Leonard Cohen's "The Passing of a Lady's Man"

Hawlik Pascal: Album décrié, honni par Leonard Cohen lui-même, mais perso c'est un album qui tient la route, avec une orchestration différente, moins dépouillé avec la touche de Phil Spector. L'album n'a pas à rougir, il est de très bonne facture.

France on May 19, 2023

Amazon Kunde: Prima!

Germany on Feb 12, 2022

Alex: Excellent quality hardback. Complete with dust jacket (non price cut), thick pages, unbroken spine, and everything else you might find if you bought this book new, which you can't ask it's out of print. I don't like buying like this generally as you are guessing slightly on the quality but I was very impressed by Death of a Lady's Man. As for the poetry, well it's Cohen. If you like his music or his written word then you'll love this. It's by far his most dense collection, with huge and amazing prose poems such as 'How to Speak Poetry'. Each work has an identically titled piece after it, sometimes ther are poems about the poems, or they are earlier drafts, bits from his notebooks. Anyway, it makes for a wonderful insight into Cohen's writing process that his other works don't always have. The only unfortunate thing about this collection would be the lack of art. In his more recent works Cohen covers the blank space with sketches, which personally I find lovely whilst reading, this book appears to squeeze just before he started doing this. But still an amazing read, and a very good copy.

United Kingdom on Apr 15, 2020

Chevy: Well, what can I say? This album is monumental in all aspects and certainly made it a controversial one at the time and years to come. When Mr. "walls of sound", Phil Spector is involved, you know it's going to have a good feel to it. But this album offers more. It has the styling and lyrics of the great late Leonard Cohen. With Phil at the driver's wheel, he's not only the producer, he's fully involved with lyrics, guitar, backing vocal, and arrangements, you know you'll have a winner, especially with greats stopping by to contribute to this phenomenal recording at spector's home, Terry Gibb, Sneaky Pete on pedal Steel, Claudia King, and of course Bob Dylan. However, I advise all music lovers to research the making, and how this union of Cohen and Spector came to light. It certainly goes down in the books as musical history, in every sense of the word. Buy this album now as it's a "must have" among your record collection.

Canada on Feb 16, 2020

Amazon Customer: I'm late to the Leonard Cohen party but, thanks to former student Joe Quam, I received an invitation.
Brand new copy at a decent price and the book/ CD collection grows. Thanks, Joseph!

United States on Nov 03, 2019

Frank: Leonard Cohen excelente artista, el disco llego a tiempo y en perfecto estado,

Leonard Cohen el ultimo de los grandes poetas de la musica.

Nada recomendable tomar bebidas embriagantes mientras escuchas este disco, depresión segura.

Mexico on Dec 01, 2017

Andrian Curshen: I am a great fan of Leonard Cohen, who has finally become a legend in the U.S. He had reach legendary status in Europe long ago and in his home country of Canada some years ago. His songs are not for everyone's taste, some require a bit of thought. The songs on this CD were recorded during a drug and alcohol induced haze at the Phil Spector studio in Hollywood back in 1977. Phil Spector, the genius, crazy guy who went to jail for shooting his girlfriend. An HBO movie recently appeared with Al Pacino in the title role. After the recording was finished Cohen said he never ever wanted to have anything to do with Spector again and he never did. These songs don't appear on any other CD to the best of my knowledge.

United States on May 21, 2013

JunBaudelaire: This is Cohens darkest album as he was in a manic state while recording this master work. The title track is one of his best lyrical works ever. A song about despair and love lost fade into a Death of A Ladies Man.

United States on Mar 08, 2013

Chris Lee: Everyone knows Songs from a Room and Songs of Love and Hate, but this is and amazing album. This album is a collaboration with the great Phil Spector and you can hear the influence throughout, with the grandiose production and female backup singers.

United States on Mar 01, 2013

Peter Uys: Death Of A Ladies' Man is a work of tortured intensity expressed in striking songs so it will sound abrasive to some, especially those who prefer his spare style of the 1960s & later works like  Recent Songs . As for the complaints about Phil Spector's production, the sound is not that far removed from songs like Is This What You Wanted? and Lover Lover Lover on 1974's  New Skin for the Old Ceremony  that are characterized by raw vocals & heavy rock instrumentation.

Even earlier, on 1971's  Songs of Love and Hate  the track Diamonds in the Mine was anything but gentle. Why, even his 1967 debut  Songs of Leonard Cohen  contains the anguished One Us Cannot Be Wrong which addresses the lover in a sequence of strange images before moving on to melodic whistling and exiting with bitter shouted la la lahs.

So there definitely was a precedent for this heavy approach. His own dislike of the album - he completely ignored it in compiling  The Essential Leonard Cohen  - probably has more to do with unpleasant recollections of the recording process, which reportedly was quite stressful, than with the actual music. There is...

United States on Aug 19, 2008