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Somewhere around the age of sixteen, I bought my first Leonard Cohen album. It was a vinyl copy of either Songs From a Room or his Greatest Hits. I'm struggling to remember now. I probably purchased it from Discovery Records on Queen Street East. Though I may have purchased it from the long gone Eargasm Records that used to be located a few blocks from Discovery Records at Jones Ave and Queen St East.
    I remember looking at that album cover, it was the backcover that really caught my attention, for the first time and being completely enamoured with it. Before I had even got the record home I had fallen in love with it. It's a pretty romantic image for a sixteen year old boy just discovering great music. A boy in love with rock and roll, who dreamed of becoming a writer.
   Fourteen years later that image is just as powerful. The impact when I look at it now exactly the same. The front cover is a simple black and white photograph of a young Leonard Cohen standing in a small room tightening his tie in a mirror. The backcover is a simple black and white photograph of an old room, sun pouring in through the window. The room empty but for a single bed, a table, a typewriter and a girl, sat at the typewriter. That's it. What a simple beautiful idea. I mean, you listen to a song like Bird on a Wire or Suzanne while looking at that record sleeve and it moves something way down inside of you.
    To me that image represented an ideal. Truth. Something to strive for. It was pure. Like reading On the Road for the first time. Kerouac always gave me that same feeling. So did a lot of the songs on Lou Reeds album Transformer. But that image on the back of that Cohen sleeve was always first I think? That idea of living so simply. And the idea of being moved in such a way by the artwork on an album sleeve.
     It's an image and an idea I still hold on to. I have a lot of memories of myself on Sunday afternoons sat with a stack of vinyl, listening to music, closely examining the record sleeves of albums by bands like Pink Floyd, The Beatles, Neil Young and the Allman Brothers. It always added to my enjoyment of the music, to the emotional impact of the songs.
    It's something that's been lost in music today. In this age of digital downloads. I don't listen to albums much anymore, I listen to songs. I listen to songs on playlists and I listen to songs on shuffle. And it's fucking tragic. But maybe I'm just being nostalgic. Maybe I have no one else to blame but my own lazy ass? Maybe it's a bit of both? Either way I guess I'll always have those memories.