Last spring, when Elizabeth & the Catapult accepted an invitation from NPR to compose a song cycle based on the Leonard Cohen poetry collection "Book of Longing," the group had no trouble with the assignment.
Elizabeth Ziman recently had been through a bad breakup, and she found in Cohen's poems parallels to her own life.
"'Book of Longing' has to do with his attempt to reach the Buddhist ideal in this Zen monastery in California, and kind of his failure to, and his humor about it, and his ability to laugh at himself about it," Ziman says from her home base in Brooklyn, a week before Wednesday's tour stop in New Haven. "And that was what I was going through, in a way." Hartford Courant
You can definitely hear the Leonard Cohen influence in this song, simply an amazing job.
I'm looking forward to hearing more of Elizabeth and the Catapult.
The Other Side of Zero
Here's something very different, a joyous pop tune about a grown up version of ET?
You And Me
Go Away my Lover
And just to get back to the Leonard Cohen connection check out Elizabeth and the Catapult's great take on a Leonard classic.
Everybody Knows
Live at Paste Magazine
