by Jeff Burger
—from “On the Road, for Reasons Practical and Spiritual,” by
Larry Rohter, the New York Times, February 25, 2009
TV AND RADIO INTERVIEW
JIAN GHOMESHI | April 16, 2009, Q with Jian Ghomeshi, QTV (Quebec), CBC Radio One (Canada)
Cohen followed a good year with an arguably even better one: In 2009, he was touring worldwide and giving some of the best performances of his career. There’s ample evidence of that on Live in London, which Columbia issued in CD and DVD formats on March 31. (And if you want to see just how far Cohen had come as a performer, check out the fascinating but embryonic Live at the Isle of Wight 1970, which was released on CD, DVD, and Blu-ray a little more than six months later, on October 19, 2009.)
Around the time of Live in London’s release, he spoke at his Montreal home with Canadian radio and TV personality Jian Ghomeshi about his current tour, his career, and what he had lately been referring to as his life’s third act. —Ed.
Jian Ghomeshi: Leonard Cohen … it’s a great pleasure to be here with you.
Leonard Cohen: Oh, well, thanks for coming over. I appreciate it.
JG: You’re very generous to let us come and invade your home and sit inside your house. Thank you for this.
LC: You’re most welcome.
JG: I’m thinking about you and your last year. You’ve just returned from India and you’ve played New York and I know you were in L.A. and you’ve been on tour for almost a year now. Does this house that you have owned or been in on and off for thirty-five years represent something of a haven, a retreat for you?
LC: Well, I think everybody’s home does, but yes. I’m very happy to come back here.
JG: What do you do when you first get back to this house?
LC: Change the light bulbs. [Laughs.]
JG: But this is the cozy retreat?
LC: Yeah. My kids were brought up here a good part of the time. My grandchild comes here. I have a washing machine that everybody in the neighborhood uses.
JG: Still?
LC: Mmm hmm.
JG: You ever consider giving the house up?
LC: Well, you do from time to time. A Montreal house takes a lot of care. You’ve got to worry about pipes freezing and roofs leaking, so sometimes I think I’m not here long enough to justify the care it takes but that feeling evaporates as soon as I come into the place.
JG: Tell me about this tour, this journey that you’ve been on. It started around May of last year. It continues. You’re doing a bunch more dates coming up. You seem to be having a good time onstage. You just played the Beacon Theatre in New York for three hours plus. You did the same thing when you were here in Montreal last summer. What have you learned being back onstage for the first time in fifteen years?
LC: It’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks, as you know. I don’t know if I’ve learned anything but I’ve been grateful that it’s going well. I’ve got good musicians, great singers, and hospitable audiences and it seems to be going well. You can’t ever guarantee that it’s going to continue going well because there’s a component that you really don’t command in these affairs.
JG: What component is that?
LC: Some sort of grace, some sort of luck, some sort of spirit that informs the enterprise. It’s hard to put your finger on it and you don’t really want to put your finger on it. But there is that mysterious component that makes for a memorable evening. And somehow we’ve been lucky or graced to have that kind of evening that means something to you more than the fact that you’ve just done another concert. We’ll be doing our hundredth concert in Austin and then we’ve got another hundred to go. And that’ll take us to the end of October probably.
JG: Have you been surprised by just how well this tour has done? It’s not the greatest of moments economically for artists who are touring. And you of course are a musical legend. You’re known around the world but it’s not just in New York and in Montreal and in Los Angeles that the shows are doing well. You’re selling out shows in Saskatoon, in Victoria, and in London, Ontario. You’re an urban Jewish kid from Montreal who in 2009 is selling out all over the place. What do you make of that?
LC: Well, beyond a general sense of gratitude I don’t really analyze the mechanism. I’m just happy that it’s going well. Because, as you know as a musician yourself, you never know what’s going to happen when you step on the stage. You never know whether you’ll be able to be the person that you want to be or that the audience is going to be hospitable to the person that they perceive. So there are so many unknowns and so many mysteries connected. That’s even when you’ve brought the show to a certain degree of excellence. Everybody’s well rehearsed, everybody knows the tunes, but still you never know what’s going to happen.
JG: I want to ask you about where you’re at in life. In 2001 in the Observer newspaper, you referred to this stage of your life as the third act and you quoted Tennessee Williams as saying life is a fairly well-written play except for the third act. You were sixty-seven when you said that. You’re seventy-four now. Does that ring more or less true for you still?
LC: Well, the beginning of the third act seems to be very, very well written. But the end of the third act, of course, when the hero dies [laughs]—each person considering himself the central figure of his own drama— that, generally speaking from what one can observe, can be rather tricky. My friend Irving Layton said it’s not death that he’s worried about—it’s the preliminaries.
JG: Are you worried about the preliminaries?
LC: Sure. Every person ought to be.
JG: Let me come back to that. If you’re accepting the third-act role, let’s go back to the first act for a second. Maybe not actually to the beginning of the first act. I want to pick up at the beginning of your musical career because something that’s very interesting about you as a singer and a musician is that by the time you started professionally singing, you weren’t a teenager—you were a man in your early thirties and you made this decision … of course, you’re well known as a writer and a poet [by then] but this was a brand-new career for you that you were starting in your thirties. How fearful were you of starting a second career at that point?
LC: Well, I’ve been generally fearful about everything so this just fits in with the general sense of anxiety that I always experienced in my early life. When you say I had a career as a writer or a poet, that hardly begins to describe the modesty of the enterprise in Canada at that time. We often mimeographed our books. An edition of two hundred was considered a bestseller in poems. So one had a vocation, one had some kind of calling, but you couldn’t properly call it a career. At a certain point, I realized that I’m gonna have to buckle down and make a living. I didn’t really know how to do this. I’d written a couple of novels and they’d been well received but they’d sold maybe three thousand copies.
JG: Award winning …
LC: Well, some of them won an award or two and the reviews were good but the sales were very, very limited. So I really had to do something and the only other thing I knew how to do was play guitar. So I was on my way down to Nashville. I loved country music. I thought maybe I’d get a job playing guitar. And I’d been in Greece for a long time. I was kind of out of touch with what was going on. When I hit New York I bumped into what later was called the folksong renaissance. There were people like Judy Collins and Dave Van Ronk and Dylan and Joan Baez. There were wonderful singers around and I hadn’t heard their work. That touched me very much because I’d always been writing little songs myself too but I never thought there was any marketplace for them.
JG: Some people would think it’s ironic to go into music to make money given that it’s not necessarily the most lucrative of professions for most artists either.
LC: No, in hindsight it seems to be the height of folly to resolve your economic crisis by becoming a folksinger. I had not much of a voice either. I didn’t play that great guitar either. I don’t know how these things happen in life. Luck has so much to do
with success and failure.
JG: People talk about the fact that you’ve written songs that you’ve almost grown into as you get older—that you were writing beyond your years, and performing so, when you started your music career. Did that have something to do with the fact that it wasn’t happening when you were seventeen—it was happening when you were in your midthirties? In other words, how did starting a musical career in your thirties inform what you were writing and presenting?
LC: I always had the notion that I had a tiny garden to cultivate. I never thought I was really one of the big guys so the work that was in front of me was just to cultivate this tiny corner of the field that I thought I knew something about, which was something to do with self-investigation without self-indulgence. I never liked the latter too much as a mode. Just pure confession I never felt was really interesting but confession filtered through a tradition of skill and hard work is interesting to me. So that was my tiny corner and I just started writing about the things that I thought I knew about or that I wanted to find out about. So that was how it began. I wanted the songs to sound like everybody else’s songs. I was very much influenced by women’s background voices.
JG: You were influenced by women’s background voices?
LC: Yes, I liked those songs that had that feel. Those are the songs of the fifties. So those were the sounds I wanted to try to reproduce. Also, my own voice sounded so disagreeable to me when I listened to it that I really needed the sweetening of women’s voices behind me.
JG: Are you over that—your voice sounding disagreeable?
LC: No, not at all. Not yet. Maybe a bit later.
JG: You say … you’ve always been fearful of everything. When did you give yourself permission to think of yourself as and call yourself a legitimate singer and musician?
LC: Well, you cycle through these feelings of anxiety and confidence. If something goes well in one’s life, one feels the benefits of the success. When something doesn’t go well one feels remorse. So those activities persist in one’s life right to this moment.
JG: Meaning there’s days you still don’t feel legitimate?
LC: Legitimacy is another question. I have a strong sense that I exist. So that’s as legitimate as I need to be but when you’re out there in front of the public you’re going to get a whole lot of responses and at this stage of the game I have a pretty thick skin. I prefer praise to criticism but I’m really ready for both.
JG: Sticking with that first act but moving into the second part of it, into the seventies, you become quite prolific, you put out a few records…. A lot of the songs that you write seem inspired by, written for, or written about women. I’m thinking of Suzanne, I’m thinking of Marianne. You’ve spoken with such awe at the beauty and power of the women who’ve inspired you. Have the women in your life been a source of your strength or weakness?
LC: Good question for every man. It’s not a level playing ground for either of us, for either the man or the woman. Love is the most challenging activity that humans get into. We have the sense that we can’t live without love, that life has very little meaning without love. So we’re invited into this very dangerous arena where the possibilities for humiliation and failure are ample. So there’s no fixed lesson that one can learn about the thing because the heart is always opening and closing. It’s always softening and hardening. We’re always experiencing joy or sadness so there’s no jackpot in the whole enterprise. You’re either going to have the courage [or not], because after a certain amount of time, the accumulation of defeats in this realm are going to be significant. So I think people that—in spite of the defeat, in spite of the impossibility of establishing reasonable contacts with the other—are fortunate enough to be able to continue to do that are indeed fortunate. But there are lots of people that close down. And there are times in one’s life when one has to close down just to regroup.
JG: Are there times when you’ve lamented the power that women have had over you?
LC: I never looked at it that way. There’s times when I’ve lamented, there’s times when I’ve rejoiced, there’s times when I’ve been deeply indifferent. You run through the whole gamut of experience but for each other, men for women, women for men, and we are the content of each other. And most men have a woman in their heart and most women have a man in their heart. There are people that don’t. There are monks that don’t. But most of us cherish some sort of dream of surrender. But these are dreams and sometimes they’re defeated and sometimes they’re manifested.
JG: It seems like an obvious question but do you think love is empowering?
LC: It’s a ferocious activity where you would experience defeat and you experience acceptance and you experience exultation. And a fixed idea about it will definitely cause you a great deal of suffering. If you have the feeling that it’s going to be an easy ride, you’re going to be disappointed. If you have a feeling that it’s going to be hell all the way, you may be surprised.
JG: You were coming to the fore of the public imagination at a time of free love, a great time of sexual liberation, and you famously had a lot of powerful relationships with different women. Do you regret at times not having a lifelong partner? [Cohen begins singing Edith Piaf’s “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien.”] Not at all?
LC: No. I don’t have a sense of my life as a story that was written and that I’m reading. I’m not a sentimental guy. I’m blessed with a certain amount of amnesia and I really don’t remember what went down. I know that it’s engraved in some kind of cellular level and it’s operating and it’s there but I don’t review my life that way.
JG: I want to move into the second act and ask you about some of the difficult times you had. You’ve talked about clinical depression that you had and I’m thinking about the 1990s, even in the face of a very successful record that you made in 1992, The Future. Do you think dealing with depression was an important part of your creative process?
LC: Well, it was a part of every process. It was the central activity of my days and nights. It was dealing with a prevailing sense of anxiety, distress, a background of anguish that prevailed.
JG: How important was writing to your survival?
LC: It had a number of benefits. One was economic. It wasn’t a luxury for me to write, it was a necessity. But in writing, if you can discard the slogans that naturally come to you, especially in a highly politicized time like we are [in] now, where gender politics and regular politics and environmental politics … where there’s a good thing to say about everything if you’re on the right side. These times are very difficult to write in because the slogans really are jamming the airwaves. So writing is a very good way—
JG: What do you mean by the slogans?
LC: Well, what is right, what is the good position. It’s something that goes beyond what has been called “political correctness.” It’s a kind of tyranny of a posture. A kind of tyranny that exists today of what the right thing should be. So those ideas are swarming through the air today like locusts. And it’s difficult for the writer to determine what he really thinks about things, what he really feels about things. So in my own case, I have to write the verse and then see if it’s a slogan or not and then toss it. But I can’t toss it until I’ve worked on it and seen what it really is. So I [employ the] process of writing the verse and discarding it until I get down to something that doesn’t sound like a slogan, that doesn’t sound like something that’s easy, that surprises me.
JG: If you think about those difficult times—and you can do that now through the lens of what seems to be a pretty positive place you’re in today—what do you consider your darkest hour?
LC: I wouldn’t tell you about it if I knew. Nothing comes to mind. I dare not … even to talk about oneself in a time like this is a kind of unwholesome luxury. There’s so much suffering right now. To talk about my darkest hour in the face of what’s going on in most of the places in the world now seems to be an area that leaves me quite indifferent. I don’t think I’ve
had a darkest hour compared to the dark hours that so many people are involved in right now. Large numbers of people are dodging bombs, having their nails pulled out in dungeons, facing starvation, disease. Large numbers of people. So I think we’ve really got to be circumspect about how seriously we take our own anxieties today.
JG: Well, let me ask you what you would tell others. You’re famously mentioned in Kurt Cobain’s song, “Pennyroyal Tea”: “Give me Leonard Cohen afterworld so I can sigh eternally.” After he committed suicide in the nineties, you said you wished you had spoken to him, that you might have been able to “lay something on him.” What would you have said to Kurt Cobain?
LC: I don’t know what I would say to him but the sense of solitude and hopelessness that comes out of that sense of isolation could probably have been penetrated by a certain kind of company, just a certain kind of sympathetic company. But you can read the life you’re living but you cannot change a word.
JG: You’ve been musing on your own mortality in your lyrics for some time now. I’m thinking back to 1988 and “Tower of Song” where you famously wrote, “My friends are gone, my hair is gray / I ache in the places where I used to play.” That was twenty years ago. How much do you reflect upon your own mortality now?
LC: You get a sense of it. The body sends a number of messages to you as you get older. I don’t know if it’s a matter of reflection. That implies a kind of peaceful recognition of the situation. Occasionally there’s a stab of pain or an ache and you remember that this is not going to go on forever. But I’m not really given to reflection on those. My friend Irving Layton was very concerned with immortality and posterity. And as I read his work now, I think that he will achieve what he wanted, which was not an eternal life based on his work but certainly an extended life. But I never had those concerns.
JG: A couple of decades ago, in a CBC interview, you were asked, “What are you more sure of now than when you were a teenager?” And you said, “Death.” [Laughs.] You have been thinking about it for a while. So are you more sure now?
