if you give them the chance to grow on you. They most assuredly will.

This album is my favorite of the Cohen releases. It may not have the classic sound of many of his earlier albums, but his ability to overlay lyrics like

"Now in Vienna there's ten pretty women
There's a shoulder where Death comes to cry
There's a lobby with nine hundred windows
There's a tree where the doves go to die
There's a piece that was torn from the morning
And it hangs in the Gallery of Frost"

with an underlying accompaniment that is at the same time electronic and string driven is genius, pure and simple. Cohen has the ability of the timeless masters to maintain his style and keep current gracefully.

Mr. Cohen says it best. "I was born like this, I had no choice
I was born with the gift of a golden voice"

Do yourself a favor. Spend an evening in the dark listening to this album over a glass of good wine. You won't regret it.

Five Stars only because they won't give me six.
-HawkeyeGK

The songs contained on this release are absolutley stunning. Cohen mixes a world weary point of view with a dry dark humor, and his verbage so economical that not a word is wasted. Cohen may not have the "golden voice" that he jokes about in TOWER OF SONG, but he nails the vocals on every song here with just the right emotion and inflection.

Then comes the backing tracks. This could be a primer on cliched 80's production values. Cheesy synthdrums, backing vocals worthy of Diane Warren songs and generic keyboards would destroy lesser artists or tunes. Only TOWER OF SONG and EVERYBODY KNOWS get treatments worthy of their fine lyrics and vocals.

I would love to see Cohen redo this album with a sympathetic producer, who would frame these dignified tunes with the backing they so richly deserve. It never hurts to dream.

As a fan who has every original Cohen album, this one is quite simply the best. "Songs Of" will always be a sentimental favorite but "I'm Your Man," from beginning to end is one the most enlightening musical voyages you will ever take. Lyrics have always been Cohen's strong point but now we have a maturity in the music itself, laced with just enough pop/rock licks and tricks that my Oldies-loving wife even likes some of these songs. How coincidental that his voice is at its masculine best to match the penetrating lyrical expeditions. No wonder a new generation of music fans and performers alike fell in love with this guy {re: the tribute albums that followed}. This album is the perfect cure for the unidentifiable musical phlegm that is spewing from too many radio speakers near and far as you read this. Leonard Cohen is quite simply too cool for the charts and too intense for the masses. Buy this, spend a quiet weekend listening, and find out why.

What is actually incredible is not that this is a great album from Leonard Cohen. No. What is trully unreal is that this album stands out so far out infront from all his rest.
Cohen is a poet and a great poet at that, but he is a poet before he is a songwriter and this might explain it all.
In "I'm your man" everything falls together. The lyrics have the capability to grab anyone no matter what his mood or musical predisposition. The music is a perfect match and not only for the time it was written. I heard this album just this week in year 2002 (it was written in 1988) and i thought "hmm, if this had come out this year it would still be a huge hit".
Which is why this album became a big commercial success. But you see, not all commercial music is cheap.
What to mention first concerning the songs on offer here? The memorable "First we take Manhattan"? You would have to avoid not knowing this song and if you somehow have you have missed a true classic!
But songs of great stature are in abundance in "I'm your man": the eponymous song of the album is a monument of Cohen's song writting ability, a very emotional song and a love song that manages to be great without being cheesy. The "Tower song" is a bitter recollection that a lot of people will relate to regardless of age and "Everybody knows" is a doomy one that will please the conspiracy freak in you (which you SHOULD have)...
But all in all there is no song that falls below par, there is no "filler". There is no song in this album that you would want to skip.
All that combined with Cohen's at times cold and at times emphatic delivery make the whole a classic album. In fact, if i were asked what in my opinion would qualify for a perfect album then "I'm your man" would be one of the first examples that would pop in my mind.
"Everybody knows that the dice are loaded...."

I heard all of the songs on this album when I stopped to listen to a rerun of Austin City Limits on PBS. I just happened across it when I was flipping through the channels last night but was immediately just blown away by the music, the lyrics, the arrangements, the musicians and singers and by Leonard Cohen himself. I just loved it. After the broadcast I looked up LC on the Internet and was amazed by the lyrics of the many songs he has written and by the breadth of his career. Today I have ordered this album and two others. I've probably been around as long as Mr Cohen but I'm now his newest and biggest fan.

"I'm Your Man" has a perfect title.

Leonard Cohen IS the man, my man and the man for everyone who loves a sweet, sad ballad sung in a voice that drains every teardrop from the lyrics, and sets them to music that washes over you like rain.

This 1988 disc represented a breakthrough of sorts for the Canadian born singer/songwriter. Combined with his now legendary appearance on PBS's "Austin City Limits" the same year, "I'm Your Man" won Cohen a legion of new fans in the U.S. where he had previously enjoyed relatively minor success.

From the sinister "First, We Take Manhattan" and "Everybody Knows," the latter highlighted by John Bilezikjian on the ode, to the wryly amusing "Tower of Song" and "I Can't Forget," this album provides a crash course in all of the man's styles. The topper, though, is the epic "Take This Waltz," based on a poem by Garcia Lorca. Jennifer Warnes shares the vocals here, and adds considerable depth to an already powerful song.

Cohen has made better albums (1971's "Songs of Love and Hate" is his finest album in my book), but "I'm Your Man" is his most accessible.

You the man, Leonard, you the man.

Brian W. Fairbanks

There was a time when people quipped that you get a free single-edge razor blade with every Cohen album. It's true some of his early work leaned toward depressing material, though every album had at least one song to blow you away. I'm Your Man began an entirely different phase of Cohens career. This album comes up almost all winners. I'm not overly fond of Jazz Police and First We Take Manhattan, but whatever weakness those songs involve is more than overwhelmed by all the others. If Cohen hadn't done so much and been around so long I'd be tempted to call 'Take This Waltz' my all-time Cohen favorite. In other times I've called it the best song of the 20th Century. I still might be tempted to do so. This is the best of his career up until that time, despite Suzanne, The Stranger, Bird on a Wire and a dozen others. Get it if you don't have it.

During that musically confused decade, the eighties, an artist who debuted twenty years earlier renovates his style, adapting to new technology and a new lyrical approach after a long period during which his work received little attention. It sounds like a recipe for absolute ruin. Surprisingly, cult hero, Leonard Cohen, undergoes this process and comes out as a shining success, creating one of the best albums of his career with 1988's I'm Your Man. Despite introducing significant changes to his form, such as a polished, synthesizer-infused sound and a darkly ironic approach to lyrics, similar to recent work by alternative rock pioneers such as the Pixies and REM, the songs of I'm Your Man emphasize many things fans have always loved about Cohen: the wryly confrontational attitude ("First We Take Manhattan," a sinister song about Cohen's disdain towards the placid, yuppie fashion and music industries of the era, "Everybody Knows," which echoes disappointment at the post-civil rights era), the glum self-depreciation ("Jazz Police," the magnificent "I Can't Forget") and the helpless romanticism ("Ain't No Cure for Love," the title track, in which Cohen sounds like either Allen Ginsberg attempting to woe a woman or Dean Martin trying to creep out his usual audience). Cohen does not come off as desperate and he does not sell-out. On I'm Your Man, he merely reevaluated his musical persona and was ready for the exceptional second phase of his career.

I love finding artists that most people are unfamiliar with. Leonard Cohen is one of these artists. I first heard him in the 1990 film "Pump Up The Volume" starring Christian Slater. I wondered who he was. Later, in 1993, he appeared again on the soundtrack to Oliver Stone's "Natural Born Killers." By this time I knew who he was but was unfamiliar with the majority of his work. In 1997 I bought all 9 of his studio cds. I'm Your Man is his most accessible and catchy. So is 1992's The Future. I am only reviewing I'm Your Man because it contains 8 tracks that non-fans would appreciate. I think it's a classic recording. Though, his 1968 and 1969 and 1970 cds are all classic in their own rights. I'm Your Man features great songs like "Everybody Knows", "Tower of Song", "I'm Your Man" and "First We'll Take Manhattan." Cohen's distinctive bass vocals lend his lyrical poetry more validity. It's like a poet in some darkened smokey basement reading his own poetry. A classic recording and a must have for any rock collector.

"The hyacinth wild on your shoulder/My mouth on the dew of your thighs." Where ever this guy goes, I want to be there.