Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye

This is Cohen at his most graceful, a song that manages to be simultaneously a breakup song and an act of profound generosity — the narrator absolving both parties from the cruelty that often attends endings, choosing instead to frame departure as something almost elegant. The guitar work is tender and intricate without calling attention to itself, classical fingerpicking that moves like water over stones. Cohen's voice wraps around the melody with unusual lightness; there is a smile somewhere in the phrasing, a warmth that keeps the song from tipping into melancholy even as it documents loss. The production remains bracingly simple — this could have been recorded in any era — and that simplicity is the point: the feeling is so precisely observed that decoration would only dilute it. Lyrically the song is a masterclass in indirection, circling what cannot be said directly and arriving at truth through image rather than statement, the hotel rooms and river light and borrowed bed accumulating into a portrait of a relationship that burned cleanly and will end the same way. It belongs to a tradition of literary folk that Cohen was simultaneously inheriting and elevating, the song clearly shaped by his years reading Lorca and Yeats. Reach for this one on the morning after something has ended — not in grief but in the quiet period that follows grief, when you have arrived at enough distance to appreciate what was beautiful about what is now gone.