Going into the premiere episode of True Detective season two, we knew the answers to almost all of the show’s most basic, production-based mysteries: who’d star, who’d direct, and where the season would be set. But there was still one crucial piece of the puzzle missing: Who would sing the theme song? As we learned tonight, the answer to that question turned out to be pretty awesome: none other than Leonard Cohen.
Yep, that sparse, gravelly, and altogether badass song you heard over the opening credits was “Nevermind,” a track off Cohen’s most recent studio album, 2014’s Popular Problems. As we know from last season, when music supervisor T Bone Burnett chose the Handsome Family’s dark, slinky “Far From Any Road” as the theme song, True Detective isthe kind of show that puts a lot of stock in its opening credits — they set the show’s all-important tone. Judging from last night’s episode, the mood of season two is even bleaker than its nihilistic-but-campy predecessor, and “Nevermind” — a laconic, husky-throated dirge that hangs over the opening credits like a heavy fog — was our first indication of that fact. Cohen’s low, weathered voice booms like an Old Testament God played by John Wayne.
Cohen began his career as a poet before he ever took a stab at writing songs, and “Nevermind” began its life as a poem. He first published it in 2005 on the Leonard Cohen Files, a fan site on which he sometimes posts works in progress or previously unreleased material. A year later, “Never Mind” (the poem title is two words, the song title is one, and Cohen is the sort of writer who is so jazzed about the tiny nuances of language that this does make a difference) was published in his long-awaited poetry collection, Book of Longing, his first in more than 30 years. No matter the form of what he’s working on, Cohen is a notoriously slow writer, sometimes laboring over a piece for as long as a decade. He once told an interviewer that his writing process is “like a bear stumbling into a beehive or a honey cache: I’m stumbling right into it and getting stuck, and it’s delicious and horrible and I’m in it and it’s not very graceful and it’s very awkward and it’s very painful and yet there’s something inevitable about it.” Put another way, see Popular Problems’ great manifesto of an opening track, “Slow”: “I’m slowing down the tune/ I’ve never liked it fast/ You wanna get there soon/ I wanna get there last.”
Posted from: https://www.vulture.com/2015/06/true-detectives-theme-song-leonard-cohen-nevermind.html
