MOG

I enjoyed Cale's performance here if this good song.

Baudolino has said it all for me. To me, John Cale's version is superior even its originator's. Incidentally, I didn't even know Rufus Wainwright had a go at "Hallelujah"

"Fragments of a Rainy Season" belongs to my desert island discs. Thanks for this excellent post, Petey.

There really isn't a whole lot to distinguish Buckley's, Wainwright's, or Cale's versions. They're all good. I don't recall having heard the original, but I little doubt that it's pitiable by comparison, nor would I for a moment hesitate to wager my entire household supply of Raisin Branl that if Cohen were here now, he'd agree.

No other lyricist I know of can approach Cohen's handling of the subject of sex; the amazement he conveys, his candor, his touching confusion. Everyone else either makes it seem - well, either silly or macho (usually the latter) if they're men; distasteful or clueless (usually the former) if they're women.

What distinguishes Cale's from the Buckley and Wainwright versions is that Cale is dry, stark, and direct while the others allow purple-hued vocal pyrotechnics to upstage and undermine the words. A peacock's strut is just all wrong here. Of course I imagine what I find offputting is precisely the draw for others, most of whom seem to be women. I have a lady friend who goes weak in the knees when you mention Cale's name to her, but I think we're talking about two very different strains of sex appeal here.

Cohen's version popped up on one of his very slackest albums, Various Positions, which wasn't even released in the States, so low was his stock here at the time. His live renderings of it may not be any more pleasing to the unconverted, but they are invariably, deeply passionate. He's said he feels like he's cheating the audience if he doesn't get inside of every song, every time he performs it. He works hard at this, and it shows. Is Cohen an "inferior singer"? Not by my definition.

I hate to see this track becoming a staple of emotional manipulation in TV and motion pictures, Hollywood "Pathos In A Can". This is why it's so annoying to me that I cannot get the MOG album tag, above, changed to something other than Scrubs. Yes, Scrubs, which I understand is a comedy program of some sort. I shudder to think what ignoble use Cale's track was put to in this context. But surely it could be no worse a desecration than scoring a segment of Shrek with it, something that actually happened in real life, though it beggars belief. Adding insult to injury, someone decided it was necessary to excise the line that goes "Maybe there's a God above". They did not leave out the verse in which it appears, which they might have pulled off. No, they simply chopped those few syllables out, surely distracting viewers with a sense of rhythm or rhyme, whether they knew the song or not. Why had this been done? Because you don't go around saying "maybe" about such things in polite society? For all of Shrek's laborious attempts to give me a rollicking good gross out, I find this its most repulsive moment.