Take This Longingby Leonard Cohen

"For a while, I didn't think there was going to be another album. I pretty well felt that I was washed up as a songwriter because it wasn't coming anymore. Actually, I should have known better, it takes me a long time to compose a song...However, last summer I went to Ethiopia looking for a suntan. It rained, including in the Sinai desert, but through this whole period I had my little guitar with me, and it was then I felt the songs emerging – at least, the conclusions that I had been carrying in manuscript form for the last four or five years, from hotel room to hotel room...I must say I'm pleased with the album. It's good. I'm not ashamed of it and am ready to stand by it. Rather than think of it as a masterpiece, I prefer to look at it as a little gem." ~ Leonard Cohen

Leonard Cohen first met Nico, singer with the Velvet Underground, in New York. He became besotted with her and this song expresses his unrequited love for the German songstress. Speaking in 1992 with the magazine Throat Culture, Cohen recalled: "Nico was very strange. I tried to talk to her and she always replied very mysteriously. "It was only after many weeks, after being perplexed by her conversation and paralyzed by her beauty that she told me she was deaf. She responded to everyone with whatever came into her mind because she could hardly hear a thing. Which explains her particularly strange style. But I definitely wrote 'Take This Longing' thinking of her."