The Stranger Song

If this song were a stick of Blackpool rock it would have the name Leonard Cohen written through its middle. The essence of the alienated outsider, it appears on Cohen's debut album, Songs Of Leonard Cohen, and also in the 1967 film The Ernie Game, about a man released from a mental asylum, apparently prematurely. More fittingly, it is the opening song from the offbeat 1971 Western McCabe & Mrs. Miller in which Warren Beatty plays a gambler turned semi-legitimate businessman/brothel keeper. McCabe begins as the stranger in town - a regular Western theme - and ends up dead after a shoot out with the hired hands of a big corporation that attempts to muscle in on his operation. Performed solo by Cohen, the song connects so well with the sad tale of McCabe that it could have been written for the film.