Ain't No Cure for Love

"Ain't No Cure for Love" is a song written by the Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen.

It was first released by the American singer Jennifer Warnes on her 1987 Leonard Cohen tribute album Famous Blue Raincoat and subsequently appeared as the second track on Cohen's 1988 studio album I'm Your Man.

Theme and lyrics

As its title suggests, the theme of the song is a common and traditional one for a love song. However, the lyrics of Warnes' and Cohen's recorded versions of the song are significantly different from one another. At the length of 3:22, compared to Cohen's 4:50, Warnes' 1987 recording contains five verses, compared to Cohen's six, only the first two of which it shares with Cohen's recording of 1988. In the three remaining verses, which are unique to her version of the song, Warnes sings:

There ain’t no cure for love
There ain’t no cure for love
No pill no drug
It’s all been cut with stuff
I can’t get nothin' done
Can’t be with anyone
I don’t want your brother love
I want that other love
Ain’t no cure for love

I don’t expect a medal
Just because the scene got rough
And I see you’ve been so careful to forget how good it was
I’m never givin' in
Oh I’m never givin' up babe
There ain’t no cure
Oh there ain’t no cure for love
There ain’t no cure for love
Ain’t no cure for love

No pill no drug (no, no)
There’s nothin' pure enough
I can’t get nothin' done (no, no)
I can’t be with anyone
There ain’t no cure
There ain't no cure for love.

^[1]

By contrast, however, Cohen himself sings:

There ain’t no cure for love
There ain’t no cure for love
All the rocket ships are climbing through the sky
The holy books are open wide
The doctors working day and night
But they’ll never ever find that cure for love
There ain’t no drink no drug
(Ah tell them, angels)
There’s nothing pure enough to be a cure for love

I see you in the subway and I see you on the bus
I see you lying down with me, I see you waking up
I see your hand, I see your hair
Your bracelets and your brush
And I call to you, I call to you
But I don’t call soft enough
There ain’t no cure
There ain’t no cure
There ain’t no cure for love

I walked into this empty church, I had no place else to go
When the sweetest voice I ever heard, whispered to my soul
I don’t need to be forgiven for loving you so much
It’s written in the scriptures
It’s written there in blood
I even heard the angels declare it from above
There ain’t no cure
There ain’t no cure
There ain’t no cure for love

There ain’t no cure for love
There ain’t no cure for love
All the rocket ships are climbing through the sky
The holy books are open wide
The doctors working day and night
But they’ll never ever find that cure
That cure for love.

^[2]

Cover versions

Perhaps surprisingly (for a Leonard Cohen song with apparent and still-unrealised commercial potential as a hit single) only three cover versions of the song were recorded in the 26 years between the release of the Jennifer Warnes' version in 1987 and 2013.

A cover version of the song by the American soul music singer Aaron Neville appears on the 1995 Cohen compilation tribute album Tower of Song. The Norwegian female songwriter Ane Brun performs a cover version on her 2013 album Rarities.

Mary Coughlan recorded a version on her 1992 album, Sentimental Killer.

The song also plays over the end credits of the 1999 movie Kiss the Sky, starring William Petersen, Gary Cole and Sheryl Lee.

References