Graceful and Green as a Stem

I confess that I've found some of Leonard Cohen's songs, like Bob Dylan's, more satisfying to sing than to listen to—or, put it both more precisely and more generously, I have discovered that some songs by both artists that I've never warmed to on record are in fact potent pieces of music, well constructed rooms that are well worth inhabiting. With my church band, for example, I've rendered "If It Be Your Will" and "I Believe in You," songs I have little interest in putting on an iTunes playlist but which, in performance, really communicate something and land with listeners. This disconnect isn't that hard to explain: While the strophic simplicity of many of the song forms they use doesn't always appeal to my musical tastes, which as I've noted run to harmonic novelty and complexity, at their best these artists tap deep wells with their work, and I've felt that power surge through me.

I feel roughly the opposite about Cohen's "Sisters of Mercy": It is almost the only song of his whose recorded version I find untouchably perfect as it is, and I neither feel drawn to seek out better cover versions by others nor compelled to uncover its true greatness by interpreting it myself. Its association with Altman's exquisite McCabe and Mrs. Miller certainly doesn't hurt, but even without that, its delicate, angular waltz melody, underpinned by a finger-picked guitar pattern augmented by calliope and bells, gives it the paradoxical quality of a heavy thing suspended in mid-air, like a statue on a trapeze. Its lyric, which idealizes female companionship in terms both religious and erotic (it was purportedly based on a real incident that was neither), has a subtle variation I only picked up on after close examination: Its four quatrains have the alternating rhyme scheme AAAA*, AABB, AAAA, and AABB (*true-rhyme sticklers would probably insist that that first stanza contains near rhymes, and though it really does sound like a monorhyme in context, it works nicely either way, as the words are gone/on/song/long).

But what sends this stately dance over the top for me is its bewitching, unfathomable instrumental break, a simple-sounding guitar line that is anything but simple. Indeed, though it can be counted in the song's native 3/4 and finally ends up back in that groove, the way its phrasing shifts the downbeat makes it feel almost free tempo, in a turn more characteristic of Bacharach than Cohen. Indeed I can think of literally no other song by the bard of Montreal that does anything as musically interesting as this. Here's how I charted it:

The repeated six-note phrase that starts in the second measure above (ggagfe) doesn't really land in the neat threes I've indicated, and the measure that switches to the key of B definitely doesn't sound like a firm three (the C# feels like a pickup note, and it really sounds to my ear like the chord change happens on measure's second beat, under the D#, but maybe not?). On the other hand, I'm not sure how else to notate it, let alone to learn it, than to count it out this way (I tried a few other alternatives, no dice). Honestly, perhaps the real reason I haven't tackled this song myself is that this break is so forbidding.

In this live rendition, as in the studio version, it doesn't sound effortful at all. This clearly seems like a case of a composer following his intuition (or his muse, if you will) where it takes him. I for one am happy to follow: