Jennifer Warnes
was familiar with
Leonard Cohen
from a tour of duty as one of his backup singers in the early '70s, but this collection of
Cohen
's songs must have shocked her AM radio fans who knew her from her '70s
country-pop
hits and her movie themes, if they were even able to connect the woman who sang "It's the right time of the night for makin' love" with the one who declared "First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin" over stinging guitar work by
Stevie Ray Vaughan
on the opening track here. As that pairing suggests,
Warnes
wisely took a tougher, more contemporary approach to the arrangements than such past
interpreters as
Judy Collins
used to. Where other singers tended to geld
's often disturbingly revealing
poetry
,
, working with the composer himself and introducing a couple of great new songs (
"First We Take Manhattan"
and
"Song of Bernadette,"
which she co-wrote), matched his own versions. The high point may have been the
-
duet on
"Joan of Arc,"
but the album was consistently impressive. And it went a long way toward reestablishing
, whose reputation was in a minor eclipse in the mid-'80s. A year later, with the way paved for him, he released his brilliant comeback album
I'm Your Man
. For
, the album meant her first taste of real critical success: suddenly a singer who had seemed like a second-rate
Linda Ronstadt
now appeared to be a first-class interpretive artist. ~ William Ruhlmann