by Ira B. Nadel
A rough mix was put on two tracks with the other six tracks left open for Cohen’s vocals, which he added in the studio he built above the garage of his L.A. home. Recording at home in the early hours allowed Cohen to do the vocals in “a luxurious way,” he says. “I was able to take the time to find exactly the right mood for the narrator, until the vocals married with the track and the song’s content so the voice represented the song rather than simply unfolded it.” Cutting vocals at home was also a lot cheaper than renting a studio. And the vocals, he added, are not as spare as they first sound: “You can lean on it, relax into it. There are doors and windows you can enter if you have the time.”
When Cohen was satisfied with a vocal track, he would send it back to Robinson, and she would complete the arrangements by adding sampled instruments and her background vocals. In keeping with his desire to contrast his gritty voice against a lush background, some of the songs feature as many as twenty backing vocal tracks, all performed by Robinson. Occasionally, she found herself singing doubled three-part harmony.
Originally, Cohen and Robinson intended to use other musicians and backup singers to complete the songs; her vocals were only to sketch out ideas to be sung in sessions by others. But Cohen fell in love with the sound of the sampled instruments and Robinson’s layers. Additional singers, they decided, were not necessary. Also, most of Cohen’s vocals were contiguous performances with little overdubbing of words or phrases. The sound engineer, who had to edit out nighttime noises of dogs barking and cars driving by Cohen’s garage studio, used very little compression on his voice, creating a translucent sound best described as “cool,” a term often applied to the techniques of such minimalists as Steve Reich or Philip Glass.
The reissuing of Cohen’s earlier work continued in the new millennium, notably with a Chinese edition of his novel Beautiful Losers in 2000. For the translation, Cohen composed “A Note to the Reader,” beginning with explaining how honored he felt on seeing “the frenzied thoughts of my youth expressed in Chinese characters.” He then disarmingly instructs his future readers to skip the parts they don’t like and read only the passages that “resonate with your curiosity. After a while, if you are sufficiently bored or unemployed, you may want to read it from cover to cover.” He ends by thanking readers for any interest in “this odd collection of jazz riffs, pop-art jokes, religious kitsch and muffled prayer,” and admits that when he wrote it outside at his house on Hydra, he never covered his head, so “what you have in your hands is more of a sunstroke than a book.”
Another early work newly available was Field Commander Cohen (2001), a recording of twelve songs from a 1979 British concert. It includes “Field Commander Cohen,” “Lover, Lover, Lover,” and “Why Don’t You Try,” an early duet with Sharon Robinson. A double album of thirty-one songs, The Essential Leonard Cohen (2002) followed and then a UK double album, Mojo Presents An Introduction to Leonard Cohen, in which the editors of the British rock magazine picked their twenty-three essential Cohen tracks. One measure of his artistic vitality was his nomination in February 2002 for four Canadian Juno Awards—Best Artist, Best Songwriter, Best Pop Album, and Best Video (“In My Secret Life”)—for Ten New Songs. In October 2003 he was elevated to Companion of the Order of Canada (Canada’s highest civilian honor) at a ceremony conducted by the then Governor General Adrienne Clarkson at Rideau Hall in Ottawa.
Cohen released his eleventh album, Dear Heather, in 2004, a collection of thirteen studio songs plus a live track of “Tennessee Waltz.” Dedicated to his late book publisher Jack McClelland, Dear Heather tied together poetry and song in a mix of music and verse recital. Its uneven reception—Stylus magazine called it “an album of eulogies” and cited “dated keyboard effects” and “obscure lyric repeats”—reflected his approach to the material. He told a reporter in 2006 that the album was more like a “preface, or display of the palette of all the circumstances and influences in my life” than a finished work. While it feels like a sketch of an as-yet-unfinished album, several songs do stand out, including “There for You,” written by Cohen and Sharon Robinson and “On That Day,” a meditation on 9/11 written with Anjani Thomas. Cohen frequently and graciously lets his female collaborators share the limelight, going back to Jennifer Warnes, Perla Batalla, Julie Christiansen, Sharon Robinson, and now Anjani Thomas. He also included a musical nod to his literary past on the album: “To a Teacher” is a song in praise of the Canadian poet A.M. Klein.
Cohen’s seventieth birthday on September 21, 2004 was a time for rejoicing, with Finland leading the way by issuing a stamp in his honor, and Canada lagging behind with only a CBC radio testimonial and the occasional newspaper article. But there was universal praise for his work, influence, and importance and various tribute albums appeared.
But in that same year, Cohen learned that he had been duped by both his longtime manager and a Colorado financial advisor. As Cohen stated in an email message, his new occupation became “fighting crime in tinsel town.” His attitude, however, remained philosophical. Referring to what he called his “pesky troubles,” he remarked that “it’s all enough to put a dent in one’s mood but fortunately it hasn’t, [although] certainly it’s an enterprise I could have done without.” He also offered an interesting insight: “The troubles have proved very nourishing in their way. In its fashion, my dilemma has created a landscape that has allowed me to do a great deal of work [and] the work itself has brought some blessings.”
His “pesky troubles” made the cover of Maclean’s magazine’s August 22, 2005 issue, confirming the severity of the situation and his willingness, quite uncharacteristically, to go public with his story. The article details the legal battle of suits and countersuits following his discovery that he had been defrauded of almost all of his savings. “I was devastated” he told Maclean’s senior writer Brian D. Johnson, but “you know, God gave me a strong inner core, so I wasn’t shattered. But I was deeply concerned.” Since that time, Cohen has won a $9.5 million decision against his former manager in a civil suit, but is still facing a long battle to actually restore his funds.
Other events have offset the situation, including an effort in March 2005 by the Canadian media to nominate Cohen for a Nobel Prize. Articles, letters, and essays in support of the nomination brought renewed attention to his work. And in the summer of 2005 there was the discovery by several energetic Edmonton “Cohenites” of new details concerning the origin of the song, “Sisters of Mercy,” something I had got wrong in my original biographical account. I had claimed that in 1966 Cohen met two young women in a snowstorm and brought them back to his room as he described on The Best of Leonard Cohen: “This was written in a few hours one winter night in a hotel room in Edmonton, Alberta. Barbara and Lorraine were sleeping on the couch. The room was filled with moonlight reflected off the ice of the North Saskatchewan River. I had it ready for them when they woke up.”
The full story was pulled together from formerly overlooked articles published in the University of Alberta student paper, Gateway, in anticipation of Cohen’s visit there, and several recent interviews.
In the fall of 1966, Cohen was near the height of his notoriety, having already published three books of poetry and his first novel. He was receiving much attention as a Beat-styled Canadian poet in the mold of Allen Ginsberg, and he added to his mystique by living part of the year in Greece on the island of Hydra and projecting himself as the bohemian of Canadian letters in films such as the National Film Board’s Ladies and Gentlemen …Mr. Leonard Cohen (1965).
Excitement over his Edmonton visit was unrestrained, Gateway publishing a piece four days before his November arrival describing him as the “present darling of the campus cognoscenti, the bohemian in-groups, …the Toronto morality squad and lots of lovers of language.” “More to the point,” it goes on, he is “probably the most exciting and likely the best writer in Canada right now.” Anticipation drives the writer into a frenzy of “Cohenesque” prose: He, LEONARD COHEN, shall from t
he skybird … descend unto us and sing and speak and chant to beauty in Montreal, love in Toronto, harmony in Canada and other paradoxes and we shall be grateful. … For Cohen comes—and he shall say to Irving [Layton]—behold Irving it is not entirely wrong to have been born in Westmount, for have I not traveled to Edmonton? And can I not roll craps with the best of them?
Shortly after his arrival, Cohen gave an interview to the paper. It’s classic Cohen, filled with self-deflecting remarks and oblique asides. Eli Mandel, then a poet in the University of Alberta English Department, welcomed the reporters at the door to Cohen’s room in the annex to the Hotel Macdonald by saying, “Hi, I’m Leonard Cohen.” The group was not fooled, especially since they could hear Cohen singing from the shower. When he came out, a series of questions ensued: asked if he thought Dylan’s recent breakthrough into pop music would have any greater cultural significance, Cohen said he didn’t know, adding that he felt he created Bob Dylan through the “incantation of words to a string accompaniment. That was my whole idea of what I wanted to do.” He got sidetracked into writing for five or six years, he said, but now he was back singing.
Asked if his poetry owed something to the chanting of rabbinic cantors, he answered, “I feel it’s all the same. I think for me it’s all been one poem,” and added that each book represented “a different kind of crisis.” He elaborated: “I never felt anything really move. I saw that the page looked different—sometimes it was prose, sometimes it was poetry—but I never really felt very far from that incantatory voice beside a stringed instrument.”
After he wrote Beautiful Losers, mostly to country and western music played on the Armed Forces radio network from Athens, he thought he wanted to be a country and western singer (remember, he had a country and western band as a teenager called the Buckskin Boys). When he returned to Canada, he actually headed for Nashville but got “waylaid in New York and got into that world.” He then revealed to the student journalists that he was making a record in New York. Asked again about Beautiful Losers, which had been in stores for only a few months, he told his interviewers that he considered the book “a poem, first of all: sort of a long epic poem.” He added that it was written that way and that was also the way he wrote his music. “How’s that?” asked an interviewer. “Just music … music, I just handle a very big song, exactly the same way as if I were writing a very small song.” Whether poetry or prose, the central thing is that it “always sounds like a song to me. … [and] anything that has a life and death sound to it is a song.”
Questions then turned personal and abstract: “Would you rather make love or make poems? Or are they the same thing?” Cohen’s answer? “That depends on the girl.” He then stated his well-known view that poetry is a verdict—“it’s the name we give to a certain kind of experience;” poems are not organized per se but “every poem is life and death … the only realm you want to live in.” Irving Layton, who visited Edmonton the previous year, was then cited along with his claim that “he was one of the great forces holding Canada together.” The reporters then asked if Cohen would make a similar statement about himself. “I think it’s Layton and the railroads. I feel I’m one of the great disintegrating forces,” he explained.
Questioned about French Canada, he admitted that he felt “much closer to the French chansonnier than to “any English poet,” a revealing remark, identifying in many ways the origin of Cohen’s ballad style. Asked directly if he would be singing during his visit, he replied, “I am going to do what passes for singing. I really feel that every day has got one song. You know every poet has got one poem, and every novelist has got one story, and everybody’s got one song and all my songs are the same one. All my books are really the same poem. I really feel the only way I can excuse the kind of voice I’ve got is to really write my very, very own song, and it’s the one nobody else can do.”
At the end of the interview, Cohen turned prophetic, announcing that the “disaffiliated and painful novels and poetry of our recent past will be the sutras and mantras of this new religion that’s coming. Everything that we tell each other is a kind of prayer.” He ended by saying he considered himself in the rabbinic tradition and “people who have gone on my kind of trip will be able to consult me, perhaps.” “Will you be their Moses?” he was asked. “I don’t know if I’ll be anybody’s Moses—I might be their Leonard.”
Not surprisingly, every Edmonton venue and performance of Cohen’s was packed, as was his room in the Hotel Macdonald’s annex. Rocco Caratozzolo, an Edmonton photographer, captured the youthful Cohen in a set of photos, the young singer/writer wearing a black turtleneck and holding his guitar. And new information confirms that Cohen also befriended four women during his visit, which lasted nearly a week: Patricia, Anne, Barbara, and Lorraine. (His poem “I Met You” is about Anne.)
Barbara and Lorraine were undergraduates living in the basement of a philosophy professor’s house on 89th Avenue. Leonard was invited to a faculty party there, and Barbara and Lorraine crashed it. He decided to leave and invited them back to his room. The two women fell asleep there and, moved by the evening and his “rescue” from the party, he wrote “Sisters of Mercy” about them. Some time later, when the two girls told their friend Patricia that Cohen had written a song about them, she couldn’t believe it. To confirm their story, they called him in Montreal and he sang it to Patricia over the phone. “Sisters of Mercy,” as Cohen explained, was unique: “it was the only time a song has ever been given to me without my having to sweat over every word. And when they awakened in the morning, I sang them the song exactly as it is, perfect completely formed, and they were & happy about it.”
At last count, there have been nineteen cover versions of the song written so easily for Barbara and Lorraine, by artists as diverse as Dion, George Hamilton IV, Mark Lucas, Mean Larry and Friends, Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt, and Sting and the Chieftains. What’s more, the rock band “Sisters of Mercy,” formed in Leeds in 1980 and led by Gary Marx and Andrew Eldritch, is still going strong.
Cohen’s induction into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame took place on February 5, 2006, in Toronto. Five of his songs were played, with no less a country artist than Willie Nelson singing “Bird on a Wire” and k.d. lang and Rufus Wainwright among the other performers. Cohen spoke briefly and was feted as our senior statesman of hip music and Canadian letters.
His new album Blue Alert (2006) confirmed this position. Written and produced by Cohen, the songs are jazzy ballads of loss and recovery sung by Anjani Thomas. The Hawaiian-born singer first performed on Cohen’s 1984 album Various Positions and as a harmony vocalist and keyboardist on subsequent records and tours. Blue Alert began when Thomas took the lead vocal on the Dear Heather track, “Undertow.” Soon after, she spied some lyrics on Cohen’s desk and asked if she could record them as a possible demo for his next album. Pleased with the results, she began to sift through his notebooks and files locating lines or verses she liked. The two then turned these scraps into completed songs, Cohen finding the writing strangely satisfying, saying that, “being what you are is always tricky, but being what you’re not is really liberating.” The album of “bittersweet love songs,” as Thomas calls them, is both melancholic and melodious.
Book of Longing, published in April 2006, was Cohen’s first volume of new poems in twenty-two years, and some three thousand fans turned up for his signing in Toronto—such a crowd the streets had to be blocked off. The book had been promised many times to his publisher (in interviews, Cohen comically referred to the work as the “Book of Prolonging”), but it proved worth the wait. Within a month of publication, the book reached the #1 position on hardcover bestseller fiction lists in Canada, the first time a book of poetry had done so. A mixture of poetry, prose, autobiography, his own handwriting, song lyrics, and computer-generated drawings, designs, backdrops, and images by Cohen, it’s now in its third printing and has been sold to thirteen countries, including France, Italy, Israel, and Denmark, as well as
to the U.S. and Great Britain.
Numerous self-portraits populate the book, creating a mirror text of Cohen in states of confusion and clarity, some images displaying both. “A private gaze” shows a stocky, well-built Cohen; another, entitled “We will all be airbrushed,” dated January 25, 2003, shows a poet disconsolate and frail. Book of Longing captures Cohen looking through his dreams to discover what’s happened in his life, also using a whimsical sense of uncertainty expressed in the caption, “one of those days when the hat doesn’t help.” Cohen becomes, and has always been, “a tourist of beauty / in full disappointment/ ready to fall in love/ with a ghost.” But this is recognition, not regret.
Reviews were universally strong, emphasizing not only his witty confrontation of change, but his inability to renounce yearning. His themes repeat those we have encountered and experienced in his work as early as The Spice-Box of Earth and Death of a Lady’s Man: loss, remorse, isolation, and that damn search for love and companionship. As always, the heart “is in sad confusion,” although this time it has an extra edge of humor. Wit transforms disillusionment into acceptance, as age fails to alter desire.
Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man, Lian Lunson’s documentary homage, also released in 2006, provides another new portrait of Cohen. Based on a 2005 concert in Sydney, the film gains its depth from splicing a self-deprecating interview with Cohen with performances of his songs by Nick Cave, Rufus Wainwright, Martha Wainwright, the McGarrigles, Bono, and others. The musicians treat him as a living legend but Cohen undercuts their veneration at every turn.
The publishing history of my biography is itself a measure of the continuing international interest in Cohen. Various Positions has appeared in French, German, Polish, and Japanese, as well as in Canadian, British, U.S., and Australian editions. To mark Cohen’s fifty years of writing poetry, his publisher also reprinted his first book of poetry, Let Us Compare Mythologies, youthful poems written between the ages of fifteen and twenty. Even Prince Charles, conscious of the pain of yearning, publicly affirmed his enthusiasm for Cohen’s work in a May 2006 TV interview. And interest in Cohen will undoubtedly grow again following the May 2006 announcement that his archive has been donated to the University of Toronto—more than 140 boxes of material, supplementing the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library’s 1968 collection of his work.