“Joan of Arc” by Leonard Cohen

"Joan of Arc" came out as a single in March 1971, pulled from Songs of Love and Hate, Leonard Cohen's third album, and it runs nearly six and a half minutes: four eight-line stanzas and a la-la refrain. Cohen wrote it and sings it, Bob Johnston produced, and Paul Buckmaster arranged it, with Robin Geoffrey Cable, Ed Hudson and Neil Wilburn engineering.

Mostly it plays out as a conversation between Joan and the fire consuming her at the stake, condemned for heresy in 1431. She is weary of war and would rather be in a white wedding dress (one charge against her was dressing as a man), and her surrender to the flames as their bride reads as a measure of her devotion. The vocal is both sung and spoken on parallel tracks, a layering modeled on medieval palimpsests.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.