Leonard Cohen’s Death Of A Ladies’ Man LP, his first and only collaborative effort with Phil Spector, was never really given its due as one of the best albums of the 70’s. Along with very few other albums (Big Star’s Third, Robert Wyatt’s Rock Bottom and maybe Berlin), it explored emotionally unpleasant territory and, in the long run, things we prefer not to think about— jealousy, spite, vengeance, brutality and death among them. Yet in each case, remarkably, Cohen’s and these other albums transcended possible emotional dead-ends and emerged jubilant and ultimately positive.

Somehow—though I don’t think they’ve done it properly yet—I think Martha Davis and the Motels are going to produce an album that’s going to stand alongside these classics and then some. The connection came a few nights ago, while I was listening to Ladies’ Man and its “Paper-Thin Hotel” track. In it, a man secretly follows his lover to a hotel room where she meets a secret partner and soon makes love with him. In /the next room, the deserted lover is there, ear against the wall, listening and feeling a mixture of despair and impotence: “I listened to four kisses at the door/I never heard the world so clear before/You ran your bath and you began to sing/I felt so good I couldn’t feel a thing.../A heavy burden lifted from my soul/I heard that love was out of my control, ”