It’s been a year of almost unfathomable loss for music lovers, with the passing of many beloved and critically acclaimed performers. Leonard Cohen is easily among the losses most sharply felt. Never the best-selling artist — his iconic song “Hallelujah” hit the Billboard Top 100 for the first time only after his death — he has generally been one of the most acclaimed songwriters of the past few decades, and his songs have been covered by nearly everyone.

Now, Boston-native indie rock queen Amanda Palmer and her collaborator, composer Jherek Bischoff, have added their names to the list with a song that had a small resurgence after the recent election, “Everybody Knows.” The song, popularized in 1990 by the Los Angeles rock band Concrete Blonde, is a cynical and darkly funny rebuke to political and economic power: “Everybody knows that the dice were loaded,” sang Cohen, back in the song’s 1975 release, “Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed/Everybody knows the war is over/Everybody knows the good guys lost.”













This version, arranged for piano and string quartet, harkens back to Cohen’s original tone, with its smoky sense of resigned melancholy, but Palmer’s patient, restrained vocals take on an increasing sense of menace throughout the song, dripping an acid that seems more and more deadly as the song progresses until, near the end, it’s superseded by a sense of heartbreak, about the time she sings, “And everybody knows that you're in trouble/Everybody knows what you've been through/From the bloody cross on top of Calvary/To the beach of Malibu/Everybody knows it's coming apart.”

And the listener believes her. The song has always been imbued with a portent of apocalypse, but there’s something fresh in this that makes that coming reckoning seem imminent. Whether that’s from the rawness of Cohen’s recent death or the current political climate is uncertain. Maybe it’s both.

Palmer’s piano-playing here alternates between heavy and steady with flashes of delicacy, creating bracing flashes of beauty amid the dirge. Likewise, the strings — Etienne Abelin and Ola Sendecki on violin, David Schnee on viola and Lukas Raaflaub on cello — create a wash of beauty that contrasts both against the piano and the vocals. The result is a rich texture that lends added layers and depths to what was already an exquisitely crafted song.

Palmer and Jherek collaborated earlier this year to produce an album of David Bowie covers, a tribute to yet another master lost this year. On the one hand, this song demonstrates that their earlier collaboration was no fluke, and not just a product of a shared passion for the Thin White Duke. But on the other hand, it demonstrates the scale of the talent that 2016 has claimed, and while it’s good to hear the work handled so beautifully, it’s sad to think that the flood of tributes has become a necessity.

Email Victor D. Infante at Victor.Infante@Telegram.com and follow him online at @ocvictor.