How Leonard Cohens Music Turned McCabe & Mrs. Miller Into a Masterpiece

In early 1971, Leonard Cohen was still a relatively unknown singer-songwriter. Despite releasing two critically acclaimed records 1967s Songs of Leonard Cohen and 1969s Songs From a Room the Canadian artist, who previously plied his trade as a novelist and poet, had yet to tour the U.S. He was then living on a farm in the small town of Big East Fork, Tennessee while preparing the release of that Marchs Songs of Love and Hate. I had a house, a jeep, a carbine, a pair of cowboy boots, a girlfriend a typewriter, a guitar, he once recalled. Everything I needed.

One day, he decided to go into town and check out a movie. He eventually decided on Brewster McCloud, a bizarre comedy about a Houston kid (played by Bud Cort) who wants to fly. The movie was a commercial and critical flop; Cohen saw it twice that day. Its a very, very beautiful and I would say brilliant film, he told Crawdaddy! in 1975. Maybe I just hadnt seen a movie in a long time, but it was really fine.

That night, the singer-songwriter traveled to Nashville to do some studio work. While there, he got a phone call: This is Bob Altman, the voice on the other line said. Id like to use your songs in a movie Im making. Cohen was flattered but had no idea who this guy was: Is there any movie youve done I might have seen?

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Altman mentioned his smash success M*A*S*H, which Cohen had missed. The filmmaker then said, I also did a small movie that nobody saw Brewster McCloud. As Cohen later recalled to Altman biographer Mitchell Zuckoff, I told him, I just saw it this afternoon I loved it. You can have anything you want.'

Thus began one of the great pairings of film and soundtrack of the modern era. The movie Altman was making was McCabe & Mrs. Miller, which legendary director John Huston would later reportedly proclaim the greatest Western ever made. Its certainly one of the most visionary, with Altman transforming Edmund Naughtons novel into a sad, beautiful tale of the American dream playing out in Washington State at the turn of the century. A luckless schemer named John McCabe (Warren Beatty) encounters the enigmatic madam Constance Miller (Julie Christie) in burgeoning, rustic Presbyterian Church, and these two entrepreneurs destinies are soon to be intertwined.

In much the same way, Altmans and Cohens legacies would forever be linked by McCabe. The movie is inextricably connected to Cohens songs. Its impossible to imagine Altmans masterpiece without them.

The poet-musician may not have been familiar with Altman, who died in 2006, but the director certainly knew the songwriter the iconoclastic auteur loved Songs of Leonard Cohen when it came out. [W]ed put that record on so often we wore out two copies! he once professed to film scholar David Thompson. Wed just get stoned and play that stuff. Then I forgot all about it. When Altman started dreaming up McCabe, he drew inspiration from Cohens music without realizing he had. After shooting the film and moving to the editing stage, he happened to hear some Cohen for the first time in a while and had a revelation: Shit, thats my movie! [B]ack in the cutting room we put those songs on the picture and they fitted like a glove. I think the reason they worked was because those lyrics were etched in my subconscious, so when I shot the scenes I fitted them to the songs, as if they were written for them.

Altman initially inserted about 10 Cohen tracks into the film, eventually settling on three tunes: The Stranger Song, Sisters of Mercy and Winter Lady. But as musicology professor Gayle Sherwood Magee suggests in her book Robert Altmans Soundtracks, the lyrics to other Cohen songs certainly seem to presage McCabe plot points specifically, Suzanne (which describes a woman with details that are emulated in Mrs. Miller) and One of Us Cannot Be Wrong (which references a blizzard of ice reminiscent of McCabes snowy death after he runs afoul of a mining company). Even when you dont hear Cohens music gracing scenes, the songwriters spirit pervades the film.

This indelible trio of tracks, all of which appear on the first side of Songs of Leonard Cohen, served as McCabes musical themes. The Stranger Song drifts over the films opening credits as McCabe comes to Presbyterian Church on horseback. Before weve even been formally introduced to our antihero, Cohen paints a picture of this mournful man as a cardsharp (Its true that all the men you knew were dealers) who has a mysterious past (I told you when I came I was a stranger) and is seeking sanctuary (He was just some Joseph looking for a manger).

The second, Sisters of Mercy, enters the picture when we meet Mrs. Millers prostitutes, Cohens gentle song echoing the characters warmth and generosity: They were waiting for me when I thought that I just cant go on you wont make me jealous if I hear that they sweetened your night.

The final track, Winter Lady, is Mrs. Millers theme, expressing the devotion McCabe feels for this woman whos captured his heart, even though he knows any sort of meaningful relationship is impossible. Traveling lady, stay awhile / Until the night is over, Cohen sings, unwittingly providing an inner monologue. Im just a station on your way / I know Im not your lover. If The Stranger Song ushers us into McCabe, then Winter Lady which plays over the closing credits is our farewell to the movie and the man, who ends up lying dead in a snowdrift, never to see his better half again.

But it wasnt simply the lyrical allusions that made Cohens music so perfect for McCabe. Just as Altman lived to subvert genre clichs and incorporate unconventional filmmaking techniques such as his inspired use of overlapping, sometimes muffled dialogue, which gave his scenes a sophisticated, lifelike texture Cohen was his own brand of maverick, crafting a unique sound by using nylon strings on his guitar that distinguished him from other folk singers of the time. Its essentially a Spanish style, Cohen music arranger Javier Mas revealed in Anthony Reynolds book Leonard Cohen: A Remarkable Life, later adding, He has got that nice tremolo playing that makes an incredible sound in his songs.

Cohens desire to go his own way also provoked him to recruit the string band Kaleidoscope, which mixed folk, bluegrass and Middle Eastern sounds, to provide the distinctively exotic musical backing for Songs of Leonard Cohen. Their searching, haunting instrumentation lent his songs their elusive, wistful power although, as pointed out by music critic Robert Christgau, the film version of The Stranger Song differs from the stripped-down album rendition, emphasizing the bands musical flourishes as Cohen had intended before his producer nixed the idea.

In McCabe, Cohens aural landscape is an ideal compliment to Vilmos Zsigmonds brilliantly dreamy cinematography. He remembered in Robert Altman: The Oral Biography that when they first sat down to discuss the movies visual strategy, Altman described it in images, very old, like antique photographs and faded-out pictures, not much color. Using that at his guide, the Oscar-winning cameraman developed a technique, now known as flashing, which gives film an underexposed, grainy quality thats akin to looking at old photos. Zsigmonds worn images unknowingly mirrored Cohens spectral tunes they felt timeless but also idiosyncratic and trailblazing. No Western had ever looked or sounded like this.

Altman has said that with this moody Western, he was trying to illustrate a heroic ballad. Yes, these events took place, but not in the way youve been told. I wanted to look at it through a different window, you might say, but I still wanted to keep the poetry of the ballad. Its reminiscent of something John McCabe mumbles to himself while thinking of his beloved: Ive got poetry in me, he insists to her, even though shes not there to hear it. I do, Ive got poetry in me. I aint going to put it down on paper. I aint no educated man. I got sense enough not to try it.

McCabe and Mrs. Millers beauty and poignancy comes from the attempt to put that poetry onto the screen in gorgeously hazy visuals and piercingly sad ballads that transport the viewer to a bygone world an old, violent America frontier that was soon to be snuffed out and tamed in the name of manifest destiny. That beauty and poignancy are even more acute now that its two main progenitors for its sound and vision are no longer with us.