I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen

by Sylvie Simmons

  Something had happened to Leonard in India. Something, as he told Sharon Robinson, “just lifted” the veil of depression through which he had always seen the world. Over the space of several visits Leonard would make to Mumbai over the next few years, returning to his room at the Hotel Kemps Corner and making his daily walk to satsang—altogether, he spent more than a year studying with Ramesh—“by imperceptible degrees this background of anguish that had been with me my whole life began to dissolve. I said to myself, ‘This must be what it’s like to be relatively sane.’ You get up in the morning and it’s not like: Oh God, another day. How am I going to get through it? What am I going to do? Is there a drug? Is there a woman? Is there a religion? Is there a something to get me out of this? The background now is very peaceful.”38 His depression had gone.

  Leonard was unable to articulate precisely what it was that had cured his depression. He thought he had read somewhere “that the brain cells associated with anxiety can die as you get older,”39 although the general intelligence is that depression worsens with age. Perhaps this was satori—enlightenment—though if it was, it had come with “no great flash, no fireworks.”40 Why it had come with Ramesh and Core Hinduism rather than Roshi and Zen Buddhism he could not say. Despite the differences in their teaching methods and approaches—Roshi’s strict, rigorous regimen and his repetitive teisho, delivered on the in-breath and the out-breath and addressed not to the intellect but to the meditative condition; Ramesh’s direct, straight-talking question-answer approach and his instruction that his followers should live however they choose—there was a great deal of consistency in their doctrines: overcoming the ego, nonattachment, universal consciousness, tendrel, the interrelatedness of all things. Most likely it was a combination of the two and had simply happened on Ramesh’s watch. Ramesh implied as much. “You got this very quickly,” he told Leonard, adding that his thirty years with Roshi did not hurt.41 Still, as Leonard’s mother had always used to say to him, “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” so Leonard didn’t. What was left in the deep, dark hole left after the anguish had gone was “a deep sense of gratitude, to what or who I don’t know. I focused it on my teachers and friends.”42

  The year was drawing to a close. Back in Los Angeles, Leonard once again ran into his musician friend Roscoe Beck. The last time they had seen each other had been more than five years before, just as Leonard was leaving to go live with Roshi. Beck reminded Leonard of what he’d said on that occasion, that he’d “had it with the music racket.” Leonard smiled. “Ah,” he said, “now I’ve had it with the religious racket. I’m ready to take up music again.”

  Of course he hadn’t really had it with religion. Religion, as Leonard has said on any number of occasions, was his “favorite hobby.” He still studied with Ramesh, he still meditated at the Zen Center in L.A. and he continued to read the Jewish scriptures and light the Sabbath candles at dusk every Friday. But what he had said about taking up music again was true. Leonard picked up the phone and called Sharon Robinson and Leanne Ungar, asking them to come over. It was time to record his first album of the new millennium.

  Twenty-one

  Love and Theft

  Women. You couldn’t move for them. After the largely male life of the monastery, it was a novelty and a delight. A comfort too; Leonard had not lived in such a female world since he was a nine-year-old boy in Montreal. In the apartment downstairs was his daughter Lorca. Upstairs, in the room above the garage, Sharon Robinson and Leanne Ungar were working in the studio they had put together for Leonard to make his album at home. Sharon and Leanne would arrive at noon to find him in the kitchen, preparing them lunch. Kelley Lynch, Leonard’s manager, would often show up at around the same time and eat with them.

  Cooking was one of the habits Leonard had brought home with him from the monastery. Another was getting up at four A.M., having a quiet coffee and a cigarette, then starting his day’s work. Although he had quit smoking, he had taken it up again during a visit to India; a wise man had said to him, when he refused the offer of a cigarette, “What is life for? Smoke.” While the world still slept, Leonard recorded in the aerie above the garage, until the birds began their dawn chorus in the grapefruit trees and the sound of the neighbors starting up their cars bled through the unsoundproofed walls. His computer screen lighting up the darkness, he would murmur softly into an old microphone linked to Pro Tools recording software, the harrowed young man playing a Spanish guitar to a sad-eyed girl in a bedroom seeming a lifetime away.

  Leonard was happy. He was fully aware of the novelty of such a circumstance, but it was something he tried not to think about too much; he did not want to risk thinking himself back into his old familiar state of unhappiness. Nor did he wish to tempt fate, acknowledging, “God may take it away.”1 The depression and anxiety had been so much a part of him for such a long time that on occasion they seemed hard to separate from the depth and seriousness of his work. They had certainly been the drive behind the great majority of his pursuits in his adult life—“the engine,” as Leonard expressed it, “of most of my investigation into the various things I looked into, whatever it was: wine, woman, song, religion.”2 Women and drugs, as well as mantras and fasting and all the various regimes of physical and spiritual self-discipline he had pursued, had had their pleasures, but they were also palliatives, medication, attempts to “beat the devil, try to get on top of it,”3 or help ease the pain. Now the pain had gone. Sometimes, as he went about his work, he surprised himself with the ease with which he adapted to this new lightness of being and peace of mind.

  There was also a new woman in Leonard’s life. Readers will not find this surprising, although Leonard seemed to. He thought he’d had it with the romance racket, thinking perhaps that it might have vanished along with the depression and anguish. “I think one becomes more circumspect about everything as one gets older. I mean, you become more foolish and more wise at the same time as you get older,” he said. In his midsixties, he had been reminded that the heart could not be mastered: “I think one is vulnerable at any moment to those emotions.”4 His first new love since leaving the monastery was, like his last love before he entered it, a talented beauty twenty-five years his junior: a singer and keyboard player from Hawaii who performed under her first name, Anjani.

  Anjani Thomas had been in and out of Leonard’s musical life since 1984, when John Lissauer, the producer of Various Positions, hired her to sing on “Hallelujah” and tour with Leonard. Although Leonard was not immune to office romances, there had been nothing between them on the 1985 tour, nor when Anjani sang on I’m Your Man or The Future—on the latter singing on “Waiting for the Miracle,” the song containing Leonard’s marriage proposal to Rebecca.

  In the period between those two albums, Anjani had moved to Los Angeles and married an entertainment lawyer, Robert Kory. Around the same time that Leonard parted with Rebecca and the music industry and left L.A., Anjani’s life took something of a similar turn; her marriage was over and her music career seemed to be heading the same way. But while Leonard chose to become closer with his spiritual teacher, Anjani had become disillusioned with hers, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, whose Transcendental Meditation practice she had followed for years. Making a clean break from everything, she moved to Austin, Texas, where she bought a little house and took a job as a saleswoman in a jewelry store. She was living in a city full of clubs and musicians but refused to even listen to music on her car radio on the way to work. “I was burned out,” she says. “I didn’t want anything to do with it.” Four or five years later, while she was visiting her family in Hawaii, Anjani opened the closet in her old bedroom and saw her guitar. She took it out and started writing songs—“Two records’ worth of material,” she says. “I was thirty-nine at the time and I said to myself, ‘I’m going to be forty. If I don’t do this record I’ll regret it the rest of my life.’ ” She sold the house and moved back to L.A. around the same time Leonard returned f
rom Mount Baldy. Sometime later, when their paths crossed again, she played him one of the songs she had written, “Kyrie,”* which he liked and encouraged her to record. The two became musical coconspirators and lovers; later they would become musical collaborators. But for now Anjani worked on her album and Leonard worked on his.

  Leonard had left the monastery with around two hundred and fifty songs and poems in various states of completion. An idea of what he might do with them came to him while he was at a classical concert in Los Angeles in late 1999. The performer was his godson, whose mother is Sharon Robinson. Leonard took Sharon aside during the intermission and said, “I’ve got some verses and things and I’d like for you to work on a record with me.”5 Not simply a song or two, as they had done in the past, but a whole album. Her job would be to write the melodies. It turned out to be a good deal more; Ten New Songs—at Leonard’s insistence—was as much Sharon’s album as it was his.

  One might have imagined that Leonard’s first album since his return to the music business would be all about Leonard—down from the mountain in a blaze of glory, imparting his wisdom on tablets of stone. It is not that Leonard had no melodies; he did. He either preferred Sharon’s melodies, or he preferred collaborating; perhaps one after-effect of his studies with Roshi and Ramesh was to put ego aside and be inclusive. What’s more interesting is how very female this album was. Women had always played a part in Leonard’s songs, but mostly as backing singers and muses. Here he handed almost everything over to the women. Apart from an appearance on one song by Leanne’s guitarist husband, Bob Metzger, and a string arrangement on another by David Campbell, Leanne Ungar engineered and mixed, and Sharon produced, arranged, played the instruments and wrote the melodies. In this supportive environment, all Leonard had to do was to sing the words over which he had labored so long.

  “Sharon, I would say, was the person who has had the most success writing with Leonard,” Leanne says. “She doesn’t seem to have experienced some of the difficulties other people have had. Sharon understands a lot about what Leonard likes to sing, what he’s capable of singing, then writes melodies that fit his sensibility; she comes up with the most beautiful music for him. And sometimes Sharon understands his lyrics in that he’ll give her a poem he’s written and she’ll pick out the phrases she thinks will make a chorus and construct the song based on that. I know there’s a lot of back-and-forth between Leonard and Sharon.”

  Leonard and Sharon did not discuss the album; they did not even refer to what they were working on as “an album.” It was important “to keep it open,” Sharon remembers. “ ‘Well, we might be doing an album but maybe not, I don’t know.’ ” Leonard was loath to introduce the expectations of other people into the exercise, particularly those of the music business. Instead they simply got together and worked at a song—“one song at a time, no pressure”—as if that was something they always did when they met up. “The first day, we sat quietly, listening to the music of an Indonesian singer that involved chants and ethnic rhythms. I think, in hindsight, that it helped set the tone for the workdays to come, which had a certain serene quality to them.”

  Working in Leonard’s home and not in a studio also helped maintain the illusion of two close friends just hanging out and playing some music. The room above the garage, which Leonard nicknamed Small Mercies Studio, was, unlike regular studios, very bright, its windows looking out onto a small garden of grapefruit trees, jasmine and morning glories. He had furnished the room with a couple of art deco pieces from his mother’s house in Montreal, and the sun streamed in on the curved-armed sofa where he and Sharon would sit, talking. They talked about the old soul and R & B records that both of them loved and whose sound influenced several of Robinson’s melodies—Sam Cooke, Otis Redding. Sometimes Leonard would have come up with a rhythm he liked, or a few changes, which he would play for her on the keyboard. Other times, when he handed her a set of lyrics, he might mention that he wrote them with a specific musical style in mind—“That Don’t Make It Junk” was a country song, for example. Mostly though, he was interested in seeing where Sharon would go with it. She would take the lyrics home and work on them alone in her home studio, save the melodies she had come up with onto a hard drive, then give it to Leanne, who transferred it onto Leonard’s computer, which she had set up so that he could simply push a button and continue to work on the song on his own in the early hours of the morning. Leonard enjoyed this way of working—relaxed, collaborative, but also alone.

  His relationship with Anjani appeared to follow a very similar pattern: they were a couple but they were also, as Leonard termed it, “impossibly solitudinous people” and did not live together. “I like to wake up alone,” said Leonard, “and she likes to be alone.”6 Anjani had moved into a house within walking distance of Leonard’s duplex. Leanne, who had worked with Leonard for many years, couldn’t help but notice how much happier and more secure he seemed. “I think he had found a kind of domestic peace. Or maybe it’s because we worked at his house and, instead of being in this impersonal room and ordering out, we were sitting in his kitchen and he was cooking. It had a kind of intimacy that I think you can hear in the vocals.” There was no deadline, no meter running in a studio. A song might go back and forth between Leonard and Sharon numerous times before it was finished and the next one begun. There were also breaks between recording, three or four weeks at a time, while Leonard wrote or rewrote lyrics.

  During these absences, Leanne was busy going through tapes from Leonard’s 1979 Recent Songs tour. Henry Lewy, his producer, had recorded all the UK concerts. The tapes had been gathering dust for decades, but Leonard had not forgotten them and was curious to see if they deserved resuscitating. In February 2000, an album of twelve of these songs was released with the title Field Commander Cohen. Leonard’s first album of the new millennium presents a polished performance with the jazz group Passenger, the violin and oud players Raffi Hakopian and John Bilezikjian, and backing singers Jennifer Warnes and Sharon Robinson, who was at that time a newcomer to Leonard and was now his songwriting partner.

  During a longer break, Leonard returned to Mumbai. Reinstalling himself at the Hotel Kemps Corner, he slipped back into his old schedule, taking his daily walk along Warden Road to satsang with the sea breeze in his hair, then on to the Breach Candy Club for a swim. The city was a riot of color and noise, but nothing disturbed Leonard’s sense of peace. So comfortable did Leonard appear with his life in Mumbai that Lorca, curious as to what kept her father there so long, flew out and stayed with him for a week or two. At Leonard’s suggestion she spent some of the time hunting through Mumbai’s markets for old furniture to ship back to the antiques store she now ran in L.A.

  In Canada, meanwhile, where new ways of honoring Leonard were still, miraculously, being found, Stephen Scobie organized an event in Montreal in May 2000 titled Some Kind of Record: Poems in Tribute to Leonard Cohen. Leonard, as seemed to have become an unspoken policy, declined to attend. A cartoon in a Montreal newspaper showed a woman of a certain age, hippily dressed, with an acoustic guitar, sitting forlorn on a park bench while a policeman tells her, “C’mon now, lady, everyone else has gone home. Leonard Cohen isn’t coming.” Leonard did go to Montreal not too long afterward, but on private business, to visit Pierre Trudeau, who was terminally ill. Leonard returned in September, at the request of Trudeau’s children, to be a pallbearer at Trudeau’s funeral.

  While he was in his old hometown, Leonard took the opportunity to go see Irving Layton in the nursing home. When Leonard entered his room, the eighty-eight-year-old poet, who was suffering from Alzheimer’s, stared at Leonard with a blank, bewildered face. Leonard said, “It’s Leonard.” Irving replied, “Leonard who?” Leonard’s face fell. Layton laughed uproariously. He knew who it was. The moment the nurse left the room, they had an illicit smoke, Leonard lighting his old friend’s pipe because Layton’s big boxer’s hands shook too much to do it himself.

  Se
ptember 2001. It was still monsoon season in Mumbai, but the rains had started to ease up. Having finished work on his new album, Leonard had returned to India and Ramesh. One day, as he walked into the lobby of the Hotel Kemps Corner, the desk clerk offered his sincere condolences. This was how Leonard first heard of the 9/11 terrorist attack on New York. Not long after, Leonard’s phone rang; a journalist from the New York Observer wanted his reaction to what had happened, since Leonard after all had predicted apocalypse in his last album The Future. Leonard was reluctant to give an opinion—“In the Jewish tradition one is cautioned against trying to comfort the comfortless in the midst of their bereavement.” But, when pressed, he offered something he told the reporter he had learned from his Hindu studies: “It’s impossible for us to discern the pattern of events and the unfolding of a world which is not entirely of our making.”7

  In October 2001, Ten New Songs, Leonard’s new album, was released. The photo on the front sleeve, which Leonard took on his computer’s built-in camera, pictured Leonard and Sharon, side by side. “The album,” Leonard said, “could be described as a duet.” She had expected, and sometimes urged, him to replace her vocals and remove the synthesizers on which she composed her melodies, “but as the sound unfolded,” said Leonard, “I began to insist that she keep her voice on there and that we use these synthesizer sounds, because the songs seemed to insist that the original treatments were appropriate. Also I like the way Sharon sings.”8