A novel contribution to the 33 1/3 series, this book takes a single specimen of the tribute album as ground for examining the wider type. I'm Your Fan was a tribute to Leonard Cohen, with 18 tracks across 76 minutes. I bought the album not long after it was issued in 1991, on pre-recorded cassette, where side two kicked off with REM's ‘First we take Manhattan’ (as well as CD, apparently there was also a four-sided vinyl version). Although Ammanford boy John Cale was my real draw, the acts were what in those NME-reading days I'd have thought of as ‘indie’ music – The House of Love, Fatima Mansions, The Lilac Time – alongside a few bands poised for fame: Pixies, REM, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. I'm Your Fan was produced by two journalists associated with the Anglophile French rock magazine, Les Inrockuptibles, Christian Fevret and Jean-Daniel Beauvallet. Curiously, I mentioned it in a chapter published in 2004, during a paragraph on tribute albums as a ‘signal of the ageing of the age of authenticity’ (Griffiths Reference Griffiths, Cook and Pople2004, p. 567).

Padgett's book covers in its 135 pages three broad topics: the tribute album in general, this particular example and Cohen himself, including his substantial record of generating cover versions, interestingly discussed at pp. 28–31. Three of the book's seven chapters (1, 6 and 7) are on tribute albums in general, framing four (2, 3, 4 and 5) on I'm Your Fan. As though that were not enough, no fewer than five ‘interludes’ are based on interviews: three with four producers of tribute albums (Hal Willner, Ralph Sall, and the pairing of Jim Sampas and Joe Spadaro), with Juliana Hatfield as a musician featured on tribute albums not this one, and finally with Jarkko Arjatsolo as expert in Cohen covers and tributes, and evidently known personally to the poet and singer-songwriter.

Not unrelated to the book's ambitious range, Padgett writes as a journalist rather than an academic writer on music – reading the book took just one afternoon – and his prime method is indeed the interview. In addition to the interludes, Padgett spoke with the album's two producers, as well as many of the musicians who contributed tracks, including Peter Astor, Robert Forster and Guy Chadwick. It looks as though he didn't speak to the two musicians who make it to the title of Chapter four, Nick Cave and John Cale. Mick Harvey of Cave's Bad Seeds does comment wisely (pp. 66–7), having edited their lengthy performance of Cohen's ‘Tower of Song’ into the deliberately disjointed 5 minutes and 35 seconds of the album's penultimate track. The final track is a little spur for the book as a whole (see pp. 4, 64), as John Cale's selection of verses, musical arrangement and performance, on piano and voice, of Cohen's ‘Hallelujah’ generates a cover version by Jeff Buckley and subsequent pop stardom, entertainingly detailed at Padgett's pp. 93–6, albeit ending with Cohen's mordant summary: ‘it's a good song, but too many people sing it’.

Written by an author devoted to cover versions in more general terms, I'm Your Fan is an admirable plunge into the topic of tribute albums. An academic presentation would more visibly build on precedent, including important contributions by the indefatigable B. Lee Cooper. Furthermore, an academic approach to the tribute album would also, and first I think, undertake exercises of definition and clearing the ground. In a field characterised by the abundance and fecundity of popular culture the question always to be raised is: what is a tribute album? Like Cooper's useful taxonomic exercise (Reference Cooper2005), Padgett's is an inclusive view. For example, a tribute album for The Rolling Stones (mentioned at p. 111) issued in 1998 opens with a recording by Otis Redding who died in 1967. I should be inclined as far as possible to limit the field – still enormous enough – by a few conditions which would exclude the Stones tribute. Try this: the tribute album as a set of studio recordings (for the ‘tributee’) by ‘various artists’ (the ‘tributers’) issued for the purpose of the album, instigated and overseen by a ‘visionary’ producer (or producers, as with I'm Your Fan). Three key players: tributee, tributer, producer. However conceived as tribute, then: Hallelujah: the Songs of Leonard Cohen, 2019, Ace Records, contains previously issued recordings; Jennifer Warnes's 1986 Famous Blue Raincoat: the Songs of Leonard Cohen is a single tributer; and I should edit out the concert recording as simply a different kettle of fish, which would sadly mean that Leonard Cohen: I'm your Man of 2006 would go, even though it was produced by Hal Willner (who shifted from studio to concert: Padgett p. 20). I'm Your Fan assuredly qualifies as tribute album by my limitations, and Padgett is absolutely right to focus on record producers, not only the French pair for I'm Your Fan but also the four producers of his interludes. Interesting broad claims are made. Padgett sees Hal Willner as having instigated the type with Amarcord Nino Rota in 1981, and it's most useful to have a starting point even if it turns out in time to be the wrong one. Ralph Sall makes a fascinating claim (at pp. 41–2) about ‘stature’, that tributees need to be of a standing similar or comparable with the tributer: a singer warbling ‘Hallelujah’ in your (pre-pandemic) local at the weekend is one thing, REM recording ‘First we take Manhattan’ is what matters. Sall's demanding criterion would reduce the quantity of tribute albums at a stroke! A small criticism is that Padgett at pp. 51–2 makes a point about gender inequality in the music industry that will be familiar to readers of Popular Music, so that it's a shame then that no mention is made of Tamara Saviano, ‘visionary’ producer of tributes for Stephen Foster, Kris Kristofferson, Jackson Browne, Guy Clark and the Sun record label.

Moving on from defining the tribute album, a second academic point concerns expertise, the relationship between the tribute album and its underlying or generating repertory. Although no contributor to I'm You Fan, and the book's redeeming female voice, at pp. 77–80, Juliana Hatfield is marvellously morose about her involvement in a variety of tribute projects, although she eventually issues her own, single-artist tributes for Olivia Newton-John and The Police in 2018 and 2019 on the American Laundromat label. Beholding the serried tributees on an album, we might assume connection to, affection for, or expertise in the work of the tributer. That said and as ever, the study of tribute albums might differ from mere participation, evoking a familiar textual issue: one hears the original track ‘through’ the cover, and a tribute album has a distinct consistency in the generating repertory. In short, apart from fugitive comments by musicians, there is to my mind not enough informed comparison on I'm Your Fan between the tributes and the Cohen originals.

Finally, the tribute album says something distinctive and suggestive to the issue of canon and the process of canonisation. Taking Cohen as an example – and I'm no expert in his work – in one direction his entire output – each track on his ‘fourteen studio albums’, as Wikipedia puts it – is reduced to two greatest hits collections. In another separate direction, the same entire repertory is reduced in concert presentation as represented by recordings such as (the excellent) Live in London of 2009. In a third direction, Cohen generates tribute albums, certainly two: I'm Your Fan of 1991 and Tower of Song produced by Kelley Lynch, David Anderle and Steve Lindsay of 1995 (Padgett is grumpy about it at pp. 112–13). The Willner-produced concert recording (see above) falls alas by my stringent definition. Now, Arjatsolo claims (at p. 102) 115 Cohen tributes released on LP or CD – so by my account that's three down, 112 to go – but, for now at least, I'd be sceptical of that number, sure that many of them would raise issues of language (lost in translation), musical style (a reggae tribute) or, for better or worse, Sall's ‘stature’.

All that said, I'm with Ray Padgett in seeing the tribute album as a significant element in the ecology of the musical career, comparable with the Festschrift in academic writing. In his final chapter, Padgett goes for Weltschmerz, as the ‘streaming’ of music alters conditions of production and reception, not least in that the tribute album qua album disappears among an endless collection of tracks, many of them no doubt by way of tribute (p. 134). For academics, however, rightly fond of the titular parenthesis with specific dates, grounds emerge for suggesting a second important year inside the brackets: if tribute albums arguably began in 1981, then they arguably end somewhere in the handover from CD to streaming. Padgett ends his study with the single, Cohenesque sentence ‘Hallelujah’ but, to the provision of distinct start and end dates academics should say: Amen to that.