by Jeff Burger
I changed the tempo from 3/4 to 4/4 and it allows a lot of space to arise when it’s turned into an R&B song.
BG: Why is it on this album after all this time?
LC: I think it’s on this album because the track survived. I wouldn’t have put it on the album unless the track had a certain exuberance. I prepared a lot of Red Needles. That’s a cocktail I invented in Needles, California, in 1976. It consists of tequila and cranberry juice and Sprite and fresh-cut fruit. I prepared pitchers of this cocktail for the musicians and we couldn’t stop playing; most of the takes are twenty-five minutes long, and we kept this one because it’s eight minutes long. I did fall down in it; that’s where the guitar solo occurs. It was a very exuberant, passionate evening, and several musicians told me it was the happiest time they ever spent in a recording studio.
BG: Has the way you feel about romantic love changed over the years?
LC: I’m not sure how I felt about it. I’ve never considered myself a romantic person. I find it very difficult to locate sentimentality or nostalgia or that kind of warm passion or potato feeling in myself, so I’m not sure what is meant by romantic love.
BG: I would say, it’s being able to say, “I’ll be loving you always.”
LC: Well, again, just as I’m able to say, “I’ve seen the future, brother, it is murder” with an upbeat dance tune, I can say, “I’ll be loving you always” with a lot of drunken musicians hammering out the tune around me. If you can find the proper landscape in which you can summon these deep feelings, then I think you’re very privileged. I don’t know, given just the man and woman in the room, would I be able to come up with that kind of pledge—“I’ll be loving you always, with a love that’s true always, not for just an hour, not for just a day, not for just a year, but always”? I think we’re all familiar at least with the appetite for that kind of pledge, that commitment.
BG: The reason I ask is it seems in your earlier work, when you talked about romantic love, that it was in contention with the creative process. In order to commune with the angels, you had to leave the woman. There doesn’t seem so much of that in this work.
LC: Well, there certainly was a quarrel of some kind but I think that in many songs, many poems, it was resolved by the presence of the woman. She allowed you—freed you—to pray and I think it’s more that than separation. One hand on her shoulder allowed you to summon other powers with the other hand. The close presence of the woman has always been an element even if it’s in terms of tension or debate or as you say, contention, just as I like to use a woman’s voice in my recording of song. My voice, such as it is, needs all the help it can get. Besides that, the presence of the female voice allows my voice to speak more clearly.
BG: What do you think you say to women—it might be an unfair question—in your lyrics, in your poems?
LC: I think I’ve been saying the same thing from the very beginning. We’re all in the same boat, we’ve entered into this quarrel, into this cage, union, and extremely ambiguous circumstance together and we’re going to sort it out together. That is why I never thought of myself as a romantic poet because I always was very clear from the beginning that this confrontation involves some serious risks to the versions of oneself.
BG: You mean the confrontation between men and women?
LC: Yeah. And it’s always been confrontational. Not in an aggressive sense but in an acknowledging sense that there are some profound differences and it involves serious risks and that these risks are really best acknowledged. And I think that’s the tone of most of the stuff and if the love and passion can transgress that mutual acknowledgment then you do have something that takes off. Either it’s a song or a poem or the moment. But without that, you’ve got the moon-in-June school of writing—though my stuff gets close to the moon-in-June school of writing, but I think it’s that acknowledgment of the risk that rescues it every time.
BG: There’s a song called “Light as the Breeze” in which the woman gives the man in the song a warning where she says, “Drink deeply, pilgrim” …
LC: “… but don’t forget there’s still a woman beneath this resplendent chemise.”
BG: It seems to me that in your earlier lyrics and poems, the women often were too saintly or they were angels of mercy or compassion. To come right out with that kind of almost feminist warning … it seemed like a new voice.
LC: [Contemplating and then beginning slowly.] Perhaps I’m suffering from convenient amnesia as to lines from previous songs…. I know that in this one I say, “You can drink it or you can nurse it, it doesn’t matter how you worship, as long as you’re down on your knees.” I think that’s been my position more or less over the years, and creakily standing up and regretting it and getting down again.
BG: Is it the man who should be down on his knees?
LC: Maybe this is some kind of alibi I’m about to spin, but I’ve never felt that distant from the woman’s position. She’s not outside of my intimate experience. I’ve never felt the woman was an alien creature from my point of view that I had to either overwhelm or glorify. I think that if you’ve experienced yourself as neither man nor woman—think that anyone who sings about these matters has to have that experience and I think everyone has had the experience, in an embrace you’re neither man nor woman—you forget who you are. Once you have experienced yourself as neither man nor woman, when you are reborn into the predetermined form, which you inhabit, you come back with the residue of experience or the residue of wisdom, which enables you to recognize in the other extremely familiar traits.
BG: I’d like to talk about writing here. Especially your novel writing, because you wrote two wildly successful novels that sold over eight hundred thousand copies each, but it’s been twenty-six years now since Beautiful Losers was published, and I wonder why you never returned to the fiction form.
LC: I got lost in the song. I got very involved in the life of music and the lyric and I went to some quite remote places—at a certain point I was only writing Spenserian stanzas to be set to music. I don’t think there’s anyone else in the Western world writing Spenserian stanzas with that very intricate verse form. So I got very interested in the whole lyrical form.
BG: Would you consider yourself a writer of songs before a poet?
LC: Yes, I’m a songwriter.
BG: A lot of people who are interested in the word and rhyme and poetry reject rhyme because it feels like an armature and the perfect word to express what you mean might not rhyme. Do you find that?
LC: No. But I don’t feel any sense of evangelism about the matter. I think that much of the work that is done today in music and songwriting and verse suffers from this unwillingness to submit yourself to the anvil of rhythm and rhyme. It makes it too easy. When you are compelled to find rhymes and to satisfy rhythms, it makes you run through everything you know about the language. It makes you run through word after word after word and test every idea.
BG: In “Waiting for the Miracle,” the miracle is that there is that word, isn’t it?
LC: That’s right. Young songwriters often ask me for advice and all I know is that if you stick with a song long enough, it will yield, but long enough is way beyond any reasonable estimation of what long enough might be. I’m not advising this as a modus operandi for anybody, but I know that the reason I write is to discover the newness of my mind and the newness of my thought. And that can only be discovered when you submit yourself to this process in which you have to defend the words and the lines and the new ideas. Nothing new arises if you’re just allowed to unfold your thought with no tension.
BG: You live in L.A. part of the year, don’t you?
LC: Well, I find myself down there a lot and I’ve been unable to develop a strategy of habitation. Sometimes I’m down there, sometimes I’m in Montreal.
BG: When we up here in Canada think of being a writer in L.A., it seems as if there would be too many distractions, the glamour and the drive-by shootings. Does that affect your work?
LC: I think that L.A. has a very appropriate landscape for my work. It is really, truly an apocalyptic landscape. Geologically, the place is about to fly apart. Socially and politically, we know that it’s erupting every two years, there is real social unrest, and many of the writers who’ve worked there have perceived that this is the place where the destruction of the American psyche is going on in a very discernible manner. I find it a very hospitable place to work.
BG: Stimulating.
LC: It seems to be true. The social contract is fraying. People are not quite certain how to behave with one another. It is up for grabs. I don’t like that part of it. Especially since my daughter’s been living with me, I really have felt that I’d like to get back to Canada.
BG: That’s good. [Considers for a moment.] You seem less world-weary than you did thirty years ago.
LC: I’m in better shape now, too. [Laughs.]
BG: Whatever else you are, you’re undeniably successful. Your albums and your books sell in the hundreds of thousands.
LC: But it often hasn’t been that way, and I’m very grateful now, especially that my songs are being revived by very young bands. That’s always agreeable to see. Especially the song. You don’t mind the book going into the dusty corner, but the song really has an urgency and if it isn’t sung, it’s nowhere.
BG: To what extent do you think the melancholy image of you, true or not, as the tortured spiritual lover and troubadour has added to or detracted from your success?
LC: I don’t know. You live on the front line of your life and as I say, you’re kind of dodging the shrapnel and the missiles most of the time. It’s very difficult to develop an overall strategy about things or a perspective on your life. I have been tortured, I am tortured, we all are tortured. People are living with a kind of intolerable ambiguity about their lives. When you hear politicians speak, you say to yourself, “They don’t seem to have heard the bad news.” It develops a terrible schizophrenia in society between the public utterance and private experience. You just give up thinking anybody’s going to talk to you again from that public realm. That causes the social contract to fray—you don’t know where people stand. Somehow, I felt that part of my job was to own up to this intolerable sense of ambiguity that seems to inform all my activities.
BG: So would you say as much as you can that you are what you write? That you stand by your songs?
LC: I would stand by them. But I’ve been presenting this rap for a long time, which is a catastrophe has taken place, there’s no point in waiting for it, and somehow in the interior plane or the interior landscape a catastrophe has taken place, there is a flood going on.
BG: It’s been going on for thirty years?
LC: It’s been going on a long time—I don’t know when the wave broke the wall. But I do believe we are in this torrent, that the landmarks are down and the lights have gone out and you’re holding on to your orange crate in the torrent and somebody goes by holding on to his broken flagstaff. What is the appropriate behavior in this circumstance? Is it to declare yourself a conservative or a liberal or for abortion or against abortion? Those kinds of descriptions seem to be totally irrelevant to the situation. I prefer my descriptions of myself as they have developed over the years in my songs and books. I think that those descriptions are much more appropriate and, yes, I would stand by them.
THE LONELINESS OF THE LONG-SUFFERING FOLKIE
WAYNE ROBINS | November 22, 1992, Newsday (Long island, New York)
Wayne Robins interviewed Cohen in New York City, at Le Parker Meridien Hotel on West 57th Street. “It was a well-focused, totally engaging conversation,” he told me. “I hadn’t really been a Cohen fan until The Future, which is the project we were discussing, so I was very interested in talking about its beguiling combination of pessimism, nihilism, and hope, as well as its full-bodied musical arrangements.” —Ed.
On his new album, The Future, Leonard Cohen views history’s changing currents with more than a little bit of wariness. “Give me back the Berlin Wall / Give me Stalin and St. Paul / I’ve seen the future, brother, it is murder,” he sings in the title song.
While others assumed that the end of the Cold War would signal the triumph of democracy in Eastern Europe, Cohen wasn’t so sure. There is a song called “Democracy” in which he sees it coming, all right, “through a hole in the air / From those nights in Tiananmen Square … From the fires of the homeless / From the ashes of the gay: Democracy is coming / To the USA.”
“I began to write it when the events in Eastern Europe began to indicate there was a democratic resurrection, and the Berlin Wall came down and people were saying, democracy is coming to the East,” Cohen said last week in a Midtown [New York] hotel suite. “I was one of those people who weren’t entirely convinced that this was going to happen, and that it wasn’t going to come about without a tremendous amount of suffering.”
From the genocidal Civil War in what was once Yugoslavia to the neo-Nazi-tinged violence against foreigners in Germany, events have proven Cohen’s suspicions to be regrettably on the mark. But mixed with caution is the Canadian writer and musician’s optimism about America.
“I was not unaware of the ironic impact of saying, ‘Democracy is coming to the USA,’ but the song is affirmative,” he said. “I just can’t keep my tongue in my cheek that long. I’m Canadian, and we watch America very carefully. Everybody in the world watches America. And regardless of the skepticism and irony, [wise guy] superiority that most intellectual circles have about America, it is acknowledged that this is where the experiment is taking place, where the races are confronting one another, where the rich and poor are confronting one another, where men and women, the classes … this is the great laboratory of democracy.”
Cohen’s interests are only partly external. The fifty-eight-year-old writer, who divides his time between Montreal and Los Angeles, wrestles with shifting emotional states in “Waiting for the Miracle.” “You wouldn’t like it baby, you wouldn’t like it here / There’s not much entertainment, and the critics are severe,” he sings in his husky, seductive growl over a spare but lushly melodic musical track.
“[There are] people who are bitten by this particular bug, where meaning has evaporated and significance has dissolved,” Cohen said. “Many people now confess to me that they inhabit this kind of landscape, where nothing has much taste. I mean, they’re not selling fifty million Prozac pills a week for nothing; we are undergoing some kind of nervous breakdown. And it’s from the point of that nervous breakdown and beyond that the song is written…. I’ve been talking about this catastrophe, this interior catastrophe, for a long time. I find a lot more hospitality to this idea now. So all the songs are about that position, but I think treated vigorously, and if I may say so, cheerfully.”
The courtly Cohen is dressed so impeccably in a designer suit that he makes the typical GQ model look frumpy. Despite his calm bearing and consummate manners, he is no stranger to the apocalyptic emotional struggles his songs describe. The Future took four years to finish.
“I tend to get shattered as I bring a project to completion,” Cohen said. “I have to discard versions of myself, and versions of the songs, until I can get to a situation where I can defend every word, every line. But that place often involves a real shattering of equanimity, or of balance … I have to go to this naked and raw place. And it usually involves the breakdown of my personality, and I flip out…. I can’t go into crowds, I don’t want to leave my house, I don’t want to leave my room, I don’t want to answer the phone, all my relationships collapse.”
When the work is over, Cohen climbs back. “You try slowly to repair your relationships or support system, so you try the Prozac or Deseryl [another antidepressant], or you go to synagogue or the meditation hall, you go back to yoga or start running, whatever repair mode is accessible, you embrace.”
Cohen has been the laureate of creative agony since the 1960s, when he was a celebrated triple threat as poet (The Spic
e-Box of Earth), novelist (Beautiful Losers and The Favorite Game), and singer-songwriter. His songs such as “Suzanne,” “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye,” and “Bird on the Wire” are folk-pop standards.
Though his recording career went through something of an eclipse in the 1970s, he has come back strong in the last decade. Singer Jennifer Warnes had a surprise bestseller in 1986 with the critically acclaimed Famous Blue Raincoat, an album of Cohen material; the often-wry songs of his 1988 album I’m Your Man helped generated a renaissance of Cohen’s own career. Last year, a number of left-of-center rockers released a tribute album of Cohen songs called I’m Your Fan, with appearances by the Pixies, Nick Cave, House of Love, John Cale, and R.E.M., the latter of which contributed a stunning version of “First We Take Manhattan.”
Cohen is philosophical about the attention he’s receiving from a new generation. “You live with wild dreams of yourself and your own importance that are chronically disappointed, and when some of them aren’t you’re pleased,” he said.
Cohen has never married (“I was able to find ideological justification for my fright, which was developed quite extensively in my young manhood,” he said), but has two children. His daughter, eighteen, lives with him in Los Angeles; his son, twenty, attends Syracuse University.
Back in the 1960s, Cohen’s sensitive, passionate writing made him a figure of romantic obsession to young educated women, and he is still, to some, an intellectual sex symbol. In retrospect, he finds it amusing that he was the object of such lust.
“It’s so curious, because I couldn’t get a date,” he said. “I couldn’t find anybody to have dinner with. By the time that first record came out, which rescued me, I was already in such a shattered situation that I found myself living at the Henry Hudson Hotel on West 57th Street, going to the Morn-ingstar Cafe on Eighth Avenue, trying to find some way to approach the waitress and ask her out. I would get letters of longing from around the world, and I would find myself walking the streets of New York at three in the morning, trying to strike up conversations with the women selling cigarettes in hotels. I think it’s always like that. It’s never delivered to you.”
