by Jeff Burger
Then, of course, I noticed that birds came to the wires and that was how that song began. “Like a drunk in a midnight choir,” that’s also set on the island. Where drinkers, me included, would come up the stairs. There was great tolerance among the people for that because it could be in the middle of the night. You’d see three guys with their arms around each other, stumbling up the stairs and singing these impeccable thirds. So that image came from the island: “Like a drunk in a midnight choir.”
PZ: You wrote that you “finished it in Hollywood in a motel in 1969 along with everything else.” What did you mean?
LC: Everything was being finished. The sixties were being finished. Maybe that’s what I meant. But I felt the sixties were finished a long time before that.
I don’t think the sixties ever began. I think the whole sixties lasted maybe fifteen or twenty minutes in somebody’s mind. I saw it move very, very quickly into the marketplace. I don’t think there were any sixties.
PZ: “I’m Your Man.”
LC: I sweated over that one. I really sweated over it. I can show you the notebook for that. It started off as a song called “I Cried Enough for You.” It was related to a version of “Waiting for a Miracle” [sic] that I recorded.
The rhyme scheme was developed by toeing the line with that musical version that I put down. But it didn’t work.
PZ: You quoted Dylan once when you said, “I know my song well before I start singing.” Do you always have the song completely finished before you begin recording?
LC: Yeah. Sometimes there’s a rude awakening. As there have been several times in the past. As with “Anthem.” Several times I thought I had sung that song well and then when I heard it I realized I hadn’t.
PZ: What do you think of songwriters who write in the studio?
LC: I think they’re amazing. I have tremendous admiration for that kind of courage and that kind of belief in one’s own inspiration. That the gods are going to be favorable to you. That you’re going to go in there with nothing but the will and the skill, and the thing is going to emerge. And great stuff has been done that way. It’s not like this never works. There are masters of that style. Dylan is one of them. I think he’s gone in with nothing and come up with great things. That is to say that my impression about Dylan is that he’s used all the approaches: the spontaneous, the polished, the unhewn, the deliberate. He masters all those forms.
PZ: There aren’t many songwriters of your generation who have been able to maintain the quality of their past work the way you have been able to.
LC: First of all, you get tired. There aren’t that many bullfighters in their forties. You do your great work as a bullfighter in your twenties and your thirties.
There is a certain age that is appropriate to this tremendous expenditure of energy and the tremendous bravery and courage that you need to go into the fray. It often is a young man’s game, or as Browning said, “The first fine careless frenzy.” That is what the lyric poem is based on, the song is based on. But there are some old guys who hang in there and come up with some very interesting work.
PZ: In your work you’ve shown that a songwriter can go beyond that early frenzy and come to a new place and do new things that haven’t been done.
LC: I certainly felt the need to find that place. I always thought I was in it for the long haul, touch wood.
PZ: Does it have to do with interest, that you’re still interested with the process?
LC: It was to do with two things. One is economic urgency. I just never made enough money to say, “Oh, man, I think I’m gonna get a yacht now and scuba-dive.” I never had those kinds of funds available to me to make radical decisions about what I might do in life. Besides that, I was trained in what later became known as the Montreal School of Poetry. Before there were prizes, before there were grants, before there were even girls who cared about what I did. We would meet, a loosely defined group of people. There were no prizes, as I said, no rewards other than the work itself. We would read each other poems. We were passionately involved with poems and our lives were involved with this occupation. And we’d have to defend every line. We’d read poems to each other and you were attacked! With a kind of savagery that defangs rock criticism completely. There ain’t anybody that I’ve ever read who can come up with anything like the savagery, and I might say the accuracy, that we laid on each other.
We had in our minds the examples of poets who continued to work their whole lives. There was never any sense of a raid on the marketplace, that you should come up with a hit and get out. That kind of sensibility simply did not take root in my mind until very recently. [Laughs.] I think maybe it’s a nice idea but it’s not going to happen when you write seven-minute songs.
So I always had the sense of being in this for keeps, if your health lasts you. And you’re fortunate enough to have the days at your disposal so you can keep on doing this. I never had the sense that there was an end. That there was a retirement or that there was a jackpot.
PZ: You mentioned the early frenzy of youth. Do you find you need frenzy or conflict in your life to write great songs or can you create from a place of calm?
LC: I certainly think so and I’m looking forward to achieving that interior condition so that I can write from it. But I haven’t yet. I’ve come a long way compared to the kind of trouble I was in when I was younger. Compared to that kind of trouble, this kind of trouble sounds like peace to me. But of course one is still involved in this struggle and while you’re involved in this struggle you know peace is just a momentary thing, but you can’t claim it. I’m a lot more comfortable with myself than I was a while ago. I’m still writing out of the conflicts and I don’t know if they’ll ever resolve.
PZ: Do you find the song to be a more powerful art form than others?
LC: I love it. As a mode of employment. I don’t even think about art forms. I’m very grateful to have stumbled into this line of work. It’s tough but I like it.
PZ: Do you have the sense that some of your songs are lasting and timeless?
LC: Sometimes I have a feeling that, as I’m fond of saying, a lot of my songs have lasted as long as the Volvo.
PZ: They’re sturdy.
LC: They seem to be sturdy. This last album [The Future] I think is very, very sturdy. If it has any faults it’s that it’s a little too well armored. It seems to have a kind of resilience like a little Sherman Tank, that it can go over any landscape. I don’t know whether that’s something you want parking in your garage, but it seems to have a kind of armored energy. I’ve tried to make the songs sturdy over the years.
PZ: Is it your feeling that songs will continue to evolve, that there are new places to go with them?
LC: I think they will. It’s a very good question and it summons the whole aesthetic. I think it’s not important that they change or that anybody has a strategy for changing them. Or anyone has to monkey with them experimentally. Because I think that songs primarily are for courting, for finding your mate. For deep things. For summoning love, for healing broken nights, and for the central accompaniment to life’s tasks. Which is no mean or small thing.
I think it’s important that they address those needs rather than they look into themselves in terms of experimenting with form or with matter. But I think that they will, of course, change. I think that, although there’s got to be songs about making love and losing and finding love, the fact that you’re on the edge of a burning city, this definitely is going to affect the thing. But it affects it in surprising ways that you don’t have to worry about.
Like [German love song] “Lili Marlene” came out of the war. [It was written during World War I and became popular during World War II. —Ed.] It’s a very conventional song. A very beautiful song. It touched the troops on both sides. People who had undergone the baptism of fire sang “Lili Marlene,” though they thought it was the corniest song in the world. So I don’t think it’s necessary to tinker with the form. It’s just necessary to let the wor
ld speak to you.
PZ: Do you have a discipline for writing? Do you write at the same time every day?
LC: I get up very early. I like to fill those early hours with that effort.
PZ: Most of your writing is done in the morning?
LC: Yes. I find it clearer. The mind is very clear in those early hours.
PZ: Is that a daily thing?
LC: Usually. I blow it and fall into disillusion and disrepair. Where the mind and the body and the writing and the relationships and everything else goes to hell. I start drinking too much or eating too much or talking too much or vacationing too much. And then I start recovering the boundaries and putting back the fences and trimming the hedges. But when the thing is working, I find early in the morning best.
I get up at four thirty. My alarm is set for four thirty. Sometimes I sleep through it. But when I’m being good to myself, I get up at four thirty, get dressed, go down to a zendo [meditation hall] not far from here. And while the others, I suppose, are moving toward enlightenment, I’m working on a song while I’m sitting there. At a certain moment I can bring what I’ve learned at the zendo, the capacity to concentrate, I can bring it to bear on the lines that are eluding me.
Then I come back to the house after two hours. It’s about six thirty now, quarter to seven. I brew an enormous pot of coffee and sit down in a very deliberate way, at the kitchen table or at the computer, and begin, first of all, to put down the lines that have come to me so that I don’t forget them. And then play the song over and over again, try to find some form.
Those are wonderful hours. Before the phone starts ringing, before your civilian life returns to you with all its bewildering complexities. It’s a simple time in the morning. A wonderful, invigorating time.
PZ: Do you find that your mind is always working on songs, even when you’re not actively working?
LC: Yes. But I’m actively working on songs most of the time. Which is why my personal life has collapsed. Mostly I’m working on songs.
At home in Montreal, 1972. BIRGIT REINKE
At the airport in Paris, 1976.
CLAUDE GASSIAN/DOMINIQUE BOILE ARCHIVES
Paris concert, September 7, 1974.
CLAUDE GASSIAN/DOMINIQUE BOILE ARCHIVES
Toulouse, France, November 19, 1980. ALBERTO MANZANO
Hydra, January 1981.
ALBERTO MANZANO
With daughter Lorca, Hydra, January 1981. ALBERTO MANZANO
Barcelona, Spain, May 15, 1993. IVAN GIESEN
With singer Jennifer Warnes at Jackson Browne’s 50th birthday party, Los Angeles, October 1998. ALBERTO MANZANO
With the late Spanish singer Enrique Morente, FIB Festival, Benicassim, Spain, July 2008. ANGEL SANCHEZ /ALBERTO MANZANO ARCHIVES
In concert, Ghent, Belgium, August 12, 2012. ALBERT MANZANO ARCHIVES (THANKS TO RIA)
Barcelona, Spain, September 21, 2009. IVAN GIESEN
TV INTERVIEW
BARBARA GOWDY | November 19, 1992, TVOntario (Ontario, Canada)
In one of his last interviews of 1992, Cohen talked for TVOntario with writer Barbara Gowdy. “This was both the easiest and the most exciting interview I have ever done,” she later wrote. “Exciting because Leonard Cohen’s ‘Suzanne’ was an anthem to me and for thousands of other teenaged girls in the late sixties. When you mention that song, people tend to go on about the lyric about how ‘she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China,’ but it was the line ‘And you know that she’s half crazy but that’s why you want to be there’ that I went for, exonerating, as it seemed to, my behavior then and over the next fifteen years.
“The fact that the interview went off so smoothly—that came as a surprise,” Gowdy continued. “I had only a few hours to prepare for it, I had nothing to wear, I forgot my shoes. But from the minute he entered the room, Leonard was relaxed and gracious. And once the interview started he was remarkably open. It was as if he didn’t know how famous he was, despite all the women lined up in the hallway outside the hotel room where the interview took place. It was as if getting close to the truth was much more important than giving an impression of cleverness or mystery.”
Gowdy’s interview aired on November 19—just five days before the release of The Future. —Ed.
Barbara Gowdy: In the title song of your new recording, The Future, it says, “There’ll be the breaking of the ancient Western code / Your private life will suddenly explode / There’ll be fires on the road … / I’ve seen the fUture, baby, it is murder.” How are we to take this?
Leonard Cohen: With a grain of salt, I guess. “There’ll be the breaking of the ancient Western code, I mean your private life will suddenly explode.” That is this whole investment in private space that the West has painfully established over the centuries. That is specifically what is going to collapse. “There will be phantoms, there’ll be fires on the road”—a return to suspicion, superstition, return to the tribal paranoia and the white man dancing. It evokes a scene of the end of things but with certain variations.
BG: That’s kind of bleak, isn’t it, even for you?
LC: It would be bleak if it wasn’t set to a hot dance track.
BG: Yeah, there’s an upbeat rhythm behind it.
LC: If I’d just nailed that onto the church door like Martin Luther, it would be a very grim prophecy. But the track on the album has a certain buoyancy that allows the lyric to survive in a happier landscape.
BG: I read an interview years ago in which you said that on a personal level your lyrics tend to be prophetic.
LC: They really are prophetic but, unfortunately, the songs take so long to finish that my prophecy business is collapsing. My song on the unification of Germany is just finished, a long time after the event. My song called “Democracy” was used and people identified it with the victory of the Democratic Party. I’d written it long before that. It just didn’t come out until very recently.
BG: That song, the lyrics—I couldn’t get you to sing some of the lyrics for me?
LC: [Surprised.] Which one? “Democracy”? [Recites.]
It’s coming through a hole in the air, from those nights in Tiananmen Square / It’s coming from the feel that it’s not exactly real, or it’s real, but it’s not exactly there / From the wars against disorder, from the sirens night and day, from the fires of the homeless, from the ashes of the gay / Democracy is coming to the USA.
BG: Not bad. So what is the future—is it murder or is it democracy?
LC: I think it is murder … myself. I think that the possibilities—the appetite for homicide grows in every heart. The extremist positions begin to sound more and more attractive. I find myself perking up my ears when I hear someone from the Ku Klux Klan talking or the Black American Nationalists, even though I am not welcome in either of those parties. I find the rhetoric has a certain edge, pizzazz, attraction. I think everybody feels more hospitable to the extremist position as it is articulated now.
BG: How will that fit into democracy?
LC: Democracy’s the flip side of the future. Democracy is the alternative and I believe that growing with this sense of ambiguity about our lives, about our jobs, about our marriages, about our loves, about our affiliations and loyalties—in the background is the faith we call democracy, which is the greatest religion the West has produced. It is the first religion that affirms other religions, the first culture that affirms other cultures and that designates it as great. [G. K.] Chesterton said about religion, “It’s a great idea, too bad nobody’s tried it.” We are at the edge of this experiment; it’s just begun. Democracy’s a very, very recent idea as it’s applied to the masses.
I think America’s the great laboratory. Regardless of how ironic we’ve trained ourselves to be about America—we in Canada and in Europe—in a certain way our blessings can be summoned for America; somehow we understand that it is there the great experiment is taking place. The races are confronting each other, the classes live side by side, the rich and the poor
watch the same screen every night—so something is going on there that’s going to affect us all. And I don’t think anyone with goodwill cannot wish it well.
BG: That sounds optimistic.
LC: I think there’s an optimistic note there.
BG: There’s more optimism in this album. The song called “Anthem.” Can you sing the refrain for me?
LC: “Ring the bells that still can ring, forget your perfect offering / There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”
BG: What is the light?
LC: The light is the capacity to reconcile your experience, your sorrow, with every day that dawns. It is that understanding, which is beyond significance or meaning, that allows you to live a life and embrace the disasters and sorrows and joys that are our common lot. But it’s only with the recognition that there is a crack in everything. I think all other visions are doomed to irretrievable gloom. And whenever anyone asks us to accept a perfect solution, that should immediately alert us to the flaws in that presentation.
BG: I thought you were going to say the light was love. There’s a lot of talk of love on this album. In fact, the 1925 Irving Berlin song, the song “Always” …
LC: A grand song, very popular in our house when I was growing up. My mother loved the song, and we used to play it when I was playing clarinet in dance bands around Montreal. It had the prestige of “Stardust” as one of the songs you played toward the end of the dance. I always loved the song. It’s a very gentle song: “I’ll be loving you, always, with a love that’s true …”
