Leonard Cohen Performs La Manic by Georges Dor For First Time: Montreal Nov 29, 2012

Leonard Cohen’s first public performance of La Manic by Georges Dor took place during his second 2012 Montreal show. La Manic appeared in a total of five shows during the 2012 Tour and in only three 2013 concerts.1

Leonard Cohen – La Manic
Montreal: Nov 29, 2012
Video by caro8680

 

This brief description of the song is from the Canadian Songwriters Hall Of Fame website:

La Manic, a song in the form of a letter by a young man telling his girlfriend back home of the loneliness of workers building dams up north on the Manicouagan River, sold more than 150,000 copies at the time of its initial release. It was later released as part of Georges Dor’s debut album, which remains one of the most popular collections ever produced by a Quebec songwriter.

I find this excerpt from Poutine Pop #4 – Georges Dor by Theo Mathien (Midnight Poutine: June 24, 2011) more to the point:

Dor’s music manages to distil the everyday details of life into compact and resonant stories that also describe larger cultural changes. This is no more apparent than in “La Manic,” Dor’s most famous song. A love letter from a construction worker who has been toiling away on the Manicouagan hydroelectric project to his lover, it is a poignant portrait of loneliness and heartache, the song’s weary and resigned mood reflecting the toll of his sacrifice.

However, it is also symbolic of a French Quebec’s newfound power and sovereign aspirations, as the Daniel Johnson Dam [formerly known as “Manic-5”] was the first major project completed by Hydro Quebec, which had been recently nationalized in ’63. While it has never gained the universal embrace of something like Vigneault’s “Gens du Pays,” “La Manic” does possess a romantic populism that has endeared it to many (150 000 copies of the 45 were sold upon its release). I like to think of it as the “No One Like You” of its time.

Lyrics With English Translation

Leonard Cohen On His Life In French Quebec

I live in Montreal, which is a French city, in Quebec, which is a French country–especially now, it is a country. I live as a minority writer, almost in exile, because there is no English writing community where I live. These are very special Canadian problems which to me form the Canadian character, because we’re very much involved in this notion of what is minority and what is majority; and yet while these questions are in the air, it seems that everybody has space. Because we don’t have the melting pot notion at all in Canada, we have a federal system that runs right down into the psyche of the country. So in a sense I live like a foreigner in my own city, cut off by the fact that I don’t speak French that well. I can get by, but it’s not a tongue I could ever move around in in a way that would satisfy the appetites of the mind or the heart.2

Leonard Cohen’s Introduction To La Manic: Montreal 2012

Je vais chanter une chanson que je n’ai pas écrite. Une chanson que j’ai aimée dès que je l’ai entendue il y a très longtemps. Je travaille aussi à une traduction mais ce n’est pas encore terminée. Voici l’original par le grand écrivain et chanteur, defenseur de la langue, Georges Dor

[English translation] I’ll sing a song that I have not written. A song that I’ve loved when I first heard it a long time ago. I am also working on a translation but it is not over yet.. Here is the original by the great writer and singer, defender of the language, Georges Dor3

La Manic Performed By Georges Dor
1966
Video by Jackretro

Leonard Cohen Invokes La Manic In 2006 Canadian Songwriters Hall Of Fame Induction Speech

Leonard Cohen’s brief acceptance speech at the 2006 Canadian Songwriters Hall Of Fame induction is typically gracious, includes the requisite self-effacing joke, and even offers a rendition of his trademarked phrase, “If I knew where the good songs came from, I’d go there more often.” The high point, however, is his invocation of Georges Dor’s La Manic to close his talk. (Cohen’s reference to La Manic was almost certainly not a spontaneous phenomenon; the song also entered the Canadian Songwriters Hall Of Fame in 2006, along with Leonard Cohen himself.)

Leonard Cohen Accepting Induction into CSHF 2006, Part II
Video from ljw2909

Best Video Of La Manic Performance From 2013 Tour

Leonard Cohen – La Manic
Brussels: June 30, 2013
Video by albertnoonan

More About La Manic

A thoughtful and helpful analysis of the song can be found at Analysis of “Manic” by Georges Dor by Professor Olaf Huygens-Tremblay. While written in French, most of it survives Google Translation into English.

Credit Due Department: “Barrage Daniel-Johnson2” by Bouchecl 20:56, 11 August 2007 (UTC) – Bouchecl 20:56, 11 August 2007 (UTC). Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

I am republishing selected posts from my former Leonard Cohen site, Cohencentric, here on AllanShowalter.com (these posts can be found at Leonard Cohen). This entry was originally posted Mar 23, 2015.
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1. Statistics courtesy of the all-knowing Roman Gavrilin aka Hermitage Prisoner, [↩]
2. Leonard Cohen: The Romantic in a Ragpicker’s Trade by Paul Williams (Crawdaddy, March 1975). [↩]
3. From a LeonardCohenForum note by Beatriz Salles [↩]