“I Have Loved You So Long”: Neil Young, Leonard Cohen & “Greensleeves”

In 1974, at the height of their songwriting powers, both Leonard Cohen and Neil Young recorded their own versions of “Greensleeves,” each with new lyrics to the folk song standard. Their draw to the song is understandable as its words of lost love and beguiling melody have been played and recorded hundreds of times. 

The first known official appearance of “Greensleeves” was in September 3, 1580, when a song titled “A New Northern Dittye of ye Lady Greene Sleeves” was registered at the London Stationer’s Company by a certain Richard Jones. Four years later, this same Richard Jones published “A Handful of Pleasant Delights.” It included the now familiar words:

Alas, my love, ye do me wrong,
To cast me off discourteously,
And I have loved you so long,
Delighting in your company.

Greensleeves was all my joy,
Greensleeves was my delight,
Greensleeves was my heart of gold,
And who but Lady Greensleeves.

The song’s immediate popularity is evidenced by William Shakespeare including a reference to “Greensleeves” in his play “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” which was written in 1602 less than 20 years after the publication of the song by Jones. In the play, the character Mistress Ford references “Greensleeves” and later, Falstaff bellows the following: “Let the sky rain potatoes! Let it thunder to the tune of ‘Greensleeves.’” This reference demonstrates that “Greensleeves” was the early 17th century version of a number one hit. 

Part of the reason for the tune’s ubiquity today was its adoption as the Christmas song “What Child Is This.” The song is unavoidable during the month of December since being absorbed by the Christmas Industrial Complex. Another example of the functionality of “Greensleeves” can be seen in the United Kingdom, where it was the jingle for the first fleet of Mr. Whippy ice cream vans:

The melody attracted John Coltrane as well, recording the song for his 1961 album Africa/Brass:

“Greensleeves” allowed Coltrane to play in both minor and major keys within the same song, similar in approach to his version of “My Favorite Things.”

Much has been written about the color green as the central image of the song. Many have speculated that the lady’s sleeves are green from rolling in the grass, implying that Lady Greensleeves is sexually promiscuous or even a prostitute. Whereas, Ian Pittaway theorizes that the green in the song represents love, joy, youth, the month of May, and even chastity. The positive interpretations of “Greensleeves” appear to be what attracted Neil Young to the song when he cut it by himself on May 8, 1974:

Young begins the recording by playing the immortal “Greensleeves” melody on acoustic guitar. He sings the standard set of lyrics with a heart-breaking directness. Young has the ability to sound as if he’s the loneliest man on the planet, and this performance is no different as he immerses himself in the melancholy tone of lost love inherent to “Greensleeves.” Of particular resonance is that the lyrics of “Greensleeves” include the phrase “I have loved you for so long” which is close to Young’s 1969 song “I’ve Loved Her So Long” as well as “heart of gold.” Of course, that is the title of the biggest hit of Young’s career, recorded and released on 1972’s Harvest:

“Heart of Gold” contains a message of optimism that despite an array of obstacles, the narrator is intent on seeking and finding true love. Even though he is “getting old,” it won’t diminish his capacity and desire to finally discover this ultimate fortune. Things have changed in the two years since Young recorded “Heart of Gold.” The song’s brightness and enthusiasm has dissipated, replaced with the forlorn longing of regret within “Greensleeves.” Young sings, “Greensleeves was my heart of gold;” the use of the past tense is all too apparent. Lady Greensleeves was his heart of gold and now she is gone. Young then adds lines to the standard set of lyrics for “Greensleeves”:

Greensleeves were all she wore
As they stood beneath the ocean’s roar.

With his image of two lovers surviving under the sea, Young infuses a supernatural tint to “Greensleeves,” highlighting the mystical nature of the old folk song thanks to its haunting melody. Young expands upon this atmosphere by hinting that Lady Greensleeves is a mermaid or another creature out of folklore who has lured the song’s narrator to her world in the ocean. 

There’s also a sense of inevitably with Young’s additional lines. How long can the narrator expect to live under the sea? It’s not his place, so he is bound to lose Lady Greensleeves. This certitude recalls the poem “Cuchulain’s Fight with the Sea,” W.B. Yeats’ retelling of an old Irish folktale about the warrior Cuchulain’s quest for immortality. Within the poem, Cuchulain hears “ravings” in his head, “Delusions magical, / That he may fight the horses of the sea.” The poem ends with Cuchulain crying his name as he “fought with the invulnerable tide.” Yeats chooses his words for the last line of the poem carefully as “the invulnerable tide” underlines the hopelessness of Cuchulain’s fight. There is only one conclusion to Cuchulain’s battle and it echoes the inevitably of the lovers’ story in Young’s version of “Greensleeves.” 

Young’s imagining of a life “beneath the ocean’s roar” anticipates one of his later compositions, “Lost in Space” released on 1980’s Hawks & Doves:

In that song, Young sings “Your buildings, if they rise again / Would do much better on the ocean floor.” Once again, Young imagines a utopian existence under the sea. The line could be about architecture or even sexual potency, either way hinting of an idealized life. He goes on to sing:

Losing you
I heard I was losing you
That’s not the only thing that I got to lose
I got to lose
The deep sea blues
Look at these blues
The deep sea blues.

The inevitability within “Lost in Space” is that the couple cannot survive if they ever try to abandon their life on the ocean floor. This realization leaves the narrator with the “deep sea blues.” Perhaps the narrator of Young’s “Greensleeves” feels the same way. There was a possibility of a thriving, idealized world for him and Lady Greensleeves on the ocean floor, but that opportunity is impossible and the narrator can only look back with regret.  

A little more than a week after recording “Greensleeves” in the studio, Young took the stage on May 16, 1974 for a surprise performance at The Bottom Line in New York City’s Greenwich Village. The recording of that show was available only through bootleg releases for years before Young released his own version in 2022 titled Citizen Kane Jr. Blues. The third song that Young played that night was “Greensleeves”:

The live performance mirrors the arrangement of the studio recording, including the reference to the couple “beneath the ocean’s roar.” The crowd — who had laughed their way through “Long May You Run,” Young’s sentimental ode to his long-lost Hearse in — is quiet and respectful during “Greensleeves” and doesn’t catch the quick reference to “heart of gold.” 

In the six month period before recording the two versions of “Greensleeves,” the bulk of Young’s songwriting output was externally-focused. The soon-to-be-released On the Beach featured songs about Charles Manson-type characters and environmental concerns. Another new song that Young performed at The Bottom Line was “Pushed It Over the End.” As previously explored by Recliner Notes, it appears to be about Patty Hearst, the last of the “state of the America” song series by Young. The only work on On the Beach that might be considered a love song is “Motion Pictures (for Carrie),” the parenthetical dedication referring to Carrie Snodgrass, Young’s girlfriend at the time. Despite the outward appearance of devotion through the dedication, the song is ambivalent in its tone as the music is languid and the lyrics reflecting a feeling of hesitancy:

Well, all those headlines,
They just bore me now
I’m deep inside myself,
But I’ll get out somehow,
And I’ll stand before you,
And I’ll bring
A smile to your eyes.
Motion pictures,
Motion pictures.

The reference to “motion pictures” is a nod to Snodgrass’s screen presence and the fact that Young fell in love with her while watching her performance in 1970’s Diary of a Mad Housewife. Young also acknowledges that he hasn’t been fully present with her, but instead being self-centered and living “deep inside” himself. “Motion Pictures (for Carrie)” is an odd sort of love song and illustrative of the period right before Young recorded “Greensleeves.”

The songs that Young began to write and record after “Greensleeves” represent a complete shift in emotional content as he expresses hurt, disappointment, and anger. Young recorded the song “LA Girls and Ocean Boys” a month after the performance at The Bottom Line and it includes a bold and direct accusation:

We used to be so calm
Now I think of you all night long
‘Cause you’ve been with another man
There you are and here I am.

Though Young ends the song by singing about “A special kind of love / That it takes to rise above,” the hurt and sadness are evident in Young’s raw performance. The feeling is not dissimilar to the mood of “Greensleeves” which he sang only a month before. Further evidence of Young’s frame of mind about his relationship can be seen in a sampling of song titles that he wrote and recorded throughout the rest of 1974: “Frozen Man,” “Give Me Strength,” “Vacancy,” “Bad News Comes to Town,” and finally “Separate Ways.”

Young’s recording of “Greensleeves” symbolizes the first song in a new phase of songwriting for Young. It is the transition point in which he realizes that Snodgrass is not “his heart of gold” and that the inevitability of no longer living “under the ocean’s roar” actually points the way to a separation. The act of recording and adding words to “Greensleeves” enabled Young to open a door in his own writing to be direct and demonstrative in his feelings about lost love. Despite the excellence of this work, Young may have felt that “Greensleeves,” “LA Girls and Ocean Boys,” and the other titles cited above from the year 1974 were too emotionally transparent as none were released to the public until their inclusion in 2020’s Neil Young Archives Volume II: 1972–1976. 

In February 1974 — a few months before Neil Young’s studio recording of “Greensleeves” — Leonard Cohen was in New York recording what would become the album New Skin for the Old Ceremony. The final track on the album is listed as “Leaving Green Sleeves”:

The recording of New Skin was a different approach for Cohen as he had broken with Bob Johnston, who had produced Cohen’s previous albums: 1969’s Songs from a Room and Songs of Love and Hate in 1971. Instead, John Lissauer served as producer in an attempt by Cohen to capture a new sound for his latest batch of songs. Looking back on that decision in 1998, Cohen told Billboard:

“Lissauer has been an important figure in my life. He was the deeply musical person that I first got close to, who looked at my work as a blueprint for a sophisticated musical treatment. In other words, he understood that I was a minimalist. And he also understood that I was a musician, which was not the current opinion at the time.”

Lissauer later commented on how Cohen’s previous effort, Songs of Love and Hate, was “gloomy because it was shrouded in loneliness,” whereas, “Leonard and I shrouded New Skin in ‘Let’s not be so serious.’”

This more lighthearted approach can be seen in the circumstances of recording “Leaving Green Sleeves.” Lissauer recounted to Sylvie Simmons in I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen that the song was cut live in the studio after Cohen ingested an ample amount of ng ka py, a sweet Chinese liqueur with a high alcohol content. Lissauer said that while recording the song, “We almost had to hold Leonard up to sing, he was ng ka py’ed out of his mind.”

While the atmosphere of recording the song must have been fun, the result is somewhat alarming. If Neil Young sounds like the loneliest man in California while recording “Greensleeves,” Cohen sounds like someone who is attempting to rip out his heart while it is still beating. The song opens with Cohen’s singing accompanied by acoustic guitar and bass. He includes a fragment of the established lyrics of “Greensleeves”: 

Alas, my love, you did me wrong
To cast me out discourteously
For I have loved you so long
Delighting in your very company.

For the second verse, a violin and mandolin join the proceedings while Cohen departs from the traditional words of “Greensleeves” and presents his contribution to the song’s history:

Now if you intend to show me disdain
Don’t you know it all the more enraptures me?
For even so I still remain
Your lover in captivity.

Cohen’s words deepen the original scope of the song as Lady Greensleeves outright despises the song’s narrator, which conversely only further stokes the fire of his desire. The masochistic tendencies are all too clear as the narrator describes himself as being a “lover in captivity.” With a harpsichord chiming away in the background, Cohen moves on to the song’s chorus accompanied by a group of female voices:

Green Sleeves, you’re all alone
The leaves have fallen, the men have gone
Green Sleeves, there’s no one home
Not even the Lady Green Sleeves.

The traditional symbol of green and its associations with the month of May are removed as Cohen’s words, “the leaves have fallen,” bring a connotation of winter. These words also represent a pun on Cohen’s part as he uses the word “leave” as the plural form of “leaf” but also signals the act of departure as in the title of the song, “Leaving Green Sleeves.” In addition to Cohen’s erasure of the traditional connotations of “Greensleeves,” he also removes any sense of joy. This is a Leonard Cohen song, after all. He continues with the second verse:

I sang my songs, I told my lies,
To lie between your matchless thighs.
And ain’t it fine, ain’t it wild
To finally end our exercise.

The first two lines are classic Cohen, fusing music, storytelling (“my lies”), and sex. The third line sees him crying out and beseeching — not doubt fueled by ng ka py — the now-gone Green Sleeves to remember their time together. He attempts to downplay their relationship as “our exercise”; merely a physical act, a sexual diversion, but that’s not fooling anyone who hears the utter abandon with which Cohen sings the song. He moves on to the final verse:

Then I saw you naked in the early dawn,
Oh, I hoped you would be someone new.
I reached for you but you were gone,
So lady I’m going too.

The first line mirrors words from Cohen’s most famous composition, 1984’s “Hallelujah” (a song also produced by Lissauer): 

Your faith was strong but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew her.

The lines from “Hallelujah” refer to the Biblical story of David and Bathsheba. In “Leaving Green Sleeves,” the song’s narrator also views his love from afar, but instead of causing an immediate upheaval of love and affirmation, he wishes she were “someone new.” It’s a recognition that he knows that Green Sleeves is wrong for him, but he can’t resist her. He still reaches out, but she has left him. In a impotent gesture, he sings, “So lady I’m going too” despite the fact that she is already gone. It’s a potent cocktail of emotions for the narrator, recognizing that he wishes she were someone else while still not able to resist her, and then her eventual departure. The narrator is left with only the deepest of longing and self-hatred. 

Cohen sings the chorus twice. The first time through, his cries sound like the deepest keening associated with the singing of the death of a loved one. In the final chorus, Cohen pushes his singing beyond its normal register so that he’s simply screaming. It’s bone-chilling in its desperation, recalling John Cale’s cries at the end of his song “Fear Is A Man’s Best Friend.” Also, the narrator adjusts his message as he says, “It’s so easily done, / Leaving the Lady Green Sleeves.” His cries make the lies in the words all too easily plain. She is the one who did the “leaving” and it has left the narrator in a living hell, tortured and bereft. 

It’s worth noting that in naming his version of “Greensleeves,” Cohen splits the traditional title into two words. Speculation in Cohen fan circles is that “Leaving Green Sleeves” is not about the loss of a female partner, but rather an allegory for the Israel Defense Forces. A few months before the recording of New Skin for the Old Ceremony in the fall of 1973, Cohen traveled to Israel during the Yom Kippur War to entertain the Israeli troops. During that intensely emotional trip, writer Matti Friedman reports that Cohen composed the song “Lover, Lover, Lover” which would appear on New Skin along with “Leaving Green Sleeves.” The original version of “Lover, Lover, Lover” contained the following lines:

I went down to the desert
to help my brothers fight
I knew that they weren’t wrong
I knew that they weren’t right.

As his feelings about the war changed, Friedman writes that Cohen amended the song by striking the line “to help my brothers fight” and substituting instead “to watch the children fight.” When the song was released on New Skin, Cohen removed the entire verse. 

What does this have to do with “Leaving Green Sleeves”? Many have pointed out that the green sleeves in the song may be a reference to the green fatigues worn by Israeli service members. When viewing pictures of Cohen’s time in Israel during the Yom Kippur War, he is surrounded by a lot of green sleeves. We know that Cohen’s connection to the war evolved, causing him to adjust the words to “Lover, Lover, Lover.” Perhaps “Leaving Green Sleeves” is an acknowledgement of his saying goodbye to the troops — his “brothers” — that he loves. The regret and longing that is fundamental to his performance of “Leaving Green Sleeves” supports this reading, though the sexual nature of the words are curious. Cohen never publicly commented on this theory, so it is pure speculation. 

Apparently during a concert in Brighton in 1979, someone in the crowd shouted out for “Greensleeves,” and Cohen replied: 

“’Greensleeves’? Oh I haven’t sung that for about 300 years. I used to sing that when I was a troubadour in the south of France. My name was Artaud. I used to walk on those dusty roads singing ‘Greensleeves.’ I haven’t sung that for a long time.”

Does Cohen not remember recording his own version of “Greensleeves” only five years before? Of course, he also wasn’t a troubadour named Artaud in the south of France, so it’s fair to say that Cohen was being his playful self with that audience member. 

Cohen never forgot his fundamental connection to folk songs. When Cohen was young, he possessed a book called The People’s Songbook, a collection of folk songs published in New York in 1948. During a 1993 radio interview collected in Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen: Interviews and Encounters, Cohen commented on the songs in The People’s Songbook:

“I thought, ‘Jesus, these are beautiful.’ As I started researching songs, I went down to the Harvard Library of folk music and spent a summer there just listening to all the songs, all these incredible lyrics, and I got really deeply into it….[Alan] Lomax and People’s Songbook and the Almanac Singers…that whole tradition touched me very deeply. Their passionate concern. These kinds of attitudes now that are so belittled and so scorned. Where people actually would dare to sing songs about brotherhood. Those songs touched me very deeply in the lyrics. Also as a way to approach young women. I was shy. I didn’t exactly know how to do it, so there was something about the words on the page, that I could arrange it in some way to get some kind of attention.”

Though it’s unclear if “Greensleeves” was included in that collection, it’s evident that these folk songs had a profound impact on Cohen’s character and writing. Similarly, Neil Young has also commented on his connection to the “darkness” of old folk songs and using the “folk process” to alter and change old songs to fit his own vision. 

There doesn’t appear to be any external, precipitating factor that caused both Young and Cohen to record “Greensleeves” in 1974. It’s most likely that because of the song’s ubiquity and its universal appeal in telling a tale of lost love that both artists felt that they needed to record “Greensleeves.” The evocative melody and the theme of the ancient song were irresistible to them at that specific moment in time. Young and Cohen both accessed “Greensleeves” in order to process a specific emotion, eventually allowing them to refocus and provide them with the impetus to create their own work that could not have happened without the original song. 

Many thanks to Leonard Cohen fan and expert Harry Hew for pointing me in many fascinating directions in prepping for this piece. 

Image: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1859, My Lady Greensleeves, watercolor and gouache paint on paper, image extended on left by mounting drawing on another sheet, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.