The troubadour becomes the muse in Lail Arad’s ‘1934’, a song that marked the late Leonard Cohen’s 80th birthday three years ago. Arad imagines herself to be Cohen’s lover, “probably not more” and launches into a description of what the affair would be like. “I’d be high on hormones, you’d be low on cash. We’d uncork a bottle, smoke into the stash,” she sings, concluding however that, “It’s just a shame that you were born in 1934.”
Arad’s droll, gorgeous number, especially her veiled references to some of Cohen’s own muses and former lovers — Marianne Ihlen whom he met in Hydra, the inspiration behind ‘So Long Marianne’ and Suzanne Elrod whose photograph found itself on the cover of his album Death of A Ladies Man — was possibly the high point of the concert.
The third concert of The Hindu November Fest, was all about recapturing the folk-acoustic tradition of the 60s and the 70s, celebrating some of the greatest singer-songwriters of those times, taking you back to an era of protest movements, free love, Vietnam and Hippism. London-born Arad and her partner, Canadian-born JF Robitaille offered their audience music distilled to its bare essence: simple chords setting off verse that is profound, prophetic, introspective and poetic all at once. They were accompanied by percussionist MT Aditya Srinivasan, who gave their music an interesting twist: for instance, the anthemic notes of ‘Birds on the Wire’, a song Cohen frequently opened concerts with, was set-off by the complex percussion patterns on the kanjira.
The concert began with a cover by Simon & Garfunkel, ‘The Sound of Silence,’ the 1964 soft rock song that paradoxically led to both the duo’s break-up and break-through. This was followed by Robitaille belting out a couple of original numbers including one titled‘Missing you’ that is, as the name suggests, a rather sweet, wistful elegy to lost love. The song was number 4 on the Canadian Radio Charts, and it is easy to see why, soulful verse and melody always make for a pleasurable musical narrative.
Then Arad took over, offering her warm, witty music infused with endearing playfulness and joie de vivre. There are layers to her (her second album is rather appropriately called The Onion) and it showed. Her vocals oscillated between bold, jaunty brashness to alleviating, bluesy tones; sometimes she was the sultry seductress, at others she was a charming naivete.
From ‘Milo’ with its Nancy-Sinatra-style crooning to her her fantastic EU song that superimposed the Brexit referendum on a sad break-up, her metaphors were spot-on, her delivery compelling. Equally compelling was the duo’s first single together, ‘ We Got it Coming’, written in a snow-burnished Montreal that talked about falling in love in winter.
Cohen, Dylan and Joni Mitchell also found their way into the concert with the duo performing ‘You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere’, ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’, and yes, ‘Tower of Song’, of course. Nice enough, but the original songs worked better than the covers. While Arad and Robitaille are excellent singers in their own right, they don’t quite manage to generate the visceral response that only Cohen’s gravelly rasp and Dylan’s rusty timbre can bring.
But these are indeed big boots to fill and the effort was admirable. Tower of Song offered music that would have been perfect inside a smoky, dark NYC pub: music that carried you with it and made you want to sway and sing along.