I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen

by Sylvie Simmons

  On April 1, as he donned his monk’s robes to visit Roshi, who was celebrating his 104th birthday, Leonard learned that he had won the prestigious Glenn Gould Prize. The award, given to a living artist for a lifetime contribution to the arts, came with a $50,000 purse. Previous winners had included Pierre Boulez and Oscar Peterson. The chairman, Paul Hoffert, told a press conference in Toronto that Leonard Cohen had been the unanimous choice of all seven members of the international jury, which included the filmmaker Atom Egoyan (whose 1994 film Exotica featured “Everybody Knows” on its soundtrack) and actor and writer Stephen Fry (who deadpanned, “I thought we agreed on Justin Bieber”). Hoffert praised Leonard’s poetry and song for transcending boundaries and cultures and “touching our common humanity. His unique voice is nonetheless the common voice of people around the globe telling our stories, expressing our emotions, reaching deeply into our psyches.”9

  Leonard had met Glenn Gould in the early sixties, when Esquire sent him to interview the celebrated Canadian pianist. The piece was never published. Leonard had been so enraptured by what Gould said that he stopped taking notes, believing it “indelibly imprinted in [his] mind.” When he got home, he “could not remember a single thing” Gould said to him.10 Leonard did not mention this mishap in his letter to the award committee, in which he thanked them for “a great honor, sweetened by [his] love of the work of Glenn Gould.” Leonard continued to work on his album, which now had a title—the same title his last studio album had, before he was persuaded to change it to Dear Heather—Old Ideas.

  Adam Cohen was also working on a new album, his fourth, which, at his father’s suggestion, he had titled Like a Man. The album, Adam said, was an homage to his father, “a fusion of elegance and humour, of eloquence and effortless casualness” and “the consummate gentleman.”11 Adam had written some of its songs more than a decade earlier but had shelved them because he felt that they bore too much of his father’s influence. His sister, Lorca, did not appear to share Adam’s need to distance herself from their father and his work. She had joined Leonard at several points on the tour, making videos and shooting photos for his CD sleeves; in April 2011, she staged a series of short films by artists and experimental filmmakers, inspired by New Skin for the Old Ceremony, the album Leonard released the year she was born. But finally, a year away from turning forty, Adam felt ready to “come out” as Leonard Cohen’s son. “Despite my efforts to carve out a different identity,” he said, “really I belong to a long line of people who have embraced their father’s business.”12

  Delighted with his son’s album, Leonard was also taken with the album’s producer, Patrick Leonard, a piano player, composer and songwriter who had a long history of working with Madonna, with whom he cowrote “La Isla Bonita” and “Like a Prayer.” Adam introduced them, and Leonard and Leonard started to meet for coffee. Before long they were writing together. “Pat saw the lyric for ‘Going Home’ and he said, “This could be a really good song.’ I said, ‘I don’t think so.’ He said, ‘Can I have a shot at it?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ He came back with the music—I don’t know if it was the next hour or the next day, but it was very fast. He was working quickly and I was working quickly, and, very quickly, we wrote several more songs.”13

  Leonard revealed the existence of his new album in the late summer of 2011, at almost the same time that his U.S. record label was preparing to release yet another career retrospective, The Very Best of Leonard Cohen, a single CD whose songs were selected by Leonard. The compilation was put on hold, but not the far more copious retrospective CD box set, Leonard Cohen: The Complete Columbia Albums Collection, which contained all of Leonard’s albums, studio and live, from Songs of Leonard Cohen in 1967 to Songs from the Road in 2010.

  The imminent arrival of another album did rather spoil the title, but in fairness, his record company was not alone in taking the end of Leonard’s triumphant tour for the end of his career as a recording artist. Leonard himself appeared to be leaning that way at the beginning of 2010 when, in his acceptance speech for the Lifetime Achievement Grammy Award, he referred to making his way toward “the finishing line.” He was more likely talking in veiled terms about death, which he did often enough, than about the last dates of the tour. But in September 2011, as he celebrated his seventy-seventh birthday, sharing his cake with Roshi, even Leonard had to admit that he was “in good form.”

  In October, Leonard was in Oviedo, Spain, to receive his second major honor of the year. The Prince of Asturias Award for Letters came with a fifty-thousand-euro purse and a Joan Miró sculpture. It had not gone unnoticed that this was an award for literature; past laureates, who included Günter Grass and Arthur Miller, were not known for their songs. But as the statement from the jury read—mirroring in many ways what the Glenn Gould Prize jury had said—Leonard had been chosen for “a body of literary work in which poetry and music are fused in an oeuvre of immutable merit.” It was another vindication. Although it often seemed to fall on the deaf ears of academics and literary critics, this is what Leonard had been saying all along.

  Leonard had always been good with an acceptance speech, but at the Prince of Asturias ceremony he excelled himself. His address to the distinguished audience, among whose number were the Spanish royal family and Federico Garcia Lorca’s niece, was at once personal and a polished piece of prose (despite his claim of having sat up all night in his hotel room, scribbling notes, none of which he consulted). It was also a performance—as accomplished, practiced, dignified, humble, intimate, graceful and grateful a performance as any of the concerts on his last tour. It opened with the usual expression of gratitude and followed with his habitual self-deprecation, protesting how uncomfortable he felt being honored for his poetry when “poetry comes from a place that no one commands, no one conquers, so I feel somewhat like a charlatan.” As if to underline the “charlatan” claim, he tossed in a line he had used countless times in countless interviews: “If I knew where the good songs came from, I would go there more often.” His unease had led him, he said, to seek out the old Spanish guitar he had bought some forty years ago. He took it out of its case and held it to his face, inhaling “the fragrance of the cedar, as fresh as the day that I acquired the guitar.” “A voice seemed to say to me, you are an old man, and you have not said thank you, you have not brought your gratitude back to the soil from which this fragrance arose . . . [and] the soul of this land that has given me so much.”

  Leonard talked about the tragic young Spaniard he had encountered in his teens, playing a guitar in Murray Hill Park, at the back of his family home on Belmont Avenue. Girls had gathered around to listen, and Leonard listened too. When he stopped playing, Leonard urged him to teach him how to play like that. Over the course of three lessons, he taught Leonard the “six chords” and the flamenco guitar pattern Leonard called “the basis of all my songs and all my music.”

  Leonard spoke even more eloquently about the impact on his life of another Spanish man. When he had begun playing guitar, he said, he was also writing poems. He had been copying the styles of the English poets he had studied at school, but he “hungered for a voice.” He said, “It was only when I read—even in translation—the works of Lorca that I understood that there was a voice.” Leonard said that he did not copy that voice—“I wouldn’t dare”—but he listened closely to what it said. It gave him permission “to locate a self, a self that is not fixed, a self that struggles for its own existence.” It also told him “never to lament casually, and, if one is to express the great inevitable defeat that awaits us all, it must be done within the strict confines of dignity and beauty.”

  The ceremony was followed by a tribute concert. It began with a short video Leonard’s daughter had made. There were filmed interviews with Leonard’s band. A member of the prize jury, Andrés Amorós, recited Spanish translations of Leonard’s poetry and lyrics, accompanied by the Webb Sisters. Laura Garcia Lorca thanked Leonard for being “the best ambassa
dor” her late uncle could have had. Musicians, including the flamenco singer Duquende, the Irish singer-songwriter Glen Hansard and Leonard’s comrade of the road Javier Mas, performed his songs. Leonard was a veteran of tributes. He had sat through more heartfelt covers of his songs these past ten years than he could count. Yet there were tears in his eyes. During the closing song, “So Long, Marianne”—just as he had when he sang the same song in Jerusalem on the last night of a tour almost forty years before—he let them run freely down his face.

  At the long wooden desk in his small study, Leonard searched through numerous icons on the oversized computer monitor. Now and then he stopped and clicked on one; it usually turned out to be a photograph of one of his grandchildren. He was looking for a liner-note booklet. Unable to locate the digital version, he got out of the typing chair to look for the mock-up. He found it on the bookshelf, where it was keeping company with three volumes of the Zohar, Bukowski’s The Pleasures of the Damned, Braque’s Lithographie, a small row of Leonard Cohen books, The Language of Truth, a book on the Greek poets and an Allen Ginsberg bobblehead.

  Leonard returned with the Old Ideas booklet, whose pages were stuck together with glue, like a child’s arts and crafts project. On the cover is a photograph of Leonard, sitting, reading, on a garden chair downstairs on the small front lawn. The shadow of the woman who shot the picture (Leonard’s assistant) takes up as much space as Leonard himself. He is dressed formally in a black suit, black fedora, black shoes, black socks and black sunglasses, but his black tie is awry and the top of his white shirt is undone. Inside the booklet, along with the words of the songs, are earlier versions of the lyrics, reproduced from pages of Leonard’s pocket-sized notebooks and illustrated with his artwork. There is a self-portrait—crushed cap, grim face. There is a naked woman with long black hair, posing next to a skull.

  Leonard clicked on a file on the computer screen and leaned back in the chair. The album began to play. Leonard straightened his spine a little and lowered his eyes; he might have been meditating. Now and again, his lips barely moving, he silently mouthed the words. By the middle of the third song his eyes had closed, and remained closed for the rest of the album. Which meant that he did not notice when his computer went into screen-saver mode and a parade of news flashes started a stately procession across the monitor—Republican party candidates, the UK phone-hacking scandal, the controversy over the sale of emergency contraceptives—adding random and sometimes oddly apposite captions to the music.

  The album had gone through a number of changes since Leonard had resumed work on it at the beginning of the year. Of the new songs he introduced on tour, only two are included: “Darkness,” still largely recognizable as the song he played onstage, and “Lullaby,” with drastically rewritten lyrics. Leonard’s cowrite with Sharon Robinson “Different Sides” is here, but his cowrite with Anjani “The Street” is not. There is just one of the three reworked Blue Alert songs, “Crazy to Love You,” which has some minor lyrical changes but, far more significantly, is now a guitar, not a piano, song. After a long stretch of contentment with his synthesizer, Leonard found himself returning to the guitar, playing it on four of the tracks. His guitar on “Crazy to Love You” takes the listener back to his earliest albums, in particular to Songs from a Room. There are keyboards on the album too, and violins, horns, drums, banjo and archilaud, and Jennifer Warnes, Dana Glover, Sharon Robinson and the Webb Sisters on backing vocals. The credits name as producers Leonard Cohen, Ed Sanders, Anjani, Dino Soldo and Patrick Leonard, who cowrote four songs.

  When the tenth and final song ended, Leonard opened his eyes. This was the first time he had heard the album since they mixed it almost two months ago. He had been listening, intently, “for any false steps, or if there’s anything that could have been done another way, or if somehow the reverie were interrupted.” If it were, he said, he would have taken it back into the studio and worked on it some more. Smiling, he said, “I didn’t find any traitorous elements. I had not misjudged its readiness.”14

  Old Ideas was released on January 31, 2012. The accompanying press release described Leonard as “a spiritual guy with a poetical streak” and the album as his “most overtly spiritual.” But though the first single, “Show Me the Place,” does have churchlike qualities—the slow piano, the deep, solemn voice intoning, “Show me the place / Where you want your slave to go . . . For my head is bending low”—anyone in the least familiar with a Leonard Cohen album would recognize that the words might as easily be addressed to a naked woman as to an Old Testament God. (The first press release was quickly replaced with one from which the unfortunate phraseology was deleted. Perhaps by way of compensation, the record label erected a giant billboard of the album sleeve in New York’s Times Square.)

  Leonard’s flair for fusing the erotic and the spiritual remains unparalleled on his twelfth studio album. Even in “Amen,” where, in perfectly biblical fashion, “the filth of the butcher” is “washed in the blood of the lamb,” the angels at Leonard’s door are “panting and scratching,” and the “lord” to whom “vengeance belongs” has a lowercase “l.” It would probably be a safe bet that the lines “Dreamed about you baby / You were wearing half your dress,” in “Anyhow,” are not directed at Jehovah. And though “The Darkness” might arguably be about depression, disease or the darkness of the grave, the words “You said: Just drink it up . . . You were young and it was summer / I just had to take a dive” seem just as unarguably about cunnilingus.

  The album has levity as well as gravity. It skips and it cartwheels, falls to its knees, bows its head in prayer, hat over its heart, and flirts with the women in the front row. The protagonist of the album’s opening song “Going Home”—God, presumably, or some kind of higher power concerned with giving Leonard orders and pulling his strings—is less than pleased with this lighthearted attitude to the job he wants Leonard to do. Which is throw off his burden, go home behind the curtain, sing himself off this earthly stage and on to a better place, like an old man ought, like an old icon certainly should, like Bob Dylan did in “Beyond the Horizon,” and Glen Campbell with Ghost on the Canvas, and Johnny Cash on almost all of his late-life recordings. But Leonard Cohen, this so-called “sage,” this “man of vision,” is nothing more than a “lazy bastard living in a suit” who wants to write about the same things he has been banging on at forever: “a love song, an anthem of forgiving, a manual for living with defeat”; the same old ideas that were on his first album, Songs of Leonard Cohen, and that have been on every Leonard Cohen album since. Something as insignificant as old age was not going to change that. And, anyway, Leonard always was old. He was old on his first album—thirty-three, a decade older than the other singer-songwriters making their debuts. He did not need age to give him authority; he already had it. Instead, the passing of the years appeared to have given him a lightness—the same lightness we saw on the last tour, when he skipped out from behind the curtain and onto the stage, night after night.

  As Greg Kot noted in his Chicago Tribune review, “Old Ideas is not another of the dreaded winter-of-my-years albums that have become a cottage industry in recent decades. [Cohen is] still feisty after all these years, his entanglements with love and aging documented with wicked wit and an attitude that is anything but sentimental.”15 Kitty Empire wrote in the Observer, “Old Ideas is not all about death, betrayal and God, juicy as these are. As the title suggests, it is more of the stuff that has made Cohen indispensable for six decades: desire, regret, suffering, love, hope, and hamming it up.”16 The reviews were almost universally positive, although some critics focused more on the “ultimate defeat” than on Leonard’s “manual for living”—Rolling Stone saw him “staring down the eternal with unblinking honesty”17—and treated the album as if it were a last farewell, a bone of the saint that was still just a little warm. “It is difficult, albeit a little ill-mannered, not to regard Old Ideas as possibly Leonard Cohen’s final recorded testament,�
�� wrote Andy Gill in the Independent. “But if it is to be his last communiqué, at least the old smoothie’s going down swinging.”18

  For now, the old smoothie packed his good suit and left for a short promotional tour—New York, Paris, London. There were countless requests for interviews, which he turned down, having appeared to have entirely lost interest in the interview process. Perhaps he had never had much interest in the first place, but he had been happy (or courteous enough, or curious enough) to participate in the game and proffer exquisitely structured, perfectly worded bons mots. Instead he held a few press conferences—theatrical affairs, with a handpicked media audience. He played his album, then invited a few questions. A master of deflection, with great charm he parried almost every one. He recycled old lines and gags into new column inch upon column inch in major publications. “How is it for you to listen to your own records?” asked Jarvis Cocker, the Britpop star who moderated the London event. “I wasn’t listening,” Leonard replied. Cocker asked him how he felt about his latest award. PEN New England, an American literary association whose jury included Bono, Elvis Costello, Rosanne Cash and Salman Rushdie, had named Leonard Cohen and Chuck Berry as joint winners of their inaugural prize for Song Lyrics of Literary Excellence. Leonard replied, “The thing I liked about this award was that I’m sharing it with Chuck Berry. ‘Roll over Beethoven and tell Tchaikovsky the news’: I’d like to write a line like that.”19