my voice is surrounded by harmonies, which to me would naturally suggest the female voice. I need to hear harmonies so that I can just find the pitch." In 2009, Cohen explained further during an interview on the CBC Radio show Q: "I was very much influenced by women's background voices...I like those songs that had that feel. Those are the songs of the fifties. So those were the sounds I wanted to try to reproduce. Also, my own voice sounded so disagreeable to me when I listened to it that I really needed the sweetening of women's voices behind me." Recording and composition Only two songs from his 1970 tour are featured, including the 13-minute "Please Don't Pass Me By (A Disgrace)," which was recorded in London, and "Tonight Will Be Fine," which Cohen sang at the Isle of Wight. The latter was performed in front of 600,000 people under trying circumstances; Cohen was awoken at 4 am in his trailer and took the stage in his pajamas (which were hidden beneath a raincoat) to face an unruly, largely stoned audience that had just watched Jimi Hendrix perform and had been sitting in their own squalor for several days. Cohen's mystical performance, which is now considered one of the highlights of the show, calmed the crowd, with Bob Johnston marveling later on the Leonard Cohen Live at the Isle of Wight 1970 DVD, "I think Leonard is probably the best performer in the world. I never saw anybody that did what he did...It was a whole festival with 600,000 people there and he took it over, he captured it the last night there." The album consists mostly of reinterpretations of songs (often with additional or significantly altered lyrics) from Cohen's second LP Songs From a Room taken from the 1972 European tour. At the beginning of a Paris, France performance of "Bird on the Wire", Cohen recites the first verse of a French translation of the song's lyric. "Nancy" is a version of "Seems So Long Ago, Nancy", while "Improvisation" is an extended instrumental guitar trio version of the vamp from "You Know Who I Am", which is also featured. The other tracks are a cover of the folk standard "Passing Through", and "Minute Prologue". A "bonus" track, "Queen Victoria", was recorded by Cohen alone in his Tennessee hotel room in 1972. Neither Songs of Leonard Cohen nor the