“By the way,” Finley adds, “modern students of Kabbalah are very interested in Leonard’s work, because they see Leonard as not a professor of Kabbalah, not a theologian, but someone who really understands Kabbalah from within, [and his poetry as] the best poetry on the Kabbalah they’ve ever read. He gets the inner ethos of brokenness and healing and the tragedy of the human condition, in that we’re not particularly well suited for this life but you still have to find your way through.”
On May 13, 2006, in Toronto, Leonard gave the closest thing to a public musical performance in more than a decade. It was at a bookstore, where he was signing copies of Book of Longing. Three thousand fans showed up—the book was already on its way to the top of the bestseller list—and the police had to close off the street. On a small stage, Anjani, Ron Sexsmith and Barenaked Ladies provided the entertainment. Leonard had not planned to sing, but during her set Anjani asked him to join her and would brook no refusal. After duetting with her on “Never Got to Love You,” Leonard went on to sing solo “So Long, Marianne” and “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye.” The response was rapturous.
Blue Alert, the album Leonard and Anjani had worked on together, was released, as was Book of Longing, in May 2006. Like Ten New Songs it was a full collaboration—Leonard’s words, Anjani’s music. But unlike Ten New Songs it was not a duet album, it was an Anjani album. Her picture adorned the front cover. Underneath her name, in much smaller letters, was written “Produced by Leonard Cohen.” It was as if this man who so loved women, who so often wrote songs about women (or, as he had often claimed, wrote to attract women), who believed, as he said, that women “inhabited this charged landscape that poetry seemed to arise from, and that it seemed to be the natural language of women,”10 had finally achieved with this album what perhaps he had been working toward since his debut, which he had experienced once with Jennifer Warnes’s Famous Blue Raincoat and which, on the albums he had made since leaving the monastery, he had come ever closer to achieving: to hand his songs over to the female voice to sing.
It was a first for Leonard to make an album whose muse was not only his current romantic partner but his cowriter. The fact that it would be Anjani’s album, not his, seemed to speed up the writing process. Anjani had found the words for what would become the title song on Leonard’s desk—it was a new poem he had written for Book of Longing. She asked if she could try to make a song from it and when he consented, and told her he liked what she did with it, she moved on to another one. She took an old poem, “As the Mist Leaves No Scar,” from The Spice-Box of Earth—a volume published when Anjani was two years old—and set it to music, unaware that Phil Spector had already done so with “True Loves Leaves No Traces” on Death of a Ladies’ Man. Anjani’s melody for the song, which she titled “The Mist,” was very different though, with the feel of an old folk song. The ballad “Never Got to Love You,” a noir short story of love, regret and moving on, was put together from unused verses for the song “Closing Time.” Sometimes, as she went through Leonard’s notebooks, Anjani would find small scraps of lyrics that she liked, and she would tell him, “Just finish the song.” “Thanks for the Dance” started out as a few lines in one of Leonard’s journals: “Thanks for the dance, I hear that we’re married, one-two-three, one-two-three, one.” “I said, ‘Finish that; I could really sing that song,’ which is like telling Leonard to write ‘Hallelujah’ in a couple of weeks. But he enjoyed the task, because it was very freeing—he didn’t have to sing it, he was writing it for me now, and the standards of what he would write for himself didn’t apply, so it came quite easily. It also happened for ‘No One After You.’ It was funny because I said, ‘Okay, it’s almost there, it’s almost good,’ and then I remember there was one night when I was going in the studio the next day and I said, ‘You’ve got one hour to come up with that last line.’ He said, ‘Okay, well give me some chocolate.’ So he’s nibbling at a bar of chocolate and he’s wandering back and forth until he shouted, ‘I’m a regular cliché.’ I thought, ‘Thank you, you can write under pressure.’ ”
The recording process was not so easy. “There were some moments when it really wasn’t pretty,” Anjani remembers. “I was crushed, especially early on. Don’t get me wrong, he’s wonderfully gracious, he’s generous, he’s everything that he appears to be, but nobody’s perfect, myself included, and we both definitely have strong ideas. On Blue Alert I really started to get independent about what I wanted to do. In 2004, when we were making songs for his record Dear Heather, a friend of mine had died and I was really sad about it, and Leonard walked into the room and said, ‘Here, maybe this will make you feel better,’ and it was the lyric to ‘Nightingale,’ ” a song that appeared on both Dear Heather and Blue Alert. “But the sections were reversed. It started off, ‘Fare thee well, my nightingale.’ When I was reading it, the melody came into my head and I immediately thought, ‘This should go here and that should go there.’ It was like a puzzle I was solving. I took it home and I didn’t change the words but I rewrote the structure and I recorded it and I played it for him. And I could see his eyes open wide, because I’d actually fucked with his song. It didn’t even occur to me that he might react that way. He kept listening intently and afterward he said, ‘Well of course it starts with “I built my house.” ’ ” At some point, though, it became clear that they needed a referee. Leonard called John Lissauer, his old producer, and the man who had first brought Anjani into Leonard’s life.
Lissauer describes what he witnessed in the studio as “a tug-of-war.” As he saw it, when Leonard had worked with Sharon Robinson on Ten New Songs, it had been Leonard’s record, but although Blue Alert was Anjani’s album, “Leonard was still expecting it to be Leonard’s record. Leonard would want one thing and Anjani would want another, and I was sort of in the middle of that because I knew them both and I was trying to answer to both of them.” When he listened to the demos, Lissauer thought the songs beautiful but was not impressed with all the synthesizers and drum machines they played them on. “I said, ‘Let me at least get some organic instruments and add some colors here and there.’ ” Taking six songs away with him, Lissauer added instrumental touches, much as he had done on Leonard’s albums New Skin for the Old Ceremony and Various Positions. He thought they sounded “lovely,” as did Leonard and Anjani, “but they were bickering quite a bit, like they were trying to get custody. And—this was the most bizarre thing—their trade-off was ‘I’ll throw that thing of John’s out but you have to . . . ,’ and one by one, in order to settle their arguments and to spite each other, they threw out the improvements and wore away all the colors and stripped it back down to the demo sound.” All that remained of his work, Lissauer says, “was the baritone saxophone solo on ‘Blue Alert’ and the waltz song ‘Thanks for the Dance’ that we did together.”
The album was ultimately recorded on neutral territory, with engineer and coproducer Ed Sanders in his analog studio in L.A. Sanders had worked with Anjani on her last album, The Sacred Names, and, ever since she introduced him to Leonard during the making of Dear Heather, he had also been working as Leonard’s administrative assistant. No one had been killed in the making of the album, although Lissauer, as often seemed to happen, was left a little bruised by the experience. Still, it did not prevent him from describing Blue Alert as “one of the great albums of the decade.” It is certainly fascinating to hear the erotic desires of an old man and lyrics about memories, fatigue and valedictions expressed in the voice of a young woman and couched in elegant folk-jazz melodies. In the liner-note booklet, Leonard is photographed sitting alongside the youthful, beautiful Anjani, his face out of focus, fading, as if he were in the process of becoming a ghost.
In October 2006, Came So Far for Beauty took its final bow in Ireland as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival. The lineup included many of the previous participants and others including Lou Reed, Mary Margaret O’Hara and Anjani, the last of these three at Leonard’s reques
t. Willner was happy to oblige. Anjani broke with the tradition of singing whatever Willner allotted and performed two songs from Blue Alert. Lou Reed also selected his own songs—two from Songs of Leonard Cohen, the album that Leonard was in New York recording when Reed met him for the first time. Willner asked Reed if he would also sing “Joan of Arc” as a duet with Julie Christensen. “First of all I don’t do la-las,” said Reed, but he agreed. Nick Cave, who this time had been given two songs from Songs of Love and Hate, his favorite, remembers Reed’s treatment of “The Stranger Song” as “extraordinary, so irreverent. It was a Lou song that happened to sound like Leonard Cohen had written it before Lou.”
That autumn, Lian Lunson’s film Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man started to do the rounds of independent U.S. cinemas. Leonard slipped into a movie theater in L.A. to watch it with Anjani. It is a curious film, part concert movie, part biographical interview. Selected stage performances from the tribute concerts and testimonies from participants—“This is our Shelley,” says Bono, “this is our Byron”—are interspersed with artily shot black-and-white footage of Lunson’s conversation with Leonard. As the filmmaker and her subject tread gently through the touchstones of Leonard’s past—his father’s death, the Montreal poetry scene, the stories behind “Suzanne,” the Chelsea Hotel, Phil Spector and the monastery—Leonard offers up old, familiar lines as if they have just occurred to him: “I started writing poetry trying to get girls interested in my mind”; “The less I was of who I was, the better I felt.” For his newer fans, those who came to his songs through the famous cover versions that kept turning up on film and TV and in Willner’s tribute concerts, it was an intriguing introduction. If Leonard, wise, dapper and self-deprecating, said nothing that his old fans did not already know, they were still happy to hear him, and especially see him, saying it, since few outside of Canada had seen him in years. And the scene in which he sings “Tower of Song,” backed by a doting U2, showed he still had the chops. A soundtrack album was released, with sixteen Leonard Cohen covers recorded live at the Sydney and Brighton concerts. “Tower of Song” made it on, but one song that did not was the rousing “Don’t Go Home with Your Hard-On.” Phil Spector, Leonard’s cowriter, refused to give his permission.
Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man certainly helped pique and revive interest in Leonard. But another effect of the film was to prompt the question, why was everyone except Leonard singing his songs? A Canadian journalist asked Leonard directly if he ever intended to go back on the road. Leonard answered that it was “becoming more and more attractive to me as we drink,” but he failed to mention that he rarely drank much anymore. In Book of Longing he had captioned one of his drawings with the verse
the road
is too long
the sky
is too vast
the wandering
heart
is homeless
at last
But as the year drew to a close, Leonard showed no inclination to be anywhere other than home.
Twenty-three
The Future of Rock ’n’ Roll
On the table were a slab of beef tongue and bottle of good cognac. Leonard knew what Roshi liked. He poured a large glass for Roshi and a small one for himself and they sat with their drinks in easy silence, Leonard and the old man who had named him Jikan but usually called him Kone (not quite “koan,” but close). In a few weeks’ time Roshi would be one hundred years old, and yet here he still was, the constant in Leonard’s life, the good friend, the wise father figure who disciplined and indulged him and never left, not even when Leonard had left him. Life, aside from “the pesky little problem of losing everything I had,”1 was treating Leonard kindly in his old age. He had Roshi, he had Anjani and he had a grandson, Cassius Lyon Cohen—two good names, Leonard’s boxing hero and his grandfather—Adam’s son, born in February 2007.
Leonard wore his own seventy-two years lightly. Still, he had noticed some changes, like losing his capacity for alcohol for one, as well as his taste for tobacco. When he quit smoking, Leonard had promised himself he could start again when he reached seventy-five. He blamed his abstinence from cigarettes for the loss of the two lowest notes in his vocal range, even if in truth they had only ever been audible to certain mammals and devoted female fans. His voice now was deeper than it had ever been. It was like old leather, soft and worn, a little cracked in places but for the most part supple, and hung suspended somewhere between word and song. Since Leonard’s return from the monastery, it seemed to have been leaning more toward the word. Of course there was always music in the word, but when it came down to actual melodies, Leonard seemed as content to leave them to others to write as he had been to let others sing his songs.
Another project was about to come to fruition, which featured his words set to music that Leonard neither wrote nor sang. Unlike Blue Alert, this was a stage production, with music by Philip Glass—among the most distinguished, influential and prolific composers in postmodern American music. Almost a quarter of a century earlier, between writing his avant-garde opera Einstein on the Beach and scoring the Martin Scorsese film Kundun, Glass had taken a poem of Leonard’s from The Spice-Box of Earth, “There Are Some Men,” and turned it into an a capella hymn, which was performed as part of Three Songs for Chorus a Cappella, a work commissioned for the celebration of the 350th anniversary of Quebec. At that time, he and Leonard had never met. But having been introduced backstage at a concert somewhere along the way, they had talked about spending some time together and eventually, fifteen years later, they did, in L.A. They spent the day together, Glass recalls, “talking about music and poetry,” by the end of the day, they had agreed to work together on something, though neither knew what or when.
Glass had collaborated over the years on diverse projects with orchestras, rock musicians and filmmakers, but he particularly enjoyed working with poets. One of his favorite collaborators was Allen Ginsberg, with whom he worked for ten years, until Ginsberg’s death in 1997. Not long after, Glass tried to get in touch with Leonard again, but he says, “I discovered he had gone into the monastery.” It would be several more years before Leonard e-mailed to say, “I’m out of the monastery, so we can go back to that project.” Glass, who “was missing having that in-depth relationship with a poet that was alive,” was delighted. “I kind of went from Allen Ginsberg to Leonard Cohen—a pretty good transition, don’t you think?”
When Glass visited Leonard at his L.A. home, Leonard was still working on Book of Longing. He handed the composer a stack of loose pages, poems and illustrations, in no particular order. Sitting at the wooden table, Glass leafed through them, relishing the randomness. He started formulating categories into which he divided the contents: ballads, “the long poems I thought would be the pillars of the work”; rhymes and limericks, “the little ones”; dharma poems, “spiritual meditations”; love/erotic poems; and personal poems, about Leonard. He picked five or six from each category to write music for. Among them were some that Leonard had already recorded as songs. Tentatively, Glass asked Leonard if he would like to be involved in the music. “I was terrified that he might say yes, but he said, ‘You write the music.’ ”
Glass composed a series of song cycles to be performed by four voices and a small ensemble made up of strings, oboe, horn, percussion and keyboards. To retain the sense of randomness he had felt and to give the theater audience a sense of “flipping through a book of poetry,” he included in each song cycle a poem from each of his five categories. He also wanted to hear how the poems sounded in their author’s voice, so he asked Leonard if he would record himself reading a few. Leonard recorded the entire book and sent that. “When I heard the quality of this reading,” Glass says, “I thought I would put his voice into the piece itself. I said, ‘Though you may not be there to perform it, may I use your voice?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ ” Leonard also gave Glass use of his artwork as a backdrop. When the composition was f
inished—ninety minutes, twenty-two poems—he played it for Leonard, who sat and listened quietly. “He said almost nothing. There was one vocal part that he felt was a little bit high and I eventually brought it down an octave, but that was the only thing, and it did work better.”
The world premiere for Book of Longing: A Song Cycle Based on the Poetry and Images of Leonard Cohen was set for June 1, 2007, in Toronto, coinciding with the opening there of Leonard Cohen: Drawn to Words, a traveling exhibition of Leonard’s drawings and sketches. Glass flew to Canada to conduct the final rehearsals. To his surprise Leonard flew there too and spent a week working with him and the cast. As with Blue Alert, Leonard was not without opinions on how his words ought to be sung. Glass remembers, “He met the singers and said, ‘Well here I am, you can ask me anything you like.’ They talked for hours. He had powerful insights into the approach to singing that worked with his words. He began talking about the ‘voice’ that they should employ in singing the work—I don’t mean the kind of voice, I mean the aesthetic. At one point he said, ‘You start by singing and make it simpler and simpler and simpler and where you reach the point where you’re actually speaking, then you’re finished.’ He didn’t actually literally mean they would be speaking, I believe he meant it would be as if you were speaking, that the affectations of singing were absent. And they followed that advice and they simplified their vocal style until it became almost like speech.” Leonard had said much the same thing to Anjani.
I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen Page 48