Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen

by Jeff Burger

  LC: I’m one of those parents that’s happy to let go; I’d be happy if it was made into Muzak. I don’t have a sense of proprietorship, which probably stems from coming up as a folksinger where it was understood that songs develop a patina through interpretation. I feel that’s the mark of excellence. I was struck with the respect the singers paid to the arrangement or to my own delivery, which was very gratifying.

  DS: Do you prefer that people abide by a strict interpretation of your work?

  LC: I’ve never gotten over the pleasure of someone covering one of my songs. My career has really been quite modest in the world and not many people have done so. Somehow my critical faculties go into a state of suspended animation when I hear someone’s covered one of my tunes. I’m not there to judge it, just to say thank you.

  DS: You’re known as a pretty fair interpreter yourself, given your handling of [poet Federico Garcia] Lorca. Is it difficult for you?

  LC: Unfortunately, all my efforts are painstaking. I’d prefer it if I were gifted and spontaneous and swift, but my work requires a great deal of painstaking. That’s no guarantee of its quality, but it does. With the Lorca poem, the translation took 150 hours, just to get it into English that resembled—I would never presume to say duplicated—the greatness of Lorca’s poem. It was a long, drawn-out affair, and the only reason I would even attempt it is my love for Lorca. I loved him as a kid; I named my daughter Lorca, so you can see this is not a casual figure in my life. She wears the same name beautifully; she is a very strange and eccentric soul….

  DS: That same amount of effort must go into your own songs; let’s face it, you’re not exactly prolific.

  LC: I wish I knew. If I knew where good songs came from, I’d go there more often. Dylan gave a concert in Paris I happened to be at, and we met the next day and got into a lot of shoptalk about writing. He was doing a song of mine called “Hallelujah” and he liked the song and asked how long it took. I was embarrassed to tell him. [I thought], “I’m lying about this, but I’ll say it took two years” ’cause it was more than that. The conversation went on and I praised a song of his called “I and I” and I asked him how long that took and he said, “fifteen minutes” and I believe him. I wish I was in that tribe. Hank Williams could write songs in half an hour, or so the story goes.

  DS: Did you benefit from growing up before making your public debut?

  LC: I don’t know if we ever grow up, but I was trained in a school of writing that no one will remember called the Montreal school of poetry. We were a bunch of poverty-stricken writers who cared a lot about poetry and nothing else since in those days there were no grants or prizes … there weren’t even many women. We put out little magazines or books and read to one another and it was probably the most savage and most discerning panel of critics you could ever face. I think that’s where most of my notions developed.

  DS: Would it have been different if you had been forced to go to the masses from day one?

  LC: We were so naive and so out of it and so far from the mainstream that we thought we were writing for the masses. There was never a sense of elitism in the groups I was in. On the contrary, a very radical sensibility informed the whole thing. In effect, we were in revolt against a literary establishment that spoke with an English accent and declared you couldn’t really write great poetry unless you came out of Oxford. They didn’t think people who spoke like us could write English verse. It was designed to be read by everybody. It wasn’t; it was read by about four hundred people.

  DS: Did your concerns change when it became four hundred thousand?

  LC: Well, my bank account changed, but I don’t think my concerns did. I had songs like “Suzanne” ripped off, stolen from me. I didn’t make as much money as I should have, but it was still a degree I never dreamed of.

  DS: The early songs were so unrelievedly sad.

  LC: There is a great deal of sadness.

  DS: Yet over the years you’ve developed a wonderful sense of humor, mostly about yourself.

  LC: It’s refreshing to hear you say that. I was reading the reviews of this in England, and there they were calling me Laughing Len and saying they oughta sell razor blades with this record…. you get into the computer with this image and whenever they punch up your name, there it is.

  DS: Was there a change for the better that affected your writing, making you less desperate?

  LC: When things get truly desperate, you start laughing…. You experience what it really means to crack up….I remember what [seventeenth-century playwright and poet] Ben Jonson said: “I’ve studied all the philosophies and all the theologies but cheerfulness keeps breaking through.” [Laughs.] I’ve read that as you approach middle age, the brain cells associated with anxiety start to die—so it doesn’t matter whether you go to church every Sunday or do your yoga or whatever, you’ll start to feel better about yourself.

  DS: There’s no nastiness; do you see chinks in your armor?

  LC: It’s not so much armor, as it is threads, Band-Aids, and chicken wire. Some kind of triumphant cheerfulness starts to arise. I dunno where it comes from, maybe up above, but you become able to lean on it and to laugh. Not at others, there’s no point.

  DS: Do you feel responsible for perpetuating, or even inventing, the myth of the beautiful loser?

  LC: I do think there’s a difference, but it’s hard to judge. There’s a blessing in traditional Judaism that I always found quite profound: it’s called the blessing on hearing bad news. When you hear bad news, when you see what appears to be a loser, and before you make the determination about whether this is a guy who deserves to lose, it’s good to remember that blessing. When you deal with suffering, it’s appropriate to be reluctant about making a judgment. In the realms of pain, it’s best to keep quiet and lend a helping hand. And if you can’t lend a helping hand, at least offer a silent blessing. If you can’t do that, it’s best to do nothing at all.

  DS: You don’t get hamstrung by nostalgia, do you?

  LC: That’s a very interesting observation and I appreciate it very much; I’m not nostalgic. There are people I know who have a very finely developed sense of nostalgia and they can draw me into moods where I look at the past in a way that’s uncharacteristic. I don’t look at the sixties as the good old days; people ask me, “Isn’t it terrible what happened to the ideals of the sixties?” and I have to say I don’t know. Maybe it is, but during the sixties I never thought it was so great either, with the amount of charlatanism and hustling that went on—there’s really nothing to regret about its passing.

  When you reach a certain level of disintegration, the degree to which you can put yourself on is greatly diminished. Since you’re writing to recover your self-respect in some way, to discover some sort of significance to your own life, then you find you can lie less and less. The style then takes on a certain bluntness, a certain honesty. It’s no virtue. It’s just that it hurts more to put yourself on.

  DS: Does that sense become more acute?

  LC: I think so. These paradoxes are popular, but that doesn’t mean they’re not true: you get more vulnerable and stronger at the same time.

  DS: Do you have to detach yourself or not?

  LC: To really home in, you have to detach yourself from your own cowardice, your own laziness, your own doubt. Then you take the plunge into the material and get ready to drown … or swim.

  The thing that we’re hungry for cannot be described by a political position right now. There is some kind of moral resurrection that people from all positions on the spectrum can participate in. I don’t want my songs to be slogans for the right, left, or middle. I want it to be a cry defined in very concrete images.

  DS: That runs contrary to today’s sound-bite mentality.

  LC: I don’t have the chops to comment sociologically. Maybe I’m just getting cranky and old, but there’s very little in the public realm that’s not gibberish to me. There’s very little real commitment—the artists are doing exactly what the pol
iticians are doing: staying right at the surface, not really committing to anything, just taking easy party positions. They may be on the right side, but they’re offering slogans, not commitments.

  DS: And they elevate “Cool” above everything else.

  LC: Cool. The notion of cool has been destroying the heart for years. I remember when I came to New York for the first time in the early fifties, when Cool was starting to be developed as an important position. I remember sitting in a coffee shop in the Village, and I’d heard about a new spirit, a sweet spirit, and I remember sitting there, taking my paper placemat, and writing in big letters “KILL COOL!”

  Something has crossed the threshold that we never thought would. It’s inside, in us. The wind isn’t howling out there anymore, it’s howling within us, and everyone understands the beast has been unleashed. Extreme caution is advised.

  COHEN CLIP

  On Personal Lyrics

  “I don’t think my writing has got personal enough yet….When it’s really personal everybody understands it. There’s a middle ground, which is just unzipping and self-indulgence, but when you really tell the truth people immediately perceive that. Like when I wrote the lyrics for ‘I Can’t Forget,’ it went through so many transformations to get it really personal. It started off as a kind of hymn and I ended up stuck sitting at this very kitchen table thinking, ‘Where am I really? What can I really tell anyone about anything?’ So I thought, ‘I’ve got to start from scratch. How am I living this day? What am I doing now?’ So I wrote, ‘I stumbled out of bed / Got ready for the struggle / I smoked a cigarette / And I tightened up my gut / I said, This can’t be me, must be my double / I can’t forget [but] I don’t remember what.’”

  —from “Porridge? Lozenge? Syringe?” by Adrian Deevoy, Q (UK) 1991

  COHEN CLIP

  On His Family and Childhood

  “My mother’s presence is very strong in my heart, particularly since she died. One thing that I owe to my family is that it exposed me to a form of culture and thought but always in moderation. There were none of the fanatical elements that I see in many other similar families. I am grateful to my family…. [My father] died at the age of fifty-two…. My father and I would be very close today….It would have been difficult for him to see me walking around Montreal with a guitar. That wasn’t what he had in mind for his son. But he was a gentleman…. I don’t think about my childhood much. I don’t think that it’s a legitimate explanation of one’s life. I think that in order to survive one must be reborn, one must overcome one’s childhood, the injustices, and recognize the privileges. You can’t use your past as an alibi.”

  —from “Come On Gorilla,” by Christian Fevret,

  Les Inrockuptibles (France), c. 1992

  COHEN CLIP

  On Songs He Doesn’t Understand

  “I can’t understand half the songs in the center, which is supposed to be the pop world. Either they’ve moved into a new stage of cryptology that I’ve been unable to follow and penetrate or it’s just lazy or it’s gotten slack or people just aren’t workin’ hard enough on the craft. I don’t understand what they’re saying most of the time. A lot of the stuff is, I think, just … lazy; but because of the social urgencies that produce rap—and because of the demands of rhyme and rhythm—you get coherent statements and you get the impression of a mind … that has formed and gathered around a topic and is ready to manifest it. Another thing is that we’ve had twenty years or so of dance music, which I think we deserved because the self-indulgences of the sixties got pretty intense. I mean, there were a few geniuses like Dylan or Phil Ochs who are writing great, complex songs with lots of words in them. But lots of people scrambled and scratched up the bandwagon and, you know, we got a kind of language in our popular music that was intolerable after a while. You really couldn’t figure out what they were saying.”

  —from “Leonard Cohen’s The Future,” by Bob Mackowitz, Sony Music radio special (Canada), 1992

  THE SMOKY LIFE

  JENNIE PUNTER | January 1992, Music Express (North America)

  Jennie Punter moved to Toronto in the spring of 1991 to become associate editor at Music Express, a large-format monthly published in Canada and distributed in the United States through now-defunct record retail chains. “That job marked a turning point for me on all fronts,” she told me. “And Leonard Cohen played a memorable role in what followed.”

  At the time, said Punter, her music collection was rapidly expanding, but Leonard Cohen was barely in the mix. So when Music Express was offered a chance to interview Cohen in conjunction with the release of the tribute album I’m Your Fan, she was not the resident expert.

  Still, many of the artists on I’m Your Fan were bands or songwriters that Punter had been writing about and listening to “so I had that sonic background,” she said. “I finished reading Beautiful Losers. I borrowed some records and Cohen’s subtle artistry started to sink in.

  “When I got on the phone with Cohen, there was no time limit,” Punter recalled. “We talked for almost an hour. He talked a lot about his creative process, past and present. At one point, Cohen told me he had just started working with a Mac computer drawing tool and asked whether I wanted to see what he was currently working on. He stayed on the phone as I went to the office fax machine to retrieve a copy of a recent drawing: the back of a naked woman, lounging on her side, etched in black-and-white. My colleagues teased me about this for weeks: ‘What did you really talk about?’ Are you his new girlfriend?’ Et cetera, et cetera.

  “Death of a Ladies’ Man? I don’t think so.”

  A few months later, said Punter, Cohen arrived in Toronto for the launch of The Future, the collection of new work hinted at when they had discussed the tribute disc. “His girlfriend Rebecca De Mornay was by his side in the Cabana Room, then a hip grungy spot for local indie bands,” Punter said. “The Sony Music label guy introduced us, and Cohen politely recalled our phone conversation. I’m not the only old Toronto music hack who remembers that night fondly, seeing this suave legend with a movie star on his arm mixing it up at the Cabana, the sight of so many raucous shows for now-legendary local bands. I only now understand that Sony’s tactic of choosing this location was a deliberate move to build a new audience for Cohen’s work.

  “I met Cohen again in 1995 at a party at MuchMusic headquarters, following a listening event for Michael Jackson’s HIStory: Past, Present and Future Book 1,” Punter added. “Cohen asked me what I thought about the Michael Jackson album I’d just heard. I stumbled. I was there just for the free wine and conversation and I loved Jackson’s music in the 1970s and Bad and so on. Cohen stopped me in my tracks. His exact words: ‘Well, did you tap your toe?’ Uh, yes, I guess I did.” —Ed.

  He was born like this, he had no choice; he was born with the gift of the charcoal voice. Leonard Cohen answers the phone, with a low smoky hello. It’s morning in Los Angeles, and I imagine a cup of warm coffee sits close to his synthesizer, from which he coaxes a few chords during our conversation.

  Poet, prophet, loner, singer, father, scribbler: what can one begin to say about a man whose life and works have been examined by everyone from the fickle music media to ivory tower scholars? Here and now at least, Leonard Cohen is laboring over words and music and recordings that will be released sometime next year. And when the songs are finally out there? “I’ll feel …” Cohen pauses, “I can’t give you any analogy … excremental!”

  Montreal born and bred, Cohen is often referred to as a poet and novelist who “turned” to music in the sixties. But the music was always there, and the poetry is still written, or regrouped and published. Before his troubadour days, Cohen tooted the clarinet in his high school band. Later he played square dances with the Buckskin Boys, a country-and-western trio (he still listens to country music in his car). His first collection of poetry, Let Us Compare Mythologies, was published in 1955 [Actually, 1956. —Ed.] (there are about a dozen books of his poetry out). He also wrote two novels in
the sixties, including Beautiful Losers (1966). Cohen’s recording career began in 1968, with Songs of Leonard Cohen [Released December 26, 1967. —Ed.], and roughly a dozen albums have followed (mostly on CBS/Sony).

  “When it comes down to it, they are different things,” Cohen says when asked to compare the arts of songwriting and poetry writing. “It’s the same in that you have to sweat over both of them—at least I do. It doesn’t mean they’re good. A poem requires solitude, you stop as you’re reading and go back over it, the language is very dense and you can move any way you want. A song has a very fast, forward motion.”

  Cohen moves between L.A. and Montreal, and occasionally finds time to visit an old haunt, a Grecian isle where he owns “a house with a lot of rooms” he bought for fifteen hundred dollars in 1960. “People welcomed me, let me live on credit for a long time. The materials are very beautiful, everywhere you look. Nothing insults you, and I think we get used to being insulted and after a while, you tend to go numb.” Cohen has also taken to the road many times, staging brilliant, often lengthy, and much-celebrated concert tours in North America, Australia, and Europe.

  “It’s something I really enjoy doing, I mean, if it’s going well,” he says with characteristic modesty. “If your band is good, and your technical crew is good, then it is a really great way to live … on the road … kind of like a motorcycle gang going from town to town. It is my life, and somebody said you learn about life in three major arenas—love, money, and war—and that takes in all three.”

  Musicians have been interpreting Cohen’s songs almost as long as he’s been writing them—artists from Judy Collins to Aaron Neville to Suzanne Vega. And the songwriter also finds himself behind the mic, night after night, crooning about “Suzanne” and “So Long, Marianne.” “If a song has lasted twenty or thirty years, there’s something there. The real challenge is to find the gate to the song and to open it and to explore it again,” he explains, adding, “but if you’ve got a good band that really helps.”