Lessons Learnt: Joe Mount Of Metronomy's Favourite Albums | Page 12 of 13 | The Quietus

Baker's Dozen

Artists discuss the 13 records that shaped their lives

11. Leonard CohenI’m Your Man

Hearing this Leonard Cohen stuff, after listening to the Red Hot Chilli Peppers it was like ‘this sounds like bullshit!’, I didn’t understand the layers of intellect that had gone into making that record, and the large element of humour. My dad is into Leonard Cohen, I remember hearing the older stuff, then my sister was getting into it because she was becoming very literary. I was basically absorbing Leonard Cohen but I wasn’t crazy about it. I remember hearing ‘The Story Of Isaac’ as a child and thinking ‘god, this is fully intense, it’s so bare’. I remember hearing I’m Your Man it and at first finding it a really odd, unenjoyable experience, but now I realise that it’s a very curious idea, this industrial Leonard Cohen record, it’s really cool! ‘First We Take Manhattan’, imagine being a musician and being able to put a song like that out.

tQ: He’s not an easy artist to ‘get’ as a teenager…

That’s the hilarious thing about ‘Hallelujah’, how intentionally simple it sounds, how it’s this incredible piece of songwriting which the people who covered it didn’t understand; this beautiful song made to sound really pedestrian. You realise how entertaining it must have been for him to write that.

Selected in other Baker’s Dozens: Nadine Shah, Martha Wainwright
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