Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen

by Jeff Burger

  No need to worry. Even against the vacuous decor, Cohen has more individuality than a thumbprint. “How are you, man?” he says, opening the door, then turning around to search the room for a match to relight his pipe. In profile, he reveals clues to his age. The well-tailored clothes hang loosely on him; at sixty-seven, he’s also acquired a noticeable stoop. The long facial creases arcing downward from either side of his nose have grown into dark parentheses that contain a soft, enigmatic smile. He’s dressed in his familiar uniform: dark double-breasted suit, grey shirt with dark striped tie, black slip-on shoes. The hair is more salt than pepper and cut short. But it’s not the military buzz he was sporting during his six years at a Zen monastery on Mount Baldy, just outside of Los Angeles, where he engaged in what he calls “a study of friendship” with an aging monk, Joshu Sasaki Roshi.

  Cohen secures a match and lights up. The dense aroma of pipe tobacco hangs like incense in the room. I feel a little as if I’ve come to the mountaintop to visit the guru. He is wearing sunglasses—big, graded-tint aviator lenses in plastic frames—even though he’s in a windowless hotel room, and until quite recently alone.

  Suddenly, it occurs to me that a hotel is the perfect place to interview Leonard Cohen. After all, this is the man who starred in a film called I Am a Hotel and penned a Byronic ode to Janis Joplin and an unmade bed in a room at New York’s Chelsea. Hotels are the other mountains in his life. He might just feel more at home here in the Hotel Vogue than in his own house.

  Puffing away, Cohen doffs the shades and we sit down at a table where he tells me about the challenges of conducting a recent European press tour—giving more than one hundred interviews—while mastering the final tracks on his latest album, Ten New Songs.

  Cohen may have come down from the mountain, but the mountain is still in the music. Starting with the very Zen title, there’s a spareness to the entire project, as if he were trying to starve his songs down to a bare skeleton of notes and broken syllables. “I smile when I’m angry,” he sings on “In My Secret Life.” “I cheat and I lie / I do what I have to do to get by.” The austere production of Various Positions and I’m Your Man—Euro-disco synths, drum machine, and an angelic chorus of backing vocals—is back, as is the voice ravaged by a fierce regimen of excess, really no more these days than a gruff whisper from the basement (or as he likes to say, “almost an octave more serious”).

  Not that he needs to worry about the pop charts. Call it the Woody Allen factor. In an industry of one-hit wonders, Leonard Cohen is more than an oddity. He’s a miracle: a senior citizen with carte blanche to record just about anything he wants and release it to an adoring and loyal fan base scattered around the world. (More than three hundred people have registered for a conference dedicated to Cohen next summer on the Greek island of Hydra, which the poet himself is unlikely to attend.) Sharon Robinson, Cohen’s producer and musical collaborator on the new album, puts it this way, “There was no input at all from the record company. Leonard has a lot of autonomy when it comes to his career.”

  How to explain his good fortune? It’s certainly not his prolific pace. To update an observation made by the literary critic Stephen Scobie, Leonard Cohen is a singer who hasn’t issued a new studio album for nine years, a poet who hasn’t published a new collection for seventeen years, and a novelist who hasn’t written a new novel for thirty-six years. Part of the reason is that he’s damn picky. It is well known that Cohen went through five hundred revisions of the words to “Take This Waltz” (from I’m Your Man) before finally recording it; he has been working for years on many of the lyrics for Ten New Songs (a process he calls “blackening pages”). A single line can tie him up in knots for weeks. Given this kind of monkish devotion, it isn’t shocking that Cohen’s lyrics attain the exalted status of poetry. What perhaps should be more surprising is that they also succeed as great love songs, the kind you might find yourself humming along with on the radio.

  My tape recorder isn’t working.

  Engaging in some light banter about the weather, I try to look casual as I whack the machine against the table. The combination of a late summer heat wave and the lack of air-conditioning in Cohen’s Montreal residence made it necessary to meet at the hotel. “You’re a citizen of Mountain Street once again,” I say, slipping in a reference to his second novel, Beautiful Losers.

  “I used to live at the top of Mountain Street,” says Cohen. (I whack the machine again.)

  “By Sherbrooke?” (Whack.) I’m starting to get some idea of how hot it must be at Cohen’s place.

  “No, no,” he says. (Whack. Whack.) “Above Sherbrooke.”

  “Oh, on the actual mountain,” I say, breaking into a cold sweat. Air-conditioning be damned, I’m dying in here. So is my machine. I blurt out an apology and bumble through the standard idiot’s checklist: switch batteries, examine the tape, wiggle moving parts.

  “That’s OK, man,” says Cohen. “Check it out. Take your time.” He gets up to pour another coffee, then sits down and relights his pipe. My machine is back together; I take a breath and hit “rec.”

  Cohen leans forward slightly. “Let’s test it,” he says. “One, two.” Then it dawns on me: somehow the voice-activated recording switch has been turned on. The mike isn’t picking up Cohen’s whispery bass. I flip off the switch. “One of my recurring nightmares,” I say, “is that I get through an interview, then find out later that the machine wasn’t working.”

  “I had a similar experience a long time ago,” says Cohen, “when I was interviewing Glenn Gould for Esquire magazine. This was before the days of tape recorders. Gould was famously reluctant to do interviews, but he accepted me as an interviewer. He had his gloves on and he was very, very courteous, and we began to talk.

  “The conversation got heated,” he continues, “and I put my pen down. I thought, ‘I’m going to remember everything he says because it’s really fascinating.’ We talked for a couple of hours and I thought, I’ve really got this nailed. Then I went back to my apartment on Mountain Street and I couldn’t remember a thing. Esquire phoned me a few days later and said, ‘How did it go?” I said, ‘I’m working on it.’ Then they started phoning me every second day. Then every day. And then I stopped answering the phone. I think I had to return the advance.”

  We laugh, then Cohen crosses the room to pour himself another coffee. I seize the moment to bring up an observation attributed to Irving Layton, his longtime avuncular drinking buddy. Once at a dinner party in Montreal, I say, Layton asked, “Do you know what the problem with Leonard Cohen is?” His answer? “Leonard Cohen is a narcissist who hates himself.” Cohen laughs at the bon mot. “That’s good,” he says. “But I think Irving may have been talking about himself there.”

  It was Saint Augustine who wrote, “I am a problem to myself,” but it might as well have been Cohen. In interviews, he often defines the human condition as “a gathering around a perplexity.” Accordingly, the subject matter and primary concern of each of his fourteen albums, nine books of poetry, and two novels is always the same: Leonard Cohen. His art can be read as the transcript of an extended interview with himself, a kind of spiritual journalism in which the poet addresses his attention to the confrontation with love and its loss.

  It’s gotten him a bit of a reputation along the way. “Prince of bummers,” “poet of pessimism,” “troubadour of travail,” “the Dr. Kevorkian of song”—journalists can’t seem to get enough of the cliché of the dark knight, the tortured soul spinning his suffering into gold. But the gloomy picture does not match the man today—if it ever did. Increasingly, Cohen’s depression and the inner conflicts that marked his earlier days are being replaced by a sense of ease with the world and with himself; the dystopic prophet who recorded The Future has finally come to terms with his exile on main street. Recently, Cohen allowed one of his self-portraits to be posted on his unofficial Web site, leonardcohenfiles.com. It depicts the aging poet in a mournful, ironic pose above the words “happy at last.”
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  Are the anxious days behind? “For the moment,” he answers. “You never write the end. But yes, I’m in a graceful period now. My kids are well [son Adam, twenty-nine, and daughter Lorca, twenty-seven], my work’s going well, my friends seem to be OK for the moment.” Cohen’s close collaboration on the new album with Sharon Robinson, who wrote all of the music—a first for Cohen—suggests that the notorious perfectionist is at a place where he is ready to relinquish some control over his creative process. Lyrically, Robinson says, there’s a sense of reconciliation and peace in his songs that wasn’t there before. On “Here It Is,” he sings, “May everyone live, and may everyone die. Hello, my love, and my love, good-bye.”

  “I had a lovely moment with Irving recently,” says Cohen. (Good moments are few these days with Layton, who is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.) “We were having a smoke and he said, ‘Leonard, have you noticed that you have declined in your sexual interests?’ He’s eighty-nine. So I said, ‘I have, Irving.’ He said, ‘I’m relieved to hear that.’ I said, ‘So I take it, Irving, that you also have observed some decline in your own sexual interests.’ He said, ‘Yes, Leonard, I have.’ I said, ‘When did you first begin to notice this decline in your sexual interests?’ He said, ‘Oh, about the age of sixteen or seventeen.’”

  In interviews, Cohen has the frustrating habit of repeating stories verbatim, and this one has been getting regular rotation. But it illustrates an important shift in the poet’s concerns: as Cohen’s sexual interests begin to wane, they have been replaced by another love, a desire to live closer to the deep, silent waters that feed a love “a thousand kisses deep,” as he sings on one of the new tunes. The monk known on Mount Baldy as Jikan, “Silent One,” is singing love songs to the silence, “the common and current stillness that resides at the center of all things.”

  I ask him if he has a favorite book of the Bible. “I like Isaiah,” he says, “especially the first chapters. I love the Psalms.” Cohen explains that one of his new songs, “By the Rivers Dark,” was inspired by Psalm 137, the one that begins, “By the rivers of Babylon.” Suddenly, the poet of pleasure is quoting the scriptures of exile: “‘If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right arm forget its cunning and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I set not Jerusalem above my deepest joy.’ But I say the opposite,” he continues. “Be the truth unsaid and the blessings gone, if I forget my Babylon.”

  It’s all very heretical. Can you be a good Jew and love Babylon? “Well,” he says, “the Talmud was written in Babylon. A lot of good Jews lived and wrote and thought and prayed there. And that’s where we are—we’re on Boogie Street. We’re in Babylon. I think it’s appropriate to live completely where you are and not reserve some mythical or spiritual refuge as an alternative. That can produce a kind of dangerous spiritual schizophrenia. We have to make it here; we have to make Jerusalem in Babylon.”

  He leans back a little in his chair. “Something like that,” he says, raising his hand to wave away the air of seriousness that has filled the room like the smoke curling up from his pipe. “I say it better in the song: ‘Kiss my lips and then it’s done, I’m back on Boogie Street.’ As Roshi says, you can’t live in paradise. No restaurants or toilets.”

  That’s a good thing, because Cohen has drained a carafe of coffee in under an hour. “Just gonna take a leak,” he says, sprinting to the bathroom. The slow, labored sounds coming from behind the door punctuate the longer stretches of silence, and I’m reminded of an old Cohen tune, “Paper Thin Hotel,” from Death of a Ladies’ Man. Cohen reemerges, and we make our way out of the room and into the elevator. The doors close, then open, and we spill out into the anonymous, profane cacophony of the hotel lobby to say our good-byes. He shakes my hand and then it’s done, I’m back on Mountain Street.

  THE PRINCE OF PRURIENCE AND LOSS

  JOHN LELAND | November 2001, GQ (US)

  John Leland’s Cohen profile includes evidence of the singer’s penchant for retelling stories: You’ve already heard the Irving Layton joke that opens this piece, as well as a few of the other anecdotes. But keep reading. Leland offers some fresh insights, and so does his subject. —Ed.

  Two O.G.’s were talking about sex, and one of them was Leonard Cohen. It was October of last year, and Cohen had paid a call on his old friend, the writer Irving Layton. Layton, who is now eighty-nine and in poor health, is Canada’s most celebrated poet and until recently its alpha rake—earthy, literary, Jewish, horny, a beacon for younger writers and obsessives of the flesh such as Cohen. Leonard, Layton asked, have you noticed a decline in your sexual activity?

  In the kitchen of his house in Montreal, Cohen smiles now to recount the conversation. His own amatory legend, which he likes to downplay, includes liaisons with Joni Mitchell, Janis Joplin, and Rebecca De Mornay, among others, and verses that do not flinch at naming body parts or private acts. His eyes are serious, his voice playfully light. This is Leonard Cohen, poet of the sad song, telling a joke. “I said, ‘Well, I have, Layton. And I take it that you also have observed some decline in your sexual interest?’ Yes, the elder poet had as well. So Cohen asked him when he first noticed the decline. “He said, ‘Oh, maybe when I was sixteen or seventeen.’”

  Strictly speaking, this is the punch line, but Cohen does not leave it alone. “I think with all human creatures it’s downhill,” he continues, descending into darker, more familiar territory of bummer and rue. “One is seized by the rage for a number of years, and then the rest of the world begins to intrude and assert itself.”

  For thirty-five years, since Judy Collins recorded his mournful ballad “Suzanne,” Leonard Cohen has cut a worldly, burdened figure through the literary quadrants of pop music, engaging the big questions—sex, salvation, worth—in plainspoken rhyme that has earned him admirers as distant as Nick Cave and Neil Diamond. He is a badass of dark verse. He has come to Montreal, from his main home on the outskirts of South Central Los Angeles, to talk about his new album, titled, with typical austerity, Ten New Songs, and about the journey that produced it.

  He wears his gray hair short and pushed forward. A striped tie hangs loosely around a gray silk shirt already damp in the unseasonable heat. The album, which came out October 9, is his first since he checked into a mountain Zen monastery in 1994, emerging, with little explanation, five years later. Like his previous twelve recordings, the new one is filled with finely wrought lyrics of obsession and incompletion. He has also published two novels and nine books of poetry that are even more unflinching than his music. Scattered across forty-five years, these works have brought him pockets of adulation, comparisons to the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, and tribute albums from alternative rockers and Slovakian girl bands—and, above all, a haphazard path that by now qualifies as a long and sustaining career.

  Over a breakfast of strong coffee and cigarettes, he shows me a poem he wrote in the monastery, around the time he was thinking about coming down. It begins, “I’ve become thin and beautiful again …”

  We are in for a long talk.

  The home in Montreal is a modest row house in the old immigrant quarter, sparsely genteel, next door to a Zen center Cohen helped found, with photographs of his son, Adam, twenty-nine, who is a singer-songwriter, and daughter, Lorca, twenty-six, a painter and sculptor, on display. The house is comfortable but underused. When Cohen first left this city, at twenty-two, he did so as a celebrated Canadian poet, hoping to storm the Beat poetry and folk music scenes developing in downtown New York. After a couple of fizzled starts, he remembers landing in Max’s Kansas City, where a young man named Lou Reed introduced him to the luminaries of the Warhol crowd. Cohen had just published his prodigiously bleak 1966 novel, Beautiful Losers, which was a commercial failure at the time, though it has since gone on to sell a million copies. The gamesmanship at Max’s got heated; Cohen felt cut. Finally, Reed said to him, “You don’t have to take anything from these assholes, you wrote Beautiful Losers.” Though he never fully abandoned Montre
al, he keeps the house mainly so his children will have a connection with the city where they grew up. He has never mentioned Montreal in a song. (In a telling contrast, according to the Web site leonardcohenfiles.com, he has used the word “naked” seventeen times.)

  Two portraits in the house could serve as guideposts to Cohen’s sojourn from the city’s tight Jewish community—which produced the late Mordecai Richler, Layton, and A. M. Klein, among others—to his unlikely status, in late middle age, as a part-time pop star and full-time soul man. The first is of a seventeenth-century Mohawk girl named [Kateri and baptised as] Catherine Tekakwitha, whose oppressive virginity and bid for sainthood figure in Beautiful Losers. The other portrait is of an elderly Zen teacher named Joshu Sasaki Roshi, who has been Leonard’s spiritual advisor since the 1970s. From different sides, the two pictures address the idea of carnal quiet toward which Cohen’s writings have steadfastly groped. Tekakwitha shines with chaste incandescence; Roshi grins in slurry satisfaction beside a half-empty bottle of wine.

  A little more than seven years ago, Cohen decided he needed a change of place, not just physical but spiritual. He was ending a tour in support of an album called The Future, a corrosive look at decline on a broad scale, and ending a love affair with Rebecca De Mornay. (A rhyme from the album’s title track ran, “Destroy another fetus now / We don’t like children anyhow.”) He removed himself to a Buddhist monastery sixty-five hundred feet up on Mount Baldy, in the San Gabriel Mountains outside Los Angeles, and to the teachings of Roshi. Cohen had been to the monastery before, for short periods, but this trip was different. Though he makes little of the circumstances, he says that even at the time, he knew he would be there for years. “It sounds dramatic, and I suppose I could put a dramatic spin on it if I were interested in self-dramatization,” he says, “but it was a very natural unfolding. I was close to sixty, my old teacher was close to ninety, and I thought it would be appropriate to spend some time with him.”