The Lyrics of
LEONARD
COHEN
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Introduction
Leonard Cohen claimed that as a young man he had turned from writing poetry to writing songs as a way of making money. Looking back on this career move he wryly acknowledged the foolishness of such a plan. Nevertheless, he did eventually become wealthy in the music business before being cheated out of his retirement fund by a dishonest manager. Even this catastrophe had benign consequences, obliging him to start touring again in his seventies to great acclaim and triggering a long and triumphant final chapter in a distinguished career.
All of this was prefigured some 40 years earlier in the circumstances surrounding his famous song ‘Suzanne’ which started life as a 1966 poem, ‘Suzanne Takes You Down’ and became a 1967 song to be included on his first album and released as a single. In time, it would become one of his most covered songs. He claimed the song had been stolen from him (‘Someone smarter than me got me to sign the publishing over to them’) but concluded that this was perhaps fitting since its subject, Suzanne Verdal, had been another man’s wife. In fact she was the partner of a Québécois artist Armand Vaillancourt at the time Cohen enjoyed his platonic trysts with her in ‘her place by the (St. Lawrence) River’.
Cohen was born in 1934 to a middle-class Jewish family in Montréal. His parents were Marsha (née Klonitsky) and Nathan Cohen, the proprietor of a clothing store. Leonard’s progress through local elementary and high schools was engaged but unremarkable. Musically he had been much influenced by his mother’s singing of Russian melodies around the house. He learned to play acoustic guitar, first flamenco style then classical, although the amateur band he organised while at school was a country-folk outfit called The Buckskin Boys. At McGill University he was president of the debating society but a post-graduate course at Columbia University left him unsatisfied, so he left New York and returned to Montréal in 1957.
Cohen soon moved from Montréal to London and then to the Greek island of Hydra, writing poetry and prose in a cheap house he bought there. He had enjoyed some international success with his poems and with two novels, The Favorite Game and the sexually explicit Beautiful Losers. In Hydra his muse was Marianne Ihlen, a Norwegian he had met on the island and her influence would permeate both his literary output and his emergent song writing. Of the ten songs on his first album, Songs Of Leonard Cohen (1967), the one most obviously influenced by her was ‘So Long, Marianne’, a romantically philosophical farewell which he wrote when they parted. In fact he was devastated by the break-up and so perhaps ‘Hey, That’s No Way To Say Goodbye’ from the same album better captured his mood. Marianne also sparked the image of ‘Bird On The Wire’, first a poem and later a song to appear his second album, Songs From A Room (1969). She had casually likened birds perching on a newly-installed telephone wire in Hydra as resembling notes on a musical staff. Leonard Cohen, it was clear, always needed muses. ‘Sisters Of Mercy’, from the first album, was the result of Cohen offering two young women backpackers refuge in his hotel room during an Edmonton snowstorm. They slept in his bed while he spent the night in an armchair and wrote the song which he played for them when they woke next morning. Over the years there would be many inspirational lovers some of whom became collaborators.
When Cohen finally left Hydra he was determined to try to make a living as a songwriter. Back in North America the ex-Buckskin Boy first headed straight for Nashville, Tennessee, the home of country music. He has since said that he simply thought that Nashville was where the songwriters lived. In any case was soon tempted away from it by cosmopolitan New York. He became loosely attached to Andy Warhol’s Factory milieu but in the end, it was folk singer Judy Collins’ recording of ‘Suzanne’ that kick-started his career in music. Cohen started to perform at folk festivals and eventually Columbia’s John H. Hammond gave him a record deal. In 1970 Cohen began a relationship with artist Suzanne Elrod with whom he would have two children, a son Adam and a daughter Lorca.
After the first two Columbia albums had put him on the map as a seductively thoughtful folk-ish performer, the third, Songs Of Love and Hate (1971) seemed tinged with more abrasive emotions. ‘Avalanche’ was a compellingly spare but opaque song featuring Cohen’s distinctive Spanish guitar playing, but the standout track was ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’. It consisted of thoughts on a love triangle and was structured like a sorrowful letter, perhaps to a brother, a love rival or perhaps to himself. Cohen’s liner notes declared that the raincoat in question had really existed; it was a Burberry he had bought in London in 1959. ‘It hung more heroically when I took out the lining’ he wrote. ‘And achieved glory when the frayed sleeves were repaired with a little leather. Things were clear. I knew how to dress in those days’.
New Skin For The Old Ceremony, Cohen’s fourth studio album, was released in 1974 and represented a move towards a more orchestrated sound even as the songs became, variously, more confessional (‘Chelsea Hotel #2’), more liturgical (‘Who By Fire’) and more enigmatic (‘Lover, Lover, Lover’). Cohen was now 40 and his fascination with the complementary and antagonistic nature of the carnal and the spiritual was never more obvious than in this album with its sleeve illustration depicting a sexual coupling on a celestial cloud. ‘Chelsea Hotel #2’ told of a hotel bedroom encounter with Janis Joplin, and Cohen later came to regret ever making the late singer’s identity public; he simply saw it as a lapse of manners on his part. ‘Who By Fire’ is a hypnotic laundry list of different ways to die set to the Hebrew melody for the prayer Unetanneh Tokef sung at the noontime service of the High Holy Days. ‘Lover, Lover, Lover’ sets off a repetitive and maddeningly catchy lover’s plea to come back against howls of spiritual anxiety. Leonard Cohen, never one to flinch at the uncomfortable, was getting darker by the album even as his voice got deeper. At about this time his popularity started to wane, particularly among audiences who had not been born when he first arrived on the music scene, a man already in his early thirties.
Death Of A Ladies’ Man (1977) was an ill-judged bid to revive his commercial fortunes by means of a collaboration with producer Phil Spector, an episode that turned into a famous psychodrama. The result won Cohen the worst reviews of his career.
In contrast Recent Songs (1979) steadied the ship even if it was never in danger of setting the album charts alight. With the sort of positive review unlikely to send record buyers flocking to the stores, The New York Times said that Cohen’s latest album supplied ‘an ideal musical idiom for his idiosyncrasies’.
By 1984 the prospect of a new Leonard Cohen album failed to enthuse even his own record label. Sony refused to put out Various Positions in the US on the grounds that it wasn’t good enough. The company president allegedly called Cohen, saying ‘Look, Leonard; we know you're great, but we don't know if you're any good’. Perhaps Cohen’s sudden fondness for a Casio keyboard instead of a Spanish guitar had something to do with executive ambivalence. In any case an independent label picked up the album and it sold respectably, making the top ten in Spain, Portugal, and Scandinavia, and doing quite well in the UK. Ironically it contained what would become Leonard Cohen’s most recorded song of all – ‘Hallelujah’. Cohen wrote some 80 verses before paring ‘Hallelujah’ down to manageable size. His principal preoccupations – religion, sex and redemption – were all distilled into an elegant variation on the four-chord trick embellished with playful rhymes for the title word. It was already a truly great song well before John Cale, Jeff Buckley, Allison Crowe, Rufus Wainwright, Alexandra Burke and innumerable movies and TV shows featured it. Even Cohen himself has gently speculated that perhaps too many people sing it.
So Various Positions, that rejected seventh album, should have been the start of a revival in the fortunes and reputation of Leonard Cohen who had not recorded anything during the previous five years, working instead on other projects and visiting his children in the south of France. The album that Sony spurned became a curio despite being in the opinion of some people one of his best for years. As well as ‘Hallelujah’ it contained the deceptively jaunty tune ‘Heart With No Companion’ which begins ‘Now I greet you from the other side/ of sorrow and despair/ with a love so vast and so shattered, it will reach you everywhere’. You want it darker? ‘Dance Me To The End Of Love’ sounds like a musical love letter to Hydra with its Greek hassapiko dance structure… except that Cohen says that its grain of inspiration was the Holocaust where executions somehow surpassed what already seemed to be unsurpassable horror when orchestras were deployed to accompany the proceedings.
Leonard Cohen’s rehabilitation was boosted when Jennifer Warnes, once one of his backup singers and now with a successful career of her own, seemed prepared to take the risk of putting out an entire album of Leonard Cohen songs. Cohen said he took her stated intention to do this simply as a gesture of friendship that would remain unrealized, but the album – officially called Famous Blue Raincoat but unofficially known as Jenny Sings Lenny – was made, released and raised his profile just before his own new album I’m Your Man came out in 1998. Now with a voice so deep it was almost sub-sonic, Leonard Cohen returned to form with an album featuring a synthpop sound recorded in Los Angeles and Montréal. His subject matter was now terrorism (‘First We Take Manhattan’), cynicism (‘Everybody Knows’) and the excesses of lovers’ promises (‘I’m Your Man’). Appropriately enough, looming over a fine collection of material was ‘Tower Of Song’, a laconic, comic and ironic assessment of those who feel called upon to make music… including himself. ‘I was born like this/ I had no choice/ I was born with the gift of a golden voice’ are lines that always got a laugh from live audiences. But no one laughed at the preceding ones: ‘I said to Hank Williams, how lonely does it get?/ Hank Williams hasn't answered yet/ But I hear him coughing all night long/ A hundred floors above me/ In the tower of song’.
I’m Your Man was a renaissance of the old singer poet and following it in 1992 came The Future,, another well-received album. ‘Waiting For The Miracle’ is its existential exploration of the idea of postponing commitment on the grounds that perfection awaits even the most dispossessed. ‘Anthem’ is a glorious song in praise of the imperfection of everything. It is saved from being perfectly pessimistic by one magical couplet: ‘There is a crack in everything/ That's how the light gets in’. ‘Closing Time’ would have become the ultimate show-stopper even if Cohen had not been in the habit of ending his live shows with it. Complete with a great tune and a romping, stomping lyric depicting a thrillingly hellish nightclub that sounds a lot like some sort of purgatory, ‘Closing Time’ is an irresistible song.
In 1996, Cohen was ordained as a Rinzai Zen Buddhist monk in the Mt. Baldy Zen Center near Los Angeles and the general feeling among his fans and occasional collaborators was that he had withdrawn for good from writing and recording. However he returned to the city in 1999 and seemed to be re-engaging with his former career. Three albums that emerged from 2001 onwards were variously experimental, none moreso than Dear Heather (2004) which baffled almost everyone. Leonard Cohen was now 70 and was obliged to restore his lost retirement fund by embarking on that punishing series of international tours. It might have seemed unreasonable to expect any more albums from him at all, let alone great ones. Then, when Cohen reached 80, along came Popular Problems (2014) featuring the darkly mischievous ‘Almost Like The Blues’, a musical essay about life’s tragedies imitating art. Still it was not the end. Two years later, in the year of his death, came You Want It Darker (2016), an album that would have stood out at any stage of Leonard Cohen’s long tenure in the tower of song. The title song, ‘You Want It Darker’, evokes a greater power that seems to demand that enlightenment should always be extinguished. Given that Cohen knew he was dying, it is hard to interpret the repeated lines ‘Hineni, hineni/ I’m ready my Lord’ as anything but a cry of acceptance. Hineni means ‘Here I am’. With typical grace and in one of the final acts of his life, he sent the dying Marianne Ihlen a loving note wishing her a good journey and saying that he would be joining her very soon.
Graham Vickers
Contents
A Bunch Of Lonesome Heroes
A Singer Must Die
A Thousand Kisses Deep
Ain’t No Cure For Love
Alexandra Leaving
Anthem
Avalanche
Ballad Of The Absent Mare
Because Of
Bird On The Wire
Boogie Street
By The Rivers Dark
Came So Far For Beauty
Chelsea Hotel # 2
Closing Time
Coming Back To You
Dance Me To The End Of Love
Dear Heather
Death Of A Ladies’ Man
Democracy
Diamonds In The Mine
Do I Have To Dance All Night
Don’t Go Home With Your Hard On
Dress Rehearsal Rag
Everybody Knows
Famous Blue Raincoat
Field Commander Cohen
Fingerprints
First We Take Manhattan
God Is Alive, Magic Is Afoot
Hallelujah
Heart With No Companion
Here It Is
Hey, That’s No Way To Say Goodbye
Humbled In Love
Hunter’s Lullaby
I Can’t Forget
I Left A Woman Waiting
I Tried To Leave You
If It Be Your Will
I’m Your Man
In My Secret Life
Iodine
Is This What You Wanted
It Just Feels
Jazz Police
Joan Of Arc
Lady Midnight
Last Year’s Man
Leaving Green Sleeves
Light As The Breeze
Love Calls You By Your Name
Love Itself
Lover Lover Lover
Master Song
Memories
Minute Prologue
Morning Glory
Never Any Good
Night Comes On
Nightingale
On That Day
One Of Us Cannot Be Wrong
Our Lady Of Solitude
>
Paper Thin Hotel
Please Don’t Pass Me By (A Disgrace)
Priests
Queen Victoria
Seems So Long Ago, Nancy
Sing Another Song Boys
Sisters Of Mercy
So Long, Marianne
Song Of Bernadette
Stories Of The Street
Story Of Isaac
Summertime
Suzanne
Take This Longing
Take This Waltz
Teachers
Tennessee Waltz
That Don’t Make It Junk
The Butcher
The Captain
The Faith
The Future
The Great Event
The Guests
The Gypsy’s Wife
The Law
The Letters
The Old Revolution
The Smokey Life
The Stranger Song
The Traitor
The Window
There For You
There Is A War
To A Teacher
Tonight Will Be Fine
Tower Of Song
True Love Leaves No Traces
Undertow
Waiting For The Miracle
Way Down Deep
Who By Fire
Why Don’t You Try
Winter Lady
You Have Loved Enough
You Know Who I Am
Digital Timeline
Click below for an interactive Digital Timeline of Leonard Cohen's life and experience his poetry through music and video ...
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Hear the Music
Click below to listen to the songs included in The Lyrics of Leonard Cohen. Additionally, click the Spotify logo at the head of each chapter to hear the song, as originally sung by Leonard Cohen and as interpereated by others.
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A Bunch Of Lonesome Heroes
A bunch of lonesome and very quarrelsome heroes
were smoking out along the open road;
The Lyrics of Leonard Cohen: Enhanced Edition Page 1