by Jeff Burger
For someone stuck with a particular voice and vision, Cohen has done remarkably well. On albums such as New Skin for the Old Ceremony (1974) and the Phil Spector collaboration Death of a Ladies’ Man (1977), he introduced a new musical complexity while retaining the same somber sentiment that was by now his trademark. I’m Your Man has enough familiar Cohenisms to please the faithful (tales of yearning and impending doom) and enough experimentation to assure his critics that he’s not through yet.
“I think the thing we like about a singer,” says Cohen, “is that he’s really singing with his own voice. He’s not putting you on. That’s why people like me can get away with making records. There are certain times when I feel that my voice is absolutely appropriate for the song, like in ‘Tower of Song’ on the new album, for example.
“That curious thing we call a song is satisfying. I remember during one of my first appearances at the Newport Folk Festival admitting to someone that I was scared because I realized I didn’t know how to sing. This friend said to me, ‘None of you guys knows how to sing. When I want to hear singers I go to the Metropolitan Opera.’
“A lot of us don’t know how to sing according to certain standards but there is a whole tradition of music where you just want to hear the man telling a story as accurately and as authentically as you can. That is why there is a place for singers like me.”
It’s strange to consider that many of the women who populate his earlier songs, whose names still evoke a fancy-free youth, are now middle-aged mothers. Marianne, who shared life with him on Hydra and was pictured on the back cover of Songs from a Room, is a fifty-year-old married woman living in Oslo. Suzanne [Verdal, inspiration for the song], who once lived on the waterfront in Montreal, is in her midforties and Cohen still sees her when she returns.
“I don’t know exactly what Suzanne’s doing now and I’ve never asked her what the song meant to her,” he says. “People touch off songs. They give you a seed and the song that develops may not eventually be specifically about them although there is something of them in it. There was a girl called Suzanne who did invite me down to her place by the river and did feed me tea and oranges.”
Cohen has never married although he’s rarely been without a woman beside him. “I think a delight in women is not something you want to lose,” he says. For much of the seventies he was living with a French woman [Actually, Suzanne Elrod, who, according to Cohen biographer Sylvie Simmons, was from Miami, Florida. He didn’t meet his French girlfriend, Dominique Isserman, until 1982. —Ed.] who bore him his two children (but failed to be immortalized in any of his song titles). [As noted above, the song that bears her first name was inspired by a different Suzanne. —Ed.] When the relationship broke up around the time of Death of a Ladies’ Man, he says, it was exactly like getting divorced. He remains very close to his son and daughter, whose musical criticisms he appreciates.
He claims not to know why he’s never made it to the altar. Surprisingly, he’s not antimarriage as such. “Not at all. I think marriage is the foundation stone of the whole enterprise.” Yet he’s remained a notorious bachelor? “Something like that. Stuck in my ways!”
I suggest that his songs betray a fascination with the adventure of a falling both in and out of love and that permanence is not really what he’s seeking. “Probably not,” he says with a smirk. “Something like that. I don’t know whether I ever liked the adventure but I got into it now and again. In and then out!”
So he really hasn’t changed much in twenty-one years? “I used to be a restless young man but now I’m a restless middle-aged man,” he says. “You can’t help but change, though I’d be hard pressed to say exactly in what way.”
At fifty-three he still carries the image of being a ladies’ man, falling in love for the poetry it evokes within him. I tell him that I can best imagine him late at night in a Parisian pavement café, a Turkish cigarette in his fingers, staring into the eyes of a long-haired woman of romantic European extraction, perhaps recounting a literary tale.
“Sometimes it’s that way,” he admits with a smile, “but to keep the thing going you have to write a dozen or so books and a couple of hundred songs as well.” Does he like being a ladies’ man? “I’m no ladies’ man,” he says. “I don’t have any particular facility in the matter.”
Maybe the mood he creates is more depressing than the actual content of the songs?
“It might be. Some people might find it comforting. Some people might find it depressing. Some people might find it boring. I think these are all legitimate perceptions.”
It would be legitimate to call his songs “boring”?
“If you’re not into it. I can be bored by Wagner if I’m not into it. They’re just songs and they’re meant to do what songs are meant to do. To get you through a moment. Something to listen to while you’re washing up. Something to set the mood while you’re reaching for a lady’s hand. Something just to fill the air when the air is too empty.”
Does he ever feel, “Here I am, I’m fifty-three and I’m still chasing girls and writing songs about them?”
“Yeah. Really. I hope it never stops.”
I’M YOUR MAN
ALBERTO MANZANO | May 1988, Rockdelux (Spain)
Cohen’s 1988 tour included a stop in Spain. That’s where he talked with his Spanish translator, Alberto Manzano, who had been invited to the Madrid launch of I’m Your Man.
“He was with his French companion, [photographer] Dominique Issermann, who I had the honor of meeting during the dinner sponsored by CBS Spain following the reception,” Manzano told me. “The day after, we agreed to meet up to talk about the album in his room at the Palace Hotel, where, as usual, he was staying.
“After more than an hour of conversation,” continued Manzano, “we went out for a stroll in the Old Quarter. During our walk, Leonard could not resist the temptation of buying some chocolate, which he was prohibited from having, and then he stopped at an old clothes shop in the Atocha neighborhood, where he bought himself a grey shirt.” —Ed.
Alberto Manzano: Perhaps the most immediate surprise when listening to I’m Your Man is the use of the synthesizer. I have heard that in recent years you have been composing with a small synthesizer that you take with you everywhere instead of your guitar. Why this change in your manner of working and in your music?
Leonard Cohen: It’s true I have been working with these toy synthesizers for these past few years because I have been wanting to make songs with rhythms that I can’t play on the guitar. I don’t know how to play some of these rhythms although I like them in other people’s songs. It plays with 4/4 rhythm. But with my little machine you can press a button and you can get a sound of a tango or a slow rock or fast rock or a waltz or a two step or a polka or a reggae, and with all these advantages it makes the instrument very lovable, and you feel very loving and attached and intimate with your toy synthesizer.
AM: After the initial surprise, I remember being perplexed when listening to the record, a feeling similar to the one I had when I first heard Death of a Ladies’ Man. But Death of a Ladies’ Man was recorded almost at gunpoint, and you lost control of the album. I think Phil Spector got to the point of confiscating the tapes and taking them home to do the mixing secretly. I understand that you have made I’m Your Man totally at your leisure; you are even the producer of some of the songs. What I wanted to ask you was if the music on this album has come out naturally or whether it is the result of some sort of marketing strategy?
LC: It’s really interesting that you mention Phil Spector because I love Phil and I think the songs we wrote were very good. I did lose control of the recording. All the vocals are scratch vocals; I didn’t even learn how to sing any of those songs. They were Phil Spector’s tunes and I never mastered them. I only did them once or twice and he mixed the record in secret, but there was something about the recording process that touched me. I think there is some quality of Phil Spector that has finally surfaced in my work in a way that I
can affirm. I think the song “Ain’t No Cure for Love” owes a lot to Phil. So I always loved Phil and I feel that now I have an opportunity to express my gratitude to him.
AM: So there was no strategy?
LC: People have asked me if I used these synthesizers and these rhythms because I wanted to enter the eighties marketplace. Well, of course, I am aware of the marketplace but there was no market strategy with this record. I experimented with many ways of doing the songs. I failed many times in the studio and I ruined four or five of these songs I couldn’t bring to completion. The only way these songs could survive at all is in the form that they have. And if I hadn’t bumped into [keyboardist] Jeff Fisher in Montreal, who was introduced to me by Lewis Furey, and if I hadn’t given my own tapes of “Manhattan” to Jeff Fisher, I doubt if I would ever have been able to record these songs ’cause I didn’t seem to be able to do it myself.
I had many ideas for this song but when I heard Jeff Fisher’s arrangement it had just that quality of Clint Eastwood and Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns that I think was needed to give an ironic or humorous dimension to the song. Because it is a song that invites people to allow me to control the world and to gather behind me in this effort. It’s a mad declaration and if I had made it with a certain kind of “serious Leonard Cohen music” I do not think that I could have tolerated it. I needed the synthesizer, I needed that ironic quasi disco, quasi Clint Eastwood feel, to be able to deliver the song at all. But I think it maintains its sense of menace because of the very poppy kind of rhythms that it has. Also, in my opinion, it’s a very beautiful piece of synthesizer music that Jeff Fisher came up with.
AM: But there is a big change between your previous album, Various Positions, and I’m Your Man. I think it is quite evident.
LC: It’s true with every record, because every record the critics have said that the one before was better. I know you’re not saying that, but there has been some perception here of someone who has been failing consistently and embarrassingly since my very first record, that it’s been downhill ever since. In a certain way it’s true: the first record did have an authentic and intimate quality that maybe none of the other records have had.
But there’s no conscious effort to gather my old audience or to solicit a new audience. I have the feeling that all of the people that heard my first album are dead, and I notice that in the audience there always seem to be a lot of people who weren’t born when I wrote my first song. I think that I always sensed that I was in this for the long haul, so it isn’t a specific audience that one is aiming one’s work at, the young or the old. You make your work for the people that are in your own predicament and these people are of any age.
AM: I have the impression that the entire album is a kind of joke. You yourself seem to be having quite a good time. The banana that you are eating on the front cover … you are heard laughing after that line: “And I thank you for those items that you sent me,” and you write “I was born with the gift of a golden voice.” You have always been ironical, but here you are laughing about it all, starting with yourself. Are you laughing with pleasure?
LC: I love this question and I can say yes to every single part of this question. For me, this record has the energy of joy, of self-laughter. It has the joy of being able to rest at the surface. And there are actually a couple of lines like “that golden voice” that have made me laugh as I was writing so I knew it was a good joke and it was true. It’s a laugh that comes with the release of truth.
AM: Every depth has its surface …
LC: It’s true, and in “Ain’t No Cure for Love,” for example, the whole idea is funny, even though it’s very true. There’s a surface to the song. You don’t have to go beneath the surface. You’re not invited to penetrate the song and analyze it but if you should be so foolish as to want to penetrate the song and analyze it you’d find that it is correct even theologically. Jesus appears in the last verse and whispers to me that you can’t get away from this; even the angelic host understands. Well, Christ who gave himself a lot, who knew that the only way to love was to sacrifice, he knows that if you love, your love will take a wound, so those parts of the world that are inhabited are still there, but nobody’s invited to look at them if they don’t want to. So the song just exists as a song that reaches your ear, but if there’s something else going on all the better. But it’s better to say those things as a joke than to rub somebody’s nose in it.
AM: The harmony part of Jennifer Warnes in this song is really beautiful. Maybe it is because she knew it pretty well after she had recorded it in her album Famous Blue Raincoat. Both records, hers and yours, have been released almost at the same time.
LC: That’s true although there’s no overall strategy to produce these two records together, but Jennifer, [bassist] Roscoe Beck, and I are close friends and very much interested in each other’s musical life also. I would say that both these records are the collaboration of various elements and, yes, they did grow out of the friendship between these three individuals. Roscoe played hundreds of concerts with me, we all live in Los Angeles, and Roscoe is helping me organize my band right now, and he’s also working on a project with Jennifer.
AM: I have heard that you are preparing an album for Jennifer with songs of Edith Piaf, which you will translate. Can you tell me about that project?
LC: Oh yeah, that’s somewhere down the road, though I don’t know when I’ll get around to it. It takes me years to finish what I’m writing. I started to translate a song for Jennifer. In fact, the three of us—Roscoe Beck, Jennifer, and I—were talking about what Jennifer should do next…. I suggested that she should do an Edith Piaf album and I’d do the translation for her. She loved the idea, and then we started thinking about the song “C’est l’amour” … “C’est l’amour qui fait qu’on s’aime,” I couldn’t even translate the first line. Is it love that makes us love each other? I don’t know what it means, so the problem is how I’m going to get these translations done.
AM: But you translated Lorca’s poem, “Take This Waltz,” very well.
LC: The Lorca poem took me 150 hours to translate and a nervous breakdown, so it’s a very high price you have to pay for doing a translation, as you very well know.
AM: I think it even manages to clarify some images of the original poem.
LC: I can’t tell. There’s no way that I can judge. I can just remember the feelings that I got when I read Lorca in translations when I was a boy, so I tried to make that kind of song. I’ll never know what Lorca sounds like to a Spanish ear. I just imagine. But you translated my poem of Lorca into Spanish. I find that very interesting. It could be something like a great translation by Borges. Then I should translate your Spanish poem into another English poem and we can keep on going.
AM: Yeah. That’s a good idea …
LC: This is no church and I think we should do something crazier, more surrealist. That’s what Lorca brought to us, the surrealism.
AM: “Jazz Police” is really wild and the craziest song in your album …
LC: Jeff [Fisher] wrote the mad choir part: “Jazz Police, I hear you calling …” and the original idea was to make a rap song and something quite wild and irresponsible, something that had its own inner contradictions that would break down by themselves and every verse I started with a very serious proposition and it just breaks down into a joke or a little absurdity….
I’d shown Jeff some of the lyrics and he wrote the rhythm to go with it. I tried it as a laugh but it didn’t work so then I tried it as a kind of chant with Anjani Thomas. Then it seemed to work better and Jeff came in after that and changed some of the chords to go with the harmonies that Anjani and I had created. So it was a real collaboration in that sense too.
I’m sorry that I did something to that track that I regret now. The track was much more adventurous and crazy than it is even now. I wasn’t ready to take the whole risk so I became the jazz police in my own song and limited it and took out some stuff that was r
eally wild. The song was wonderful and it could have been more wonderful and more crazy.
AM: So “Jazz Police” was produced by Jeff Fisher. He also produced “Manhattan.” Who is he?
LC: It was my friend Lewis Furey who introduced me to Jeff Fisher. In fact, Lewis is living in Paris and he’s married to the French actress Carole Laure and they are living right beside me. So Lewis has introduced me in one way or another to three very important people in my life. He introduced me to John Lissauer back in Montreal, and he introduced me to Jeff Fisher, and his wife introduced me to Dominique Issermann, who has had a curious catalytic whirl in my life.
AM: The songs “Ain’t No Cure for Love” and “I’m Your Man” seem to be addressed to Dominique. And it returns to your image of romantic hero.
LC: I see it more like some divine balance at work—that if you experience love, you take a wound, that love and sacrifice are involved somehow one with the other, that the condition that most elevates us is the condition that most annihilates us, that somehow the destruction of the ego is involved with love. But once you submit yourself to this experience, you can never again feel at the center of your own drama, that somehow the heroic position has to fail here with love. But I didn’t want to discuss it in those terms because I think that everybody understands what “ain’t no cure for love” means, especially if you’re in it.
So although there was some kind of theological or philosophical position behind the statement, it wasn’t written from that point of view. It was written from the point of view of a man who could not shake the feeling that he had lost the woman of his life and that there was no solution to this problem and that even time was not a solution—that there are certain wounds that time does not heal. So I even found myself arguing from the theological point of view that if the wound of Jesus comes to express his love for mankind then it will never heal. And even the angels confirm it. They say even the angels know that there ain’t no cure for love.