Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen

by Jeff Burger

  LC: Well, I think that it changes naturally, but I think that the position I took in some of those early songs is not so far from the position I take now.

  TS: Which is?

  LC: That the kind of surrender that is involved with love means that you have to take a wound also.

  TS: Do you think that it’s a typical growth process, or that it’s more your own?

  LC: I can’t believe that my predicament is unique.

  RADIO INTERVIEW

  KRISTINE MCKENNA | October 1988, Eight Hours to Harry, KCRW-FM (Santa Monica, California)

  Leonard Cohen returned to KCRW a few months after his conversation with Tom Schnabel. This time he spoke with Kristine McKenna, whose two other interviews with Cohen appear earlier in this book. —Ed.

  Kristine McKenna: The first group you were in was a country outfit called the Buckskin Boys. How are your roots in country music manifest in the music you’re making now?

  Leonard Cohen: I’ve always liked country music and there’s always some kind of reference to it in my work. The Buckskin Boys were a trio and we were basically a square-dance group who played in church basements and auditoriums. I played rhythm guitar, and the only singing I did was to join in on the occasional chorus.

  KM: What were your feelings about a career in music then? Were you already committed to the idea?

  LC: I never had an idea of a career in music or a career in anything else, and I always wondered what people were talking about when they used the word “career.” It seemed to come up a lot amongst the people who worked hard at university, but I mostly found myself sitting around coffee shops with other people who felt that the word “career” had ominous overtones. I always knew, however, that I was in this for the long haul, and the kind of models I had when I was training as a young writer in what later became known as the Montreal school of poetry were men who were accustomed to not being popularly received. So when my so-called career evaporated in the world, in the seventies, I was never really aware of the evaporation. I knew I was going to continue doing my work, regardless of the response.

  KM: You never waver in your faith in your ability to do the work, or the value of it?

  LC: It’s not that I don’t waver—I live in a condition of wavering and accept that that’s part of the job description. The condition of this kind of work is continually dealing with doubt, with the breakdown, and with the possibility that you’ve deceived yourself and others all of your life. Those are the challenges and you learn to live with them.

  KM: What serves to dispel doubt for you?

  LC: You learn a few things over the years. One of the things I learned was that if I stick with something long enough it’s going to yield. In other words, if I’ve been working on a song for a month and have been unable to bring it to completion, usually I would abandon it—and I’ve abandoned very good material over the years. But lately I’ve begun to wrestle with things because I don’t have the resources and the raw material is growing more scarce. So, when there’s an indication that a song might exist, I’m ready to wrestle with it for a long time, and I find that it yields. It’s an approach that works in every aspect of life.

  KM: When you got your first taste of international success, did it cause you to lose your balance?

  LC: No, because when I was a young man my friends and I thought we were famous and believed that every time we met for a beer it was a historic event. I grew up before television so it was easier to create one’s own mythology, but we truly believed that Montreal was a holy city, all of us were sainted, gifted beings, our love affairs were important, our songs immortal, our poems deathless, and we would lead lives of delicious self-sacrifice to art or God. It was a curious mythology because we lived in a provincial town, yet the messianic idea was strong in the collective psyche there.

  KM: Women are usually presented in your songs as agents of change, and as catalysts that launch you on a quest for self-knowledge. Do you see it that way?

  LC: I don’t have that kind of perspective on my own work. One writes about one’s own experience, and certainly the experience with a woman for a man is critical. If you’re going to lead your life seriously then you’re going to be changed by the people you meet. I know I’ve been described as a romantic, but I’ve never felt that way. I think a careful analysis of my songs would indicate that it’s not a romantic position, but rather a realistic view that has striven for accuracy in terms of description.

  KM: Several critics have made the observation that one of the central themes in your work is defeat. Do you think that’s accurate?

  LC: Anybody who’s been wiped out—and that includes most people— understands this theme. And the wipeout specific to our particular culture is of the self. We exist in a continual process of establishing a personality that works for a while, then finally disintegrates under the abrasive activity of maintaining it. When it falls we’re resurrected through the creation of a new self. Don’t forget that the central myth of our culture, the crucifixion, also involves a resurrection, and that is what we’re continually doing; the personality we create gets crucified because it isn’t any good. It doesn’t work, it’s inappropriate, it’s fictitious, so it gets crucified and hung up there for everybody to see. We call that failure and it goes on right to the end, until finally you don’t have to do it anymore.

  KM: So there’s no such thing as a personality that works?

  LC: It’s not supposed to work and you’re not supposed to hang onto it. It works for a while, and when it stops working you’re the first one to know because you start making a lot of mistakes based on this fixed image you have about yourself that you have to guard and protect. When the burden of maintenance becomes too excessive you have to let it fall, and when it falls it’s painful.

  KM: All these issues seem to come to a head in the romantic relationship. Why does it happen there?

  LC: They come to a head in any relationship because a relationship has to be based on something authentic if it’s going to survive the initial thrill of first encounter. Once the encounters become frequent, the authenticity of the personality is called upon to reveal itself because people can’t rest together if they’re lying to each other. So eventually, some kind of mutual confession takes place, and usually we’re so appalled by what is revealed that we immediately scurry off to find the new thrill of a first encounter. So relationship is the arena where personality has to die.

  KM: Do we all know whether or not we’re lying? Is it possible to live a lie and remain unaware of it?

  LC: You can’t remain unaware of it for long because it hurts too much— unless, of course, you have a pathological personality that’s nourished by its manipulations and lies.

  KM: Would you agree that one of the great catch-22s of love is that you must lose it in order to know its value?

  LC: That certainly seems to be one of the scenarios. We continually wrestle with these items. You lose your love, then find that the thing you discarded is the thing you want, so you attach yourself to it in an addictive way, which pretty well precludes your ever getting it back. But we have to live with these defeated scenarios in order to repair ourselves. I think you do learn by experience, and that if the pain is sufficiently acute, you will avoid returning there.

  KM: Much of the imagery in your music has biblical associations. Is that intentional?

  LC: I’ve always regarded the Bible as a collection of stories we all know, and it’s important to tap into a common reservoir. Our Bible was written during one of the great periods of the language, and most of the great orators of recent memory—Jesse Jackson or Martin Luther King Jr., for instance—are based in that tradition. That’s where the richness of our language resides.

  KM: As far as using biblical references in your work, you seem to operate on the assumption that there’s an audience out there with a shared vocabulary and mythology. Do you think contemporary audiences are familiar with these stories?

  LC: I don’t think so anymor
e, no. We seem to be in the process of evaporating our culture pretty thoroughly, but something else will happen. We also seem to be in one of those periods where there’s a great gap between public expression and private experience, and where almost anything that manifests itself on the public level has an air of artificiality and irrelevance. You listen to politicians speaking and you can’t believe they live in the same country as you because they seem to be speaking from some position that’s fictional. It’s not their fault, it’s just that the public style today has gotten tired and is in a process of collapsing, and it takes a courageous person to speak with the language that already exists in the private sphere. I don’t want to offer a wholesale condemnation, but I’ve found hardly anything that speaks to my private experience.

  KM: In talking about your album I’m Your Man, you’ve said that it was shaped by an emotional crisis you were experiencing that caused the record to change direction radically as you were making it. Could you talk about that?

  LC: The record did change directions many times, and once quite dramatically. “Everybody Knows” began as a song called “Waiting for the Miracle,” which wasn’t a bad song. Nonetheless, I found I couldn’t sing it because I questioned whether I was really waiting for the miracle. That’s the question I ask myself about all my material at a certain point: is it really true? It doesn’t matter whether or not it’s a successful metaphor; what matters is whether it honestly reflects my predicament.

  When I first went into the studio with the songs for the record I found myself choking on the words. I was in a state where I couldn’t speak and didn’t want to answer the telephone, and as people who’ve experienced this sort of thing can tell you, it’s a condition that can deepen into quite a serious predicament. The personality I’d been maintaining was in the process of collapsing, so I had to revise my work until it became the only possible song I could sing. My own situation was so disagreeable that most forms of failure hardly touched me. That allowed me to take a lot of chances.

  KM: So how did you liberate yourself from the dark place you’d wandered into?

  LC: I don’t know if I’m out of it. I remember there was one moment, I was just lying in bed saying I can’t take this anymore, and a little voice said, “You don’t have to take it anymore.” It is that precious, miraculous moment when you realize you can change your mind, you can abandon your predicament and nothing’s going to happen to you.

  KM: Are these predicaments—which are also called depressions—the result of carelessness and not paying attention, or is it more a case of when the universe decides it’s your turn to cry, you’re gonna feel like crying regardless of how you’ve been living?

  LC: Accident is the name we give to a pattern we don’t allow to penetrate our conscious mind, but I think what happens is, we use up our disguises. You just wear them until the mask wears thin, and you find you’ve got this thing strapped across your face that everybody can see through. You can’t feel the water on your face because you’re wearing this old mask, and the soul longs for refreshment so deeply that it eventually arranges for you to feel so bad that you’re forced to rip off your mask.

  KM: You once told me that “there’s only one achievement in life, and that’s the acceptance of your lot.” Can you elaborate?

  LC: I don’t like the tone of that declaration—it seems to be somewhat of an oversimplification. All the old holy books say that it’s important to be happy with your lot, but to achieve it is a mysterious and difficult task. I can’t penetrate the mystery of suffering, and the kind of suffering we have here, without natural catastrophe, without war, is a very privileged kind of suffering. We’re very lucky to be able to suffer this way because we’re not being tortured. Nonetheless, it’s no joke, the kind of suffering I’ve observed in myself and in friends, and I’ve seen people working bravely to correct the profound imbalances that cast them into this mode of suffering. I really don’t want to speak casually or superficially about it at this moment.

  KM: Is the kind of suffering you’re referring to essentially spiritual crisis?

  LC: It’s religious in that a lot of information in our religious systems has been discarded, and people find themselves in predicaments that have the potential of being addressed from a religious point of view, but they lack the religious vocabulary to address it. This is unfortunate because although the secular approach to personality and the destruction of the self is valuable, it’s one-sided. The fact is we do feel a connection with the divine and sense the presence of a deep meaning that the mind cannot penetrate. The notion that we’re divine beings is one that’s been largely discarded by society, yet there is a crucial kind of nourishment that belief can supply. So yes, in that sense the crisis we’re discussing is a religious one.

  COHEN CLIP

  On Artistic Credibility

  “Artistic credibility, for me, is not determined by how I’m perceived or embraced by the marketplace. I can’t imagine anything that the marketplace would put me through that would be more intense or severe or dangerous than the things I put myself through. It doesn’t pose a threat that is any different or any more serious than the continual cunning, diabolical intrigues that one is already involved in.”

  —from “Leonard Cohen’s Impeccable Chop,” by Mark Dery, Frets (US), November 1988

  COHEN CLIP

  On Pop Music

  “When I was thirteen, I knew every jukebox in town; I used to escape from my house and steal quarters. So it’s not as though I am some scholar investigating this pop phenomenon. I helped create this pop phenomenon, and I am also a manifestation of it. I don’t feel I have to justify myself.”

  —from “Leonard Cohen,” by Mark Dery, Keyboard (US), September 1989

  PART III

  THE NINETIES

  Cohen issues The Future and a book of poems and songs, then climbs Mount Baldy to try out the life of a monk.

  LEONARD COHEN AND THE DEATH OF COOL

  DEBORAH SPRAGUE | November 1991, interview | Spring 1992, Your Flesh (US)

  After 1988’s flurry of activity, Cohen again stepped away from the spotlight. A tribute album, I’m Your Fan, appeared in 1991 and, that same year, the Canadian Music Hall of Fame inducted the singer. But he embarked on no concert tours from 1989 through 1992, gave few interviews, and released no new music for nearly five years.

  The musical drought ended with the November 24, 1992, appearance of the well-received The Future, and in the year leading up to its release, Cohen began talking with the press again.

  One such conversation was with Deborah Sprague, who compared the prospect of interviewing Cohen to scaling Everest or Kilimanjaro. “It’s at once compelling and foreboding, and seemingly impossible to go into without rigorous preparation,” she told me. “Imagine my surprise when I was given the chance to sit down with the man in a less-than-welcoming office-building setting, only to be confronted with one of the kindest, most welcoming, and genuinely involved musicians I’d encountered over the course of hundreds of such meetings.

  “Cohen was honest about his perceptions of the world and his impressions of himself and utterly without guile in pondering his place in the universe—both as a human being and an artist,” Sprague continued. “The abundant charm was clearly not a veneer, the interest in things outside his own skin—including those about this writer’s life—quite genuine. When his then-publicist phoned later that day to say, ‘Mr. Cohen wanted me to tell you he enjoyed your time together—and that you are a gentle soul,’ I felt affirmed to the nth degree, paychecks and awards be damned.” —Ed.

  He was the first next Bob Dylan, the first to bring to “rock” the idea that impressionable young girls will flock to a dumpy, middle-aged shlub, providing he’s got a good enough line in smooth talk, the man who made monotone semimarketable (thereby setting the stage for lessers from Bob Smith to Barry White). Yep. Leonard Cohen’s cut quite a swath through rock’s rich tapestry for a guy who’s released just eight albums over the course of the
past quarter century.

  As a depressive poet, Cohen is still peerless, as proven by the lyrics he recites from a due-in-’90, but still forthcoming, LP. His work even holds up in the hands of the new-wave losers that burdened I’m Your Fan, last year’s Cohen entry in the tribute album stakes. OK, folks like John Cale, Nick Cave, and, oddly enough, Kiwi loungesters Dead Famous People seemed to “get it,” but for the most part, the musos in question had little clue as to the formality, dignity, and self-surrender that makes a Cohen tick: then again, asking ’em to do so is like asking a prep schooler to “interpret” Bukowski.

  From his days as a Montreal beat poet (his first book, Let Us Compare Mythologies, was issued in 1956) with a country music fetish until the 1967 release of Songs of Leonard Cohen, he wandered across Europe, returning from his travels with (for better or worse) the concept of the beautiful loser—which became the title of his bestselling crank epic. The past two-and-a-half decades have seen him alternate periods of total isolation with periods of, well, moderate isolation. Highlighted by a collaboration with Phil Spector—who kidnapped the tapes of 1977’s Death of a Ladies’ Man at gunpoint—and a religious awakening that, like few others in popular music, produced works (like Various Positions) that might actually win a few converts, it’s been a career that Cohen characterizes as “modest.” Don’t believe it for a minute.

  Deborah Sprague: How did the tribute project come about?

  Leonard Cohen: I had nothing at all to do with it. I didn’t know when it began and I didn’t know when it ended. It was the brainchild of Christian Fevret, who is the editor of a rock magazine in Paris whose name no one can pronounce. It’s a magazine that holds up the flaming torch of rock and roll.

  DS: Do you find it easy to let go of your songs?