Dear Reader,
I’ve loved Leonard Cohen’s “Everybody Knows” since I first heard Christian Slater’s outlaw DJ play it in Pump Up the Volume, which I saw in the theater at the Bradlee’s Mall in 1990. My son Dominick, who knows almost everything about music, was, surprisingly, unfamiliar with the song—so everybody does not know “Everybody Knows.”
There are a few versions, notably the excellent Concrete Blonde cover at the end of said film, but I’ve always felt like none of them are quite right. Sometime in the late 90s, I came up with my own piano rendition and an arrangement. I tried recording it a few times over the years, but it never worked.
While I was in Florida last week, I listened to the song over and over. I was stuck on the dark lyrics in the first verse: Everybody knows the war is over, everybody knows the good guys lost. That felt very much on the nose. My original intention was to do the usual Five 8 parody, but nothing about it struck me as funny. It felt sacrilegious to insert rhymes like Rubio’s or Mar-a-Lagos into this particular song.
On Tuesday, by some miracle, I had the house to myself, so I recorded the piano part I came up with [checks notes] 30 years ago (shout out to my wife for getting the piano tuned for the first time since we moved here). And for once, I was pleased with how it sounded.
In the Concrete Blonde cover, the final verse is about the narrator being cheated on. (There’s so many people you had to meet without your clothes / Everybody knows.) I recorded a version with that as the climax, but I felt like it didn’t meet the moment. It was personal, not universal—which worked wonderfully in 1988, when Cohen recorded it, but not so much now.
So after genuflecting to Leonard Cohen’s ghost, I decided to tweak some of the lyrics. I tried to update them to the here and now, using as many of the original lines as possible, and keeping close to the spirit of the song and the (bitter, dark) tone Cohen establishes. (He is, of course, one of the all-time greatest lyricists, so this is a bit like Duchamp drawing the mustache on the Mona Lisa.)
You can find the actual lyrics here. Here are the ones with my slight modifications:
Everybody knows the dice are loaded.
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed.
Everybody knows the war is over.
Everybody knows the good guys lost.
Everybody knows the fight is fixed.
The poor stay poor, and the rich get rich—
That’s how it goes.Everybody knows the vote was stolen.
Everybody knows the blood was fake.
Everybody’s got this broken feeling
That they just can’t seem to shake.
Everybody talking to their pockets.
Everybody wants a box of chocolates
And a long-stem rose.
Everybody knows.Everybody knows.
Everybody knows.
That’s how it goes,
And everybody knows.Everybody knows that the vault is empty.
Everybody knows that it’s time to sell.
Everybody knows that he’s no peacemaker.
Everybody knows that it’s her Nobel.
Everybody knows the deal is rotten—
Old Black Joe’s still picking cotton
For your ribbons and bows.Everybody hears the jackboots coming.
Everybody knows it’s too far along.
Everyone who said it could never happen?
Everybody knows that they were wrong.
Everybody knows it’s coming apart.
Take one last look at this Sacred Heart,
Before it blows.
Everybody knows.Everybody knows.
Everybody knows.
That’s how it goes,
And everybody knows.
For the video, I used, almost exclusively, footage I found on the Department of Homeland Security’s (disgusting and Nazi-ish) Twitter page. The young woman who appears tauntingly at the end is Lauren Bis, deputy assistant secretary of DHS—or is it deputy assistant to the secretary?—whose job is literally to lie to our faces. I don’t know where they find these horrible people.
Ken White, aka Popehat, said something interesting on BlueSky the other day that really stuck with me: “America was never about everyone loving liberty; America was always about enough people loving liberty and being willing to defend it to keep down the people with totalitarian souls.” I should stop being surprised, I guess, that there are so many Nazis in our midst.
The saddest part of all of this is that, even as ICE terrorizes Minneapolis like Ivan the Terrible’s oprichnina, even as Trump threatens to destroy the world order and end NATO by invading Greenland, everybody does not know what’s really happening.
I hope you will forgive the imperfections of the recording. I know this isn’t what you signed up for, so thanks for allowing me the indulgence of sharing this.
