Songs of Leonard Cohen

Rare 70s New Zealand pressing! Very nice clean vinyl, high gloss cover.

Songs of Leonard Cohen is the 1967 debut album of Canadian musician Leonard Cohen. It foreshadowed the future path of his career, with less success in the United States than in Europe, reaching #83 on the Billboard chart and achieving gold status only in 1989, while it reached #13 in UK and spent nearly a year and a half in the UK album charts. Although the famed record producer John Hammond (who initially signed Cohen to his contract with Columbia Records) was supposed to produce the record, he became sick and was replaced by the producer John Simon.^[8] Simon and Cohen clashed over instrumentation and mixing; Cohen wanted the album to have a sparse sound, while Simon felt the songs could benefit from arrangements that included strings and horns. According to biographer Ira Nadel, although Cohen was able to make changes to the mix, some of Simon's additions "couldn't be removed from the four-track master tape." The instrumentalists - not credited on the album sleeve - included Chester Crill, Chris Darrow, Solomon Feldthouse and David Lindley of The Kaleidoscope, who had been recruited personally by Cohen after he saw the band play at a New York club. Backing vocals were by Nancy Priddy, who at the time was John Simon's girlfriend.