"Yes, you who must leave everything that you cannot control"

One of my favourite songs from one of my favourite films. Thank you Robert Altman for weaving Leonard Cohen's "Sisters of Mercy", "The Stranger Song" and "Winter Lady" so nicely throughout McCabe & Mrs Miller (1971).

Songs From a Room (1969)

May 1968. Like a salted slug, Paris is inverting. Disaffected university students take over factories, striking factory workers relieve themselves in campus lavatories.

In West Hollywood, Leonard Cohen argues songs with his producer, David Crosby. The following month Columbia Records fires Crosby and Cohen is shipped from Los Angeles to Nashville, where he is given a farmhouse at the edge of the city and told to write hits, not misses.

The result is Songs From a Room.

The Stranger Song (1967)

stran·ger

ˈstrānjər/

noun

1. a person whom one does not know or with whom one is not familiar.

   "don't talk to strangers"

   • a person who does not know, or is not known in, a particular place or community.

     "I'm a stranger in these parts"

     synonyms:

     newcomer, new arrival, visitor, outsider, newbie "they were taught to fear strangers"

   • a person entirely unaccustomed to (a feeling, experience, or situation).

     "he is no stranger to controversy"

     synonyms:

     unaccustomed to, unfamiliar with, unused to, new to, fresh to,inexperienced in;  archaicstrange to "I'm afraid I'm a stranger to these automated methods"

A Different Isaac

Leonard Cohen sings a song, tells a story, is spoken of, is interviewed and recites a poem. The story is reminiscent of a contemporaneous poem by Nova Scotia's Alden Nowlan, though instead of taking it to its inevitable end (as Nowlan does his poem), Cohen veers sideways, taking us elsewhere.