The woman of this song is no less distinct from the Hotel Chelsea than the Hotel Chelsea is from New York. In Cohen's tale, the memory of a lover is intrinsically tied to the place where the love affair happened. The place is at the heart of these two people's affection. One can only speculate that these were the reasons the two lovers came together in a dingy hotel room, and for all their grime and solitude, these are also the reasons that New York makes Cohen nostalgic. While many have composed odes to the place, its way of letting glamour live alongside grit is never evoked so romantically as when Cohen describes this scene and rounds out the picture with everything that New York was to him. Photo: Shinya Suzuki, via Flickr, CC 2.0Hotel Chelsea was famous as an incubator for the most soulful and creative musicians and artists of the '60s and '70s. 2" and it is evoked in all its messy beauty, from the unmade bed to the limousines waiting in the street.Ĭohen, who stayed at the Chelsea when he wasn't in Montreal or the Greek Islands, explained in an interview with Song Talk: "I came to New York and I was living at other hotels and I had heard about the Chelsea Hotel as being a place where I might meet people of my own kind. Hotel Chelsea,that gritty soul of New York's bohemian artists, is the setting of "Chelsea Hotel No. Just listen to his emphatic voice hushing the music that seems to play only as a background for his baritone as he tells the story of a tender, too brief romance. Unlike many writers who turn poems into songs, Cohen considers them entirely separate, but this is certainly one of his more poetic songs. Despite Cohen's later apology for this statement, it has forever colored the rich, fissured narrative of the song. Read full LyricsFamously, Leonard Cohen introduced this song live with a reference to Janis Joplin, implying the song was written about she and Cohen's short affair in the Hotel Chelsea.
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