I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen

by Sylvie Simmons

  Leonard’s voice on the album—so different from the voice on Field Commander Cohen—is a soft, dry baritone that unfurls like smoke over the translucent, skeletal, yet soulful-sounding digital keyboard tracks. The instruments make no attempt to disguise that they are not “real,” giving a lo-fi charm not normally associated with synthesizers. The intimacy in Leonard’s voice reflects how he recorded his vocal parts, murmuring quietly while his neighbors slept, and there’s a meditative quality to how the songs seem to flow gracefully and solemnly in and out of one another. Leonard’s own description of the album was “serene.”

  The lyrics are about wounded dawns and light, America and Babylon, about praying to God and just getting on with it. The words of “Love Itself”—which Leonard dedicated to his friend, the writer and critic Leon Wieseltier—are an account of Roshi’s teisho on love, while “By the Rivers Dark” (“By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept”) is loosely based on Psalm 137, which laments the destruction of the temple and exile of the Jews. The dreamlike “Alexandra Leaving,” which Leonard had been writing since 1985, was inspired by a poem by Constantine P. Cavafy, “The God Forsakes Antony.” The dazzling “A Thousand Kisses Deep” has multiple layers of meaning, among them holding, letting go, creating and surrendering to the Creator. This song too had been through numerous incarnations, melodically and lyrically. Rebecca De Mornay remembers hearing various versions of it in the early nineties; in 1995 Leonard told the New York Times that he wanted it to feel like “an old folk song.”9 Its companion piece “Boogie Street” is, at first glance, about Leonard accepting who he is and what he has to do, even if he does not know why, and leaving the monastic life for the music business. It opens with a prayer and a kiss before moving on to the unreality of real life, the impermanence of romantic love and the permanence of desire. “Boogie Street,” said Leonard, “is that place that we all live, whether you’re in a monastery or down in the city.”10 It is also a real place, in Singapore. Leonard had been there once.

  “During the day it’s a place of bazaars and shops and booths with a lot of bootleg records. Since I didn’t see any on display, I asked one of the vendors if he had any Leonard Cohen records. He went back to where he kept his inventory and came out with an entire box of my catalog—much more thorough than most of the stores that I’d been to, and a dollar apiece. Very reasonably priced, I thought. At night, Boogie Street transformed into this alarming and beautiful sexual marketplace, where there were male and female prostitutes, transvestites, extremely attractive people offering to satisfy all the fantasies of their numerous customers.”

  An all-service paradise, then.

  “As my old teacher used to say, ‘We can visit paradise but we can’t live there because there are no restaurants or toilets in paradise.’ There are moments, as I say in that song, when ‘You kiss my lips, and then it’s done, I’m back on Boogie Street’—in the midst of an embrace with your beloved you melt into the kiss, you dissolve in the intimacy, [it’s like] you take a drink of cold water when you’re thirsty; without that refreshment you would probably die of boredom in a week or two. But you can’t live there. Immediately, you’re plunged back into the traffic jam.”

  Leonard dedicated the album to Roshi.

  The critics, bar a very few dissenters, were full of praise. They welcomed Leonard back, told him how much his voice, his profundity and his sly humor had been missed—even if the new album did not have all the cool, playful one-liners of I’m Your Man—and that Ten New Songs was worth the long wait. He was asked in interviews if he planned to tour behind it. Leonard demurred, saying he doubted he could still fill seats. It was a typically Cohenesque answer, modest and self-deprecating. Perhaps there was an element of insecurity after so much time had passed since his last tour, but what it really came down to was that he did not want to tour. There was clearly an audience for him in Europe, where Ten New Songs was a hit—Top 30 in the UK, No. 1 in Poland and Norway and gold in seven other countries. In America, reverting to Leonard’s pre–I’m Your Man pattern, it sold poorly, failing to make the Top 100. In Canada, though, it went platinum and brought him four more Juno awards: Best Album, Best Artist, Best Songwriter and Best Video (this last one for the smooth soul single “In My Secret Life”).

  Leonard’s fellow countrymen now seemed unable to stop with the honors and homages. The Canadian consulate commissioned a tribute concert to Leonard in New York as part of its Canada Day celebrations, hiring Hal Willner to put it together. Willner was renowned for the concept ensemble projects he produced—Nino Rota, Thelonious Monk, Kurt Weill. The last time Willner had seen Leonard was pre-monastery, on the Future tour. Willner had gone to the New York show with Allen Ginsberg and remembers, “You could tell there was something going on; the vibe wasn’t as much fun as on the I’m Your Man tour. I went back with Allen to say hello, and Leonard had ducked out even then.”

  Willner called Kelley Lynch to make sure that Leonard had no objection to the Brooklyn concert. He was fine with it, she said, as long as he did not have to do anything, so Willner got going. Among the first people he called was Julie Christensen, looking for a contact for an artist he wanted to ask to perform. Julie told him, “If you’re doing Leonard stuff, you should have Perla and me come sing backup.” He thought it an interesting idea and called Perla Batalla, who told him that the date conflicted with another gig. “Then I got off the phone with Hal and I just started to cry,” Perla remembers. “I can’t not be involved.” She called back and told Willner she would cancel the other show on the condition that she could sing “Bird on the Wire” and duet with Julie on “Anthem.” Hal said, “ ‘Anthem’ is not in the show.” He changed his mind later when Leonard, over a coffee with Perla and Hal, agreed that it might make a good addition to the set list. This would be Leonard’s only involvement.

  More than half the singers Willner invited to perform were women. There were Laurie Anderson, Linda Thompson, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, Kate’s daughter Martha Wainwright, Perla, Julie and Rennie Sparks, of the duo the Handsome Family. “It just seemed to make sense,” Willner says. “We weren’t trying to imitate him, and Leonard loved women—a true, true love. They’re great songs for women to sing, the way he has of taking emotion into words.” Nick Cave, one of the five male singers on the bill (along with Kate McGarrigle’s son Rufus Wainwright; Linda Thompson’s son Teddy Thompson; Marc Anthony Thompson, no relation; and Brett Sparks, the other half of the Handsome Family), found it “really moving to hear a lot of women singing Leonard’s songs. They made wonderful sense of his stuff—I think more effectively in a lot of ways than the male singers. What I hadn’t always realized was that these were extraordinary songs on any level and that, although I love his voice—which is incredibly affecting and has a tone that’s totally unique, something like Miles Davis’s trumpet—it doesn’t need Leonard’s voice to carry these songs. They’re just really good songs—and there’s a lot of them. I’d always had a particular love for the early stuff, particularly Songs of Love and Hate because it’s punk rock, raw as can be. But he just got deeper, more humane.”

  Willner decided who would sing what. “I put a show together, like a script, a play, so it’s more about the cast with this material we all love than a ‘tribute show.’ And you don’t want everyone coming out and doing their favorite song and moving on. That way you don’t get a real balance of the material. I wanted to have some of the more obscure things, like ‘Tacoma Trailer’ and ‘Don’t Go Home with Your Hard-On,’ from Death of a Ladies’ Man.” Willner had a particular fondness for the latter.

  In February 2003, Phil Spector was arrested for the murder of Lana Clarkson, an actress and nightclub hostess he met at the House of Blues and had taken back to his mansion. Shortly after the arrest, two detectives from the homicide bureau paid Leonard a visit. They had been poring through old press clippings of stories about the eccentric producer and his guns—and there were many, involving famous names like
John Lennon, Stevie Wonder, Michelle Phillips and the Ramones, as well as Leonard. “Apparently the detectives had come across some old interviews I did in 1978 or 1979 in which I spoke of the difficulties of recording Death of a Ladies’ Man: the brandishing of guns, armed bodyguards, drunkenness and Phil’s famous megalomania.” Leonard told the detectives, “Even though Phil put his arm around my shoulder and pressed an automatic into my neck, except for the real possibility of an accident I never at any moment thought that Phil meant to do me harm. I never felt seriously threatened.” It was “basically just a good rock ’n’ roll story,” he told them, that had become exaggerated over the years.

  They asked him when he had last seen Spector. “Over twenty years ago,” he said. “They were very surprised. They said they were under the impression we were close friends. I said no. Hearing this, they thanked me for their time, finished their coffees and left. It was clear that I was not to be considered a valuable witness. I was never approached again by anyone concerned with the case, [and] needless to say, I did not testify before a grand jury.”11

  On June 28, 2003, Hal Willner’s Came So Far for Beauty: An Evening of Songs by Leonard Cohen Under the Stars took place in Prospect Park in Brooklyn. The stage was draped with a large maple-leaf flag and a female representative of the Canadian consulate came out during the intermission and lauded Leonard as “the sexiest man alive.” The concert was a success and quickly led to offers for Willner to stage it overseas. Since it had been more than a decade since Leonard last played a concert—a situation he showed no inclination to change—this tribute concert not only helped satisfy the demand from fans to see his music performed live, it also helped to keep his songs as Willner said, “out there.”

  Leonard’s record label was also doing its part in this enterprise. Two different, career-encompassing, double-album retrospectives were released in 2002 and 2003: The Essential Leonard Cohen and An Introduction to Leonard Cohen (the latter in the UK as part of the “MOJO Presents” series). There was a new, fortieth-anniversary edition of The Favorite Game as well, to tie in with the premiere of Bernar Hébert’s film. As for Leonard, he was working on his first collection of poems since 1984, titled Book of Longing. Much of the material—artwork as well as poetry—he was sorting through and editing had been created when he lived in the monastery. In the Swedish documentary shot on Mount Baldy, Leonard, describing himself as “a writer who failed his promise,” points to a pile of notebooks and adds, “I may redeem myself.”12

  In October 2003 Leonard was made a companion of the Order of Canada—one of the two highest civilian honors his country could bestow. Leonard sent his thanks and got back to work—not on his book but, remarkably, a new album.

  Dear Heather, Leonard’s eleventh studio album, was released in October 2004, two weeks after Leonard’s seventieth birthday and three years after Ten New Songs. In Leonard Cohen terms, this was surprisingly fast; his fans and his record label had become used to four-, five-, even nine-year gaps between album releases. Since Leonard had come down from the mountain he had been working nonstop, but this was nothing new; Leonard was always working. He simply chose not to release the majority of the material he had worked on. This apparent new urgency appeared to have nothing to do with the sense of mortality he had talked about more than ten years before. If anything, at seventy Leonard appeared to be in better condition, mentally, physically and emotionally, than he had been at sixty. Thoughts of being “old” did not seem to trouble him. In fact he played on the word in the original title for the album, which had been Old Ideas. It was a reference to his intention to bring together various odds and ends on this album: songs he’d written in tribute to the work of other poets, recordings of him reciting his own work, little musical sketches and half-finished ideas. Some of these ideas were old—“The Faith,” for example, a song based on an old Quebec folk ballad that he had recorded with Henry Lewy in 1979–80 and shelved; “Tennessee Waltz,” a live recording from 1985 of the weepy country standard, for which Leonard took the liberty of writing an even darker, sadder closing verse—but the majority dated from August 2003, when he began recording the album. Leonard was persuaded to substitute Old Ideas with Dear Heather only when it was pointed out that his fans might mistake it for yet another retrospective album.

  If Ten New Songs was Leonard’s most collaborative album (Death of a Ladies’ Man had been written with Spector as equal, but Leonard had no say in the recording, and the Cohen-Lissauer project Songs for Rebecca was never released), Dear Heather is his most experimental. Its thirteen songs, recorded once again in his home studio, make up a sort of scrapbook, a collage of word, image and sound. The CD liner-note booklet, in which the lyrics appear side by side with Leonard’s sketches, might have been a pocket-sized companion for Book of Longing, on which he worked at the same time. His idea, Leanne Ungar remembers, had been “to put together some melodies that the songs evoked and to actually do some poetry readings”—reminiscent, perhaps, of the shows he had performed in the late fifties with Maury Kaye.

  The opening song, “Go No More A-Roving,” is (in the manner of “Villanelle”) a poem by Lord Byron set to music by Leonard. The accompanying drawings in the booklet are of Irving Layton, to whom the song is dedicated—wide hangdog face, crushed poor-boy cap—and the entirely Cohenesque image of a guitar by an open door. “To a Teacher” also concerns a poet who was important to Leonard, A. M. Klein, who was silenced in his later years by mental illness. This time the poem set to music is Leonard’s, from his 1961 collection The Spice-Box of Earth:

  Let me cry Help beside you, Teacher

  I have entered under this dark roof

  As fearlessly as an honoured son

  Enters his father’s house

  For an avowed nonsentimentalist like Leonard, there seems to be a good deal of looking back in these songs, from absent friends to the unnamed women he thanks in the delightful “Because Of,” for having been inspired to take off their clothes by “a few songs / Wherein I spoke of their mystery.”

  The sense of collage is also evident in the music, which is diverse in style: folk, beatnik jazz, waltzes and some of the French-sounding music Leonard had talked about having written on his synthesizer on Mount Baldy. The title track takes lyrics not much longer than a haiku and repeats them, deconstructs them, then folds them over the keyboards and trumpet like aural origami. “On That Day,” a ballad written about the 9/11 terrorist attacks, has the sentimentality and straight-talking of a Randy Newman song. There is no lack of synthesizers, but there are real instruments too, including a Jew’s harp, which Leonard plays on “Nightingale,” a collaboration with Anjani, and “On That Day.” On two of the collaborations with Sharon Robinson, “There for You” and “The Letters,” Leonard’s voice is almost a whisper; most of the singing is left for the women to do. On “Morning Glory,” sung by its muse, Anjani, Leonard sounds like a ghost of himself, hovering around the beauty of her multitracked voice. On some songs Leonard lets the women sing alone; on others he speaks his words over their voices, murmuring softly, deeply and close to the microphone, like Serge Gainsbourg, or “bassing in” once in a while like a Jewish-Buddhist A. P. Carter. Although there was a very strong female presence on his previous album, on Dear Heather the women are given even greater prominence.

  Anjani says, “That record was a turning point, for both of us.” Leonard had initially called her in to sing harmony on “Undertow,” then decided that he wanted to scrap the melody and use the harmony as the lead. The song was about a bereaved, lost woman; what he liked about the harmony part was that it did not get to the root note except at the very end of the song, which gave it a tension that mirrored her emotional distress. He left Anjani and Leanne Ungar to record it while he went back to the house and made some phone calls. “I went through it a couple of times,” Anjani remembers, “and we ended up with this track that I thought was gorgeous, the best thing I’ve ever done, and Leanne l
oved it.” When Leonard came back, she said, “Wait until you hear this.” “Leanne ran the playback,” says Anjani, “and he does what he always does when he listens to music, which is stare off into space, no expression—I don’t care if you’re playing a salsa tune, he won’t move, he just sits there motionless. At the end of it he said, ‘That’s beautiful. Now sing it but don’t sing it.’ ” Anjani looked at him quizzically. “He said, ‘This is not an anthem. It’s the song of a broken woman, so be the woman on the deserted beach with nothing left.’ I remember feeling outraged that he didn’t like the superb performance that I’d just belted out, and then I thought, ‘What am I supposed to do?’ and I got really nervous and kind of shaky, like every tool I had just went out the window; I really truly had nothing left. And when I sang, this really tentative, broken thing came out. At the end of it he said, ‘That’s it. Now you’ve got it,’ and that’s when he said he had never heard me in that way before. He later described it as ‘Her voice dropped from her throat to her heart.’ ”

  What also distinguishes Dear Heather from earlier albums is the gentle modesty with which it deals with the Big Subjects, like love, death, life, faith and madness. As Leon Wieseltier noted in his album review, it “revels in its own lack of monumentality.”13 There was simplicity instead of grandiosity in his song mourning the 9/11 terrorist attacks, “On That Day,” while in the title track whimsy replaced the more common anguish about women and lust. “The longing persists,” Wieseltier concluded, “but the slavery is over. And the evidence of inner freedom is everywhere in Dear Heather. It is a window upon the heart of an uncommonly interesting and uncommonly mortal man.”14

  Leonard was for the most part straightforward and unambiguous in his lyrics (although it’s perfectly possible that he had attained such Zen mastery that the lack of ambivalence was actually a refined ambiguity). Whatever it is, it’s a beautiful, muted, beguiling album. On its front cover is a sketch by Leonard of Anjani; on the back is a photo by Anjani of Leonard, bestubbled, crushed-capped and clutching a coffee cup. Leonard dedicated the album to the memory of Jack McClelland, his longtime Canadian publisher, who died in June 2004, the year of its release. Leonard declined to tour behind the album—not even a promotional tour, as he had done for Ten New Songs. As soon as he had finished it, he had left for Montreal, where he spent the summer, happily sitting in the Parc du Portugal with the other old men, watching the world go by.