“Boogie Street” by Leonard Cohen was written by Leonard Cohen & Sharon Robinson.
Leonard Cohen released “Boogie Street” on October 9, 2001. While written earlier, this song had appeared first on an album in Cohen (and Robinson’s) album Ten New Songs which was issued in 2001.
In the 90’s Leonard Cohen spent five years in a zen monastery, forming his philosophy which was the base for this concept album.
In his words from an interview with The New York Observer:
– The evidence accumulates as you get older that things are not going to turn out exactly as you wish them to turn out, and that life has a dreamy quality that suggests that you have no control over the consequences.
Boogie Street Lyrics
Oh Crown of Light, oh Darkened One
I never thought we’d meet
You kiss my lips, and then your gone:
And i’m back on Boogie Street
A sip of wine, a cigarette
And then it’s time to go
I tidied up the kitchenette;
I tuned the old banjo
I’m wanted at the traffic-jam
They’re saving me a seat
I’m what I am, and what I am
Is back on Boogie Street
And oh my love, I still recall
The pleasures that we knew;
The rivers and the waterfall
Wherein I bathed with you
Bewildered by your beauty there
I’d kneel to dry your feet
By such instructions you prepare
A man for Boogie Street
Oh Crown of Light, oh Darkened One
I never thought we’d meet
You kiss my lips, and then it’s done:
And i’m back, back on Boogie Street
The inspiration for Boogie Street comes from Singapore. Boogie Street is a street in Singapore where two very different types of life are lived: a day life and a nightlife. Leonard Cohen visited this place after a tour of Australia in the 1980s and described it as follows in an interview with Brian D. Johnson. Maclean’s: Oct 15, 2001: “There was that kind of bazaar feeling. And at night, it was a scene of intense and alarming sexual exchange. Prostitution, and . . . everything seemed to be available. I don’t even know if it was prostitution. It just seemed to be mutual availability. Boogie Street to me was that street of work and desire, the ordinary life and also the place we live in most of the time that is relieved by the embrace of your children, or the kiss of your beloved, or the peak experience in which you yourself are dissolved, and there is no one to experience it so you feel the refreshment when you come back from those moments. As my old teacher said: “Paradise is a good place to visit, but you can’t live there because there are no toilets or restaurants.” So we all hope forthose heavenly moments, which we get in those embraces and those sudden perceptions of beauty and sensations of pleasure, but we’re immediately returned to Boogie Street”
