Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen

by Jeff Burger

  KM: Must’ve been an amazing story.

  LC: I don’t think so, but I’ll tell you if you like. It concerns realms I value deeply, and a kind of conversation I’ve always avoided. I was in a condition of acute distress, couldn’t move, couldn’t answer the telephone, but an old friend got through to me and told me she wanted to tell me about some dreams. I said that’s the last thing I want to hear. I know you’re into crystal healing and I really don’t want to hear about your dreams, especially now. She came over anyhow and told me two dreams, which I listened to reluctantly.

  First she said, “l dreamed I was you, and the pain was so intense that I woke up because I couldn’t stand it.” The second dream was a dream her father had. He’d always been a very active guy and was experiencing profound depression over the dropping of the body that comes with age. One morning he woke up in an unusually good mood, refreshed after a deep sleep. She said, “lt’s good to see you like this, Papa,” and he replied, “l had a dream about your friend Leonard Cohen. I don’t have to worry because Leonard is picking up the stones.” For some reason, something turned in my heart when she said that to me. I greeted the change of heart reluctantly because I didn’t want to indulge this idea that suffering has real mechanical value, but perhaps I was doing something useful in my immobilized state. Maybe I was visiting people in their dreams and making myself useful. I don’t know what any of this means, but her telling me this story changed my mood.

  KM: Is creativity rooted in a drive to alleviate pain?

  LC: The problem we have here on the crust of this star is physical and mental anguish. A teacher I once had told me that the older you get, the lonelier you become and the deeper the love you need. Loneliness creates an appetite for deeper love, and the entire predicament deepens. And as a result of suffering, your capacity to love deeply increases.

  KM: Have you experienced pivotal episodes and explosions of insight, or does your understanding of the human condition remain essentially shrouded in a fog that waxes and wanes?

  LC: I’ve had moments of shattering illumination. The things you see in those moments never leave you, but those kinds of illumination are rare and unbidden. In fact, they’re so unbidden that they only come when you’re not poised to receive them.

  KM: If you were asked to compile a list of things you know to be true, would there be anything on it? Or, is what is “true” always relative and in a state of flux?

  LC: There is an absolute, but it’s nothing you can speak about or objectify. We have an appetite for objectification of the absolute so we’ll have someone to hurl our prayers at, but in order to experience the absolute, we must dissolve this subject/object relationship with it. We have to stop seeing the absolute—truth, beauty, God—as outside of ourselves.

  KM: Your image is that of a ladies’ man. How do you feel about that?

  LC: As I get older, I value the reputation.

  KM: Do you feel particularly knowledgeable about courtship and romance?

  LC: Nobody masters the heart, but we all learn a few social tricks to deodorize ourselves for those initial encounters.

  KM: How would you define glamour?

  LC: Glamour is a certain coincidence of style and power, and is very much rooted in a particular moment—which is why the glamour of yesterday strikes us as quaint today. Many people who are considered glamorous don’t seem that way to me, though there are certain moods where I find everyone glamorous, and I’ll buy the cover story of anyone who’s out there, whether it’s Michael Jackson or Elizabeth Taylor. Mostly I tend to see them as hard-working people.

  KM: What three things never fail to bring you pleasure?

  LC: Good weather, a woman’s body, and the moon.

  KM: What’s your idea of an important achievement?

  LC: There is only one achievement, and that’s the acceptance of your lot.

  KM: You once commented that every artist—painter, musician, writer-has one piece that he does over and over again. Describe yours.

  LC: I did one for a long time, and I’m about to begin a sketch for another one. The beautiful thing about this endeavor is that you don’t think you’re doing the same song repeatedly but in fact, the thing keeps returning to you in the original blue gown, and that’s what gives you the energy to do it. With me, it really is the same song from “So Long, Marianne” to “The Gypsy’s Wife” to “Coming Back to You.” That song is rooted in some kind of inspired confusion of womanhood, godliness, beauty, and darkness. It was the world I lived in, and it was true. I think of my songs as more or less true because I paid the full price for every one of them.

  KM: You’ve said that a singer is basically a storyteller; what’s essential to a good story?

  LC: Something in the story must correspond to your own experience. A good storyteller is talking about you and telling your story, and thus, succeeds in illuminating your own dismal problem. A singer is a storyteller comparable to somebody you meet in a bar, or the kind of conversation you have with a new romantic friend. It’s not so much that their story has a beginning, middle, and an end—it’s that you want to hear the telling. With singers, I know their story, rather than a story they tell. For instance, you hear a story in Sinatra’s voice. He may be singing about love, lost or found, but he’s telling his own story.

  KM: You recently commented that you find your work growing more refined with the years. Do you feel in command of your creative vocabulary now?

  LC: I don’t have a sense of mastery—I don’t think anyone ever does—but you do get a sense of what the landscape is. And even after weeks of hammering away at something that refuses to yield, you don’t give up because experience has indicated that it may take a year. You become less willing to abandon things and begin to cultivate old-fashioned virtues like patience and perseverance. But the process never gets any easier—in fact, it gets harder. I’ve found myself in my underwear on a carpet in a hotel, banging my head on the floor, trying to find a rhyme for the word “orange.” I know there’s an ordinary, rational world all around me and that this enterprise has no deep significance, yet one is on the floor. No, it doesn’t get easier.

  KM: How do you explain the fact that after twenty years of operating as an essentially underground artist, you’ve suddenly become palatable to the mainstream audience?

  LC: There’s been a change in the marketplace—I don’t think there’s anything profound about this change, either, because it’s simply a manifestation of the cyclical nature of business. For instance, in the sixties people discovered they had minds and they wanted music that addressed their minds. Then, because their minds were addressed with so much nonsense, they quite justifiably decided music should address their bodies and people danced for the next fifteen years. People have been jogging and jostling themselves about for a long time and they’re tired now, so they’d like their minds addressed again. Record companies respond to these market expressions, and that’s part of whatever modest hospitality my work is presently enjoying.

  Beyond that, I recently spoke to a journalist who was talking about how dismal things are, what with friends dying of AIDS, and the sense of claustrophobia and general uselessness of the whole cultural enterprise. He said my new record might do well in America because the themes I’ve been elaborating for a long time are apparent to people now. These are the final days, this is the darkness, this is the flood. The catastrophe has already happened and the question we now face is: What is the appropriate behavior in a catastrophe?

  KM: When was the last time you surprised yourself?

  LC: My mood has changed radically and I’m so grateful for the change. I’m surprised to be able to say that I’m happy.

  KM: How did you pull that off?

  LC: I was allowed to change my mind.

  LEONARD COHEN: THE PROFITS OF DOOM

  STEVE TURNER | April 1988, Q (UK)

  “What I mostly remember about this interview was that Leonard Cohen was funnier than I’d remembered him being in 1974
,” said Steve Turner, whose previous conversation with the singer appears earlier in this book. “Also, after it was over, he took off straight for Heathrow Airport in a chauffeur-driven car and asked me to join him, as the apartment I was then living in was en route.”

  Turner and Cohen covered a lot of turf in their conversation. “Some of what we discussed I couldn’t include in the final version of the article,” Turner recalled. “We started talking about prayer (he’d not long before published Book of Mercy) and then about Judaism. ‘I follow some of the Jewish practices,’ he said, ‘but I could in no way describe myself as an observant Jew.’ Did he pray? ‘I think every man prays in his heart.’ But did he? ‘Oh, prayers spring from my heart. Certainly.’

  “I was curious about the fact that religious images had always percolated through his songs, many of them from the Bible,” Turner told me. “Cohen said, ‘Those images come to me naturally because I was brought up in Montreal where there are a lot of symbols of the different religions. I guess my reading of the Bible has contributed but there has always been that kind of imagery in my world.’

  “We briefly talked about ‘Hallelujah,’ a praise song if ever there was one,” Turner recalled. “Cohen said, ‘I say it doesn’t matter which hallelujah you utter, the profane or the sacred one. It doesn’t matter. It’s just saying amen to what is.’

  “We ended up talking in general about the language of his songs,” Turner said. “I wondered whether he ever threw in images just because the words sounded nice, rather than because they embodied an idea.

  “‘What about the “burning violin” in “Dance Me to the End of Love,” for example?’ I asked. Said Cohen: ‘Although I don’t think anyone needs to know what gave me that image, there were these little orchestras the Germans put together in concentration camps. They played while people were being incinerated or gassed. If you want to read the song from that point of view, it becomes something quite different.’

  “I asked about the ‘heroes in the seaweed’ in ‘Suzanne.’

  “‘I was meaning that there’s heroism in the most unexpected and lowly places,’ Cohen said. So he never used words simply for their effect? ‘I think that if a group of words has that kind of resonance it means that it is striking a certain truth. What you like about your favorite writers is that they’re able to put things together that weren’t together before and to touch you with that new combination of images or ideas.

  “‘I think that’s what we call writing and that’s what we call poetry,’ Cohen concluded. ‘The first guy who said, “My love is like a red, red rose”—you could say, “Well, what do you mean? In what way?” A botanist may really take exception to the image. A lot of images we really love don’t stand up to that kind of scalpel work.’”

  Interesting—but no more so than the published interview, which follows. —Ed.

  His singing voice is only slightly more tuneful than the low rumble of his speaking voice. His melancholy outlook attracts the special attention of the lonely, depressed, and jilted and he once claimed that although he used only three musical chords he in fact knew five.

  Yet Leonard Cohen, whose debut album was released in 1967, has sold around ten million records worldwide and continues to exert an influence on contemporary songwriters such as Morrissey, Suzanne Vega, Ian McCulloch, and Nick Cave.

  “I guess there’s something about my position they relate to,” says the singer. “I have this kind of outsider position. I haven’t deliberately taken it, but it’s where I’ve somehow found myself. Maybe these people see some kind of fidelity in my career.

  “Suzanne Vega has mentioned me in a few interviews, Nick Cave covered ‘Avalanche,’ and when I last toured Britain, in 1985, Ian McCulloch came to a couple of concerts and talked to me afterwards on the bus. I can see a certain kind of rapport between my work and the work of these people.”

  Back in 1967, Songs of Leonard Cohen, the album that showcased such classic Cohen as “Suzanne,” “So Long, Marianne,” “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye,” and “Sisters of Mercy,” was something of an oddity. Just as everyone was going psychedelic, a sepia-tinted Cohen glared gloomily out from a black-bordered record cover looking like Franz Kafka on a bad day. Hadn’t anyone offered him a flower or blown him a bubble?

  Just as everyone was getting hooked on the Sgt. Pepper wonderland of phasing, backward taping, and electronic sound, the Canadian songwriter turned up with nothing more than an acoustic guitar and a bunch of poems about women. Just as everyone was learning to get high, Cohen was plumbing the depths of depression, contemplating the desperation at the other end of love, and coining such memorable lines as “I lean from my windowsill in this hotel I chose / One hand on my suicide, one hand on the rose” (“Stories of the Street” [from Songs of Leonard Cohen]).

  He rapidly became staple late-night listening in student halls of residence, the perfect soundtrack to go along with a couple of candles and a bottle of wine. Almost a generation older than his main audience, he displayed a rich lived-in voice and religiously tinged love lyrics that suggested a mixture of romance, seduction, mystery, and wisdom.

  His life story added to the impression. He enjoyed a Bohemian existence between a home in Montreal, a room at the Chelsea Hotel in New York, and a cottage on the island of Hydra. His name was romantically linked with many of the female singers of the day including Judy Collins, Joni Mitchell, and Janis Joplin.

  Whereas many songwriters yearned to be authors, thereby gaining the artistic respect not afforded at the time to rock stars, Cohen was an established literary figure seeking to broaden his audience through the music business.

  He’d published five volumes of poetry as well as the novels The Favorite Game (1963) and Beautiful Losers (1966). At a time when Lennon and McCartney were being compared to Schubert and Dylan to Homer, this counted for a lot. The New York Times in 1968 saw him as on the verge of becoming a “major spokesman” for his generation, describing him as “a man-child of our time.”

  Today, at fifty-three, he’s definitely more man than child. He wears a dark pinstriped suit over a khaki shirt and blue tie, has grey flecks in his dark cropped hair, and is spending time in Paris in order to be close to his two teenage children who are at school in the city.

  He’s a serious man, but not too serious. He can afford to laugh at his image as a suicidal Lothario or at his limited vocal range. “You’re stuck with your voice,” he admits. “You’re stuck with your vision and you’re stuck with your skill.” What voice is he stuck with? “The one you hear.” Could he sing another way? “No. That’s what I mean.” To prove the point he sings the chorus of “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” and immediately turns the jaunty pop tune into a Cohen dirge.

  How does he feel about being defined principally for songs about women delivered with all the excitement of a prisoner awaiting execution? “I wouldn’t argue with it although I don’t think it’s that accurate,” he says. “I don’t think it’s unique to write about women. Most men write songs to women. It’s hard to say exactly what you’re doing. You just have this appetite to sing. I do think, though, that there are a couple of laughs here and there in my work.

  “I think a little depression is valuable for writing, though, and sometimes it comes on me very strong. Freud said that, but then he had cocaine! There are moments when the crisis becomes too intense to be able to dissolve through writing. That’s when activities like meditation and manual labor become helpful.”

  It was in Paris that he produced I’m Your Man, his ninth album and the first that’s been heard from him since Various Positions was released exactly three years ago. “It just seems to take me a long time to bring things to completion,” he explains. “I generally do a book between albums.”

  He now lives a more settled life in the old part of Montreal, writing books at his word processor, composing songs in his music room, hanging out with friends like Canadian poet Irving Layton, and occasionally flying to Los Angeles. He hasn’t visited his
Greek cottage in four years.

  “I live alone on a little street where a lot of the friends I grew up with live,” he says. “One is a sculptor, another a photographer, and one friend I even roomed with back in my college days. I don’t really like traveling anymore. I’ve done so much touring that it’s a real pleasure to stay in one place for a long time.

  “But I will be touring with this album because I consider it a part of making a record. I’ll do about fifty concerts in Europe, thirty in the United States and Canada, then about twenty in Australia and Japan.”

  Since 1969 he’s made regular visits to a Buddhist meditation center in New Mexico where besides meditating for between four and fourteen hours a day he puts in work as gardener, cleaner, painter, builder, and carpenter. Last year he spent a total of four months there.

  “It keeps the mind fit,” he says. “It cools me out and gets me closer to myself. I cut right down on smoking and start eating right. I could go to a health farm, I suppose, but there you wouldn’t get a chance to bang nails and carry boulders. Buddhist meditation frees you from God and frees you from religion. You can experience complete at-homeness in this world.”

  Although the world hasn’t heard from Cohen since February 1985, last year’s Famous Blue Raincoat by Jennifer Warnes, an album of Cohen covers, brought fresh attention to his material. Two of the songs—“First We Take Manhattan” and “Ain’t No Cure for Love”—turn up on I’m Your Man.

  Explains Cohen, “I was writing for my new record and Jennifer, who is an old friend and musical collaborator [she sang on his 1973 recording Live Songs, although her credit is misspelt on the sleeve: “Jennifer Warren”], said she wanted to do an album of my songs. She’d been saying this for a long time and I always thought it was just an expression of friendship. I never thought she’d actually do it.

  “While she was preparing to record she heard ‘First We Take Manhattan’ and wanted to do it. I was also writing ‘Ain’t No Cure for Love’ at the time so I gave that to her as well.”