In the dying moments of daylight of 2023 I was visited by the ghost of years past in the form of this song. It's laden with significance and meaning and poetry that has the sheen of timelessness. It reminds me of Montreal and snowy alleyways I peered down at 2am on Winter nights, holding a warm bag of bagels from Fairmount Avenue or St. Viateur walking back to my apartment at the top of a twisting metal staircase. It brings me back to an old roommate who would play the album for me on vinyl and lovingly explain why it was so good and so hard to achieve from the perspective of a musician. Then the mix tape it was on as I listened on a walkman on a Greyhound bus headed to New York City staring dreamily out the window at cars streaming past on the Interstate. I saw Leonard Cohen one night at a diner, the aura around him too big to approach. I heard that people would constantly knock on his door facing a little park at all hours of the day and night until he moved away. The song comes to me across the layers of days at the speed of light.  As if there were no space between the moment I first heard those distinctive chords on the guitar through radio speakers and this moment waiting in a suburban upstate parking lot for my wife. Those same notes and the warm familiarity of his voice rising up out of the silence like a spirit from beyond time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svitEEpI07E