by Jeff Burger
Well, early last year, several bands and a number of Cohen-esque singers were invited by Christian Fevret (editor of France’s top rock magazine) to cover their favorite Leonard Cohen song. Appropriately titled I’m Your Fan, the resulting tribute album includes acts like R.E.M. (“First We Take Manhattan”), House of Love (“Who by Fire”), Dead Famous People (“True Love”), and Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds (a very quirky “Tower of Song”). Of the seventeen artists on the album, most stay pretty faithful to the Cohen originals in terms of mood and even delivery—further proof of the man’s influence on modern rock and roll.
Cohen found the tribute fascinating on many levels. “I like to hear the things that are different and the things that defer to my own arrangement or interpretation,” he says. “Mostly I got an emotional hit from the thing. That’s all you really look for when you look at your own work. You look at it from the point of durability. Will the language still have meaning—the lyrical material—the music … will it stand up? Has it been designed to stand up?”
Cohen tells me that an English publisher wants to reissue Beautiful Losers, which is still in print in several countries. “You write a lot of bad songs … you never start out to write a bad song. You can pretty well tell if a thing will last. I think some of the weaker material quite legitimately dies away,” he says. “You never expect great sales from this … I never did have them. But it’s been able to give me a life that’s very free. It’s not luxurious, but it’s free.”
But free doesn’t necessarily mean easy. “The whole operation is about as graceful and smooth as a bear trying to get honey out of a highly populated bee hive,” Cohen says with a low chuckle. “I mean, you’re sort of scraping and swiping…. It’s really in my case very difficult, lots of mistakes, starting over. Each of those four things—the writing, then the recording of the songs, then the rehearsal and then touring—all are done with difficulty. And as I say, that doesn’t simply guarantee excellence. It’s just the way I get things together.”
While it has often been stuck into the folksinger-songwriter vein, Cohen’s music—including the versions on I’m Your Fan—does resonate with echoes of some of his favorite sounds. “Everything from George Jones and country music to the great cantorial songs of my own Jewish heritage,” he muses. “Gregorian chants, R&B.”
And today’s task, the new album, will it sound … like Leonard Cohen? “Well, you’ll hear this cigarette smoke voice droning away,” he says, “so people will be able to tell whose record it is. The songs I’ve recorded I’m happy with. The nature of work is repetition … that’s why they call it work. But as long as they give me the time, I’m happy with this life.”
LEONARD COHEN: INSIDE THE TOWER OF SONG
PAUL ZOLLO | February 1992, interview | April 1993, SongTalk (US)
Unlike nearly all of the other conversations in this book, the one that follows focuses almost entirely on songwriting. As such, it provides a valuable window into Cohen’s craft.
“As a songwriter, Leonard Cohen has always been a God among men to me,” said interviewer Paul Zollo, who is a senior editor of American Songwriter and a songwriter himself. “Just to recognize that he does dwell, after all, in our normal realm—specifically in the Mid-Wilshire district of Los Angeles, was remarkable. Here was his fabled tower of song. And here was the great man himself—dapper, dressed in a black suit, attended to then by a small group of young lovely women who worked there.
“Cohen’s home was stark and clean; no clutter at all, the seeming effect of a focused, dedicated mind,” Zollo told me. “He showed me it was all about enabling himself to write good songs, a process about which he’s about as wise as any human, but also funnier.
“I looked in his closet, and it was filled with a rack of black suits, all identical. His countenance was very peaceful, reflective of his time up at the summit of Mount Baldy, where he’d become a monk among monks, although one who admittedly would be playing with metaphors and rhymes while his fellow monks meditated on worlds beyond song.
“To Leonard the song was and remains everything, and his allegiance to the fullness of the form was proudly displayed as we sat on the floor of his upstairs office and pored over notebooks of songs and their revisions. As he told me in this interview, he cut out verses other songwriters would rejoice at creating—and always with specific, detailed reason. He is as completely open to whatever might simply arrive as he is careful to control the content of what gets in, and what doesn’t. But all of it is done with great humility, respect for the potential of the song itself, and love of music.
“His status elevated quite a lot since I did this interview,” Zollo concluded. “It was prior to his world tour and recent global triumphs. It was even before the status of his miracle song ‘Hallelujah’ was elevated to standard level, a rare occurrence in today’s musical world, given that it was never a hit for Leonard. It’s a song that is famous simply because it’s truly great—and as such, has been recorded by a wide range of singers who have introduced it into our culture in a lasting way. It’s a great sign for songwriters that a song still matters so much. It’s because of how much it matters to him.” —Ed.
We are sitting Indian-style on the second floor of Leonard Cohen’s home in Los Angeles. On his bookshelf are many books that he’s written, including two novels and several volumes of poetry. An unearthly rain is exploding outside as he scans countless notebooks of song, endless revisions that span decades and fill thousands of pages within hundreds of notebooks. For every verse that he keeps, there are untold dozens that he discards. When I mention that a lesser writer would have been happy with simply two of the six verses that he wrote for the stunning “Democracy” from his album The Future, he answers, “I’ve got about sixty.”
His tower of song isn’t really that tall, only two floors that I can see anyway, but to him it’s both a fortress of solitude and a factory, a place where, he says, “I summon every version of myself that I can to join this workforce, this team, this legion.” It’s here that he gives songs the kind of respect bottles of fine wine receive, the knowledge that years—decades even—are needed for them to ripen to full maturity. Quoting from the Talmud he says, “There’s good wine in every generation,” referring to the new songwriters who crop up every few years. But his own work has extended across generations and decades; he packed as much brilliance into 1992’s The Future as he instilled into his first album in 1967. “I always knew I was in this for the long haul,” he says, “but somewhere along the line the work just got harder.”
Like Dylan, Simon, and few others, Leonard Cohen has expanded the vocabulary of the popular song into the domain of poetry. And like both Simon and Dylan, Cohen will work and rework his songs until he achieves a kind of impossible perfection. He didn’t need Dylan’s influence, however, to inspire his poetic approach to songwriting. He’d already written much poetry and two highly acclaimed novels by the time Dylan emerged, leading the poet Allen Ginsberg to comment, “Dylan blew everybody’s mind, except Leonard’s.”
In the beginning, Cohen was both a member of a Canadian country group called the Buckskins and a member of what is now known as the Montreal School of Poetry. When he wasn’t playing folksongs on his guitar, he was lyrically chanting his poetry. It was only a matter of time until the words and the music came together and Cohen became a songwriter.
Songwriting was for him then, as it remains today, a labor of love. Few thoughts of making it a career entered his thoughts for many years. “We used to play music for fun. Much more than now. Now nobody picks up a guitar unless they’re paid for it. Now every kid who picks up a guitar is invited to dream.”
The first song he ever wrote was aptly called “Chant,” a poem he loosely set to music: “Hold me heartlight, soft light hold me, moonlight in your mouth …” When John Hammond, the same guy who discovered Dylan, Springsteen, and Billie Holiday, heard some of Leonard’s early songs, he told him, “You’ve got it,” and signed him to Columbia Records
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His first album, Songs of Leonard Cohen, was an extraordinary debut for any songwriter and recording artist. Like later debuts by artists such as John Prine and Rickie Lee Jones, his first record evidenced a level of writing, a resounding maturity, and musical grace seldom found on a first album. In songs such as “Suzanne” and “Sisters of Mercy,” Cohen moved beyond the realm of the popular song to reach into places previously untouched with words and music.
His following albums continued to resound with beautiful, intimate poetry while stretching the boundaries of songwriting, in such classic songs as “Chelsea Hotel No. 2,” “Joan of Arc,” and “Famous Blue Raincoat.” So moved was Kris Kristofferson by the simple valor of Cohen’s “Bird on the Wire” that he requested its opening be inscribed on his tombstone: “Like a bird on a wire, like a drunk in a midnight choir, I have tried in my way to be free.” Bob Dylan made the accurate comment that Cohen’s songs had become almost like prayers. It’s true: a certain sanctity connects all of Cohen’s work, a timeless devotional beauty that runs entirely opposite to almost everything that is modern.
He was born on September 21, 1934, in Montreal. His father died when he was nine. At seventeen he went to McGill University, where he formed the Buckskin Boys and wrote his first book of poetry, Let Us Compare Mythologies. His second volume, published in 1961 and entitled The Spice-Box of Earth, was acclaimed around the world. But as it’s always been with his careers, the extreme acclaim that his work received never equaled extreme amounts of money. “I couldn’t make a living,” he said.
For seven years he lived on the island of Hydra in Greece with Marianne Jensen and her son Axel. [Marianne was known by her maiden name, Ihlen, after she split from her husband, whose first name, like the son’s, was Axel. —Ed.] While there he wrote another book of poems, Flowers for Hitler, and two novels, The Favorite Game and Beautiful Losers.
Again the praise was vast and forthcoming but the financial rewards were scarce. The Boston Globe wrote, “James Joyce is not dead. He is living in Montreal under the name of Cohen.” But he was frustrated by the inequality between the praise and the money, and rejected the novelist’s life to move to America and become a songwriter.
Contradicting the old adage that the devil is in the details, Cohen has shown many times that the divine can be discovered there. As he once said to Jennifer Warnes, “Your most particular answer will be your most universal one.” It is the unique specificity of his songs that enables one not only to envision them but to enter them. The miraculous “Suzanne,” for example, is a song toward which many songwriters have aspired, and it is Cohen’s descriptive use of details, along with one of his most haunting melodies, that distinguishes this astonishing song.
When I mentioned to him that to this day it seems miraculous to me that someone could have written it, he agreed, not egotistically but with a kind of hushed reverence. “It is miraculous,” he said softly.
In conversation he is often Whitmanesque, speaking in evocative and inspired lists of specific human activity similar to the touching human details found in all of his songs. For example, when asked if he felt that many meaningful songs were still being written, he beautifully expounded on the meaning of meaningful songs:
“There are always meaningful songs for somebody. People are doing their courting, people are finding their wives, people are making babies, people are washing their dishes, people are getting through the day, with songs that we may find insignificant. But their significance is affirmed by others. There’s always someone affirming the significance of a song by taking a woman into his arms or by getting through the night. That’s what dignifies the song.
“Songs don’t dignify human activity. Human activity dignifies the song.”
Paul Zollo: Are you always working on songs or do you write only for specific projects?
Leonard Cohen: No, I’m writing all the time. And as the songs begin to coalesce, I’m not doing anything else but writing. I wish I were one of those people who wrote songs quickly. But I’m not. So it takes me a great deal of time to find out what the song is. So I am working most of the time.
PZ: When you say, “what the song is,” do you mean that in terms of mean-ing—where the meaning is leading you?
LC: Yes. I find that easy versions of the song arrive first. Although they might be able to stand as songs, they can’t stand as songs that I can sing. So to find a song that I can sing, to engage my interest, to penetrate my boredom with myself and my disinterest in my own opinions, to penetrate those barriers, the song has to speak to me with a certain urgency. To be able to find that song that I can be interested in takes many versions and it takes a lot of uncovering.
PZ: Do you mean that you’re trying to reach something that is outside of your immediate realm of thought?
LC: My immediate realm of thought is bureaucratic and like a traffic jam. My ordinary state of mind is very much like the waiting room at the DMV [Department of Motor Vehicles]. Or, as I put it in a quatrain, “The voices in my head, they don’t care what I do, they just want to argue the matter through and through.”
So to penetrate this chattering and this meaningless debate that is occupying most of my attention, I have to come up with something that really speaks to my deepest interest. Otherwise I just nod off in one way or another. So to find that song, that urgent song, takes a lot of versions and a lot of work and a lot of sweat.
But why shouldn’t my work be hard? Almost everybody’s work is hard. One is distracted by this notion that there is such a thing as inspiration, that it comes fast and easy. And some people are graced by that style. I’m not. So I have to work as hard as any stiff, to come up with the payload.
PZ: So you’re not a writer for whom ideas simply appear?
LC: I haven’t had an idea in a long, long time. And I’m not sure I ever had one.
Now my friend Irving Layton, the great Canadian writer, said, “Leonard’s mind is unpolluted by a single idea.” And he meant it as a kind of compliment. He’s a close friend and he knows me, and it’s true. I don’t have ideas. I don’t really speculate on things. I get opinions but I’m not really attached to them. Most of them are tiresome. I have to trot them out in conversations from time to time just to cooperate in the social adventure. But I have a kind of amnesia and my ideas just kind of float above this profound disinterest in myself and other people. So to find something that really touches and addresses my attention, I have to do a lot of hard, manual work.
PZ: What does that work consist of?
LC: Just versions. I will drag you upstairs after the vacuuming stops and I will show you version after version after version of some of the tunes on this new album.
PZ: You do have whole notebooks of songs?
LC: Whole notebooks. I’m very happy to be able to speak this way to fellow craftsmen. Some people may find it encouraging to see how slow and dismal and painstaking is the process.
For instance, a song like “Closing Time” began in 3/4 time with a really strong, nostalgic, melancholy country feel. Entirely different words. It began:
The parking lot is empty / They switch off the Budweiser sign / It’s dark from here to San Jobete / It’s dark all down the line / They ought to hand the night a ticket / For speeding, it’s a crime /1 had so much to tell you / Yeah, but now it’s closing time.
And I recorded the song and I sang it. And I choked over it. Even though another singer could have done it perfectly well. It’s a perfectly reasonable song. And a good one, I might say. A respectable song. But I choked over it.
There wasn’t anything that really addressed my attention. The finishing of it was agreeable because it’s always an agreeable feeling. But when I tried to sing it I realized it came from my boredom and not from my attention. It came from my desire to finish the song and not from the urgency to locate a construction that would engross me.
So I went to work again. Then I filled another notebook from beginning to end with the lyric, or the attempts at
the lyric, which eventually made it onto the album. So most of [my songs] have a dismal history, like the one I’ve just accounted.
PZ: Generally, do you finish the melody and then work on the lyrics for a long time?
LC: They’re born together, they struggle together, and they influence one another. When the lyric begins to be revised, of course, the line can’t carry it with its new nuance or its new meaning. And generally the musical line has to change, which involves changing the next musical line, which involves changing the next lyrical line, so the process is mutual and painstaking and slow.
PZ: Do you generally begin a song with a lyrical idea?
LC: It begins with an appetite to discover my self-respect. To redeem the day. So the day does not go down in debt. It begins with that kind of appetite.
PZ: Do you work on guitar?
LC: It usually was guitar but now I have been working with keyboards.
PZ: Does the instrument affect the song you are writing?
LC: They have certainly affected my songs. I only have one chop. All guitar players have chops. Especially professional ones. But I have only one chop. It’s a chop that very few guitarists can emulate. Hence, I have a certain kind of backhanded respect from guitar players because they know that I have a chop that they can’t master. And that chop was the basis of a lot of my good songs.
But on the keyboard, because you can set up patterns and rhythms, I can mock up songs in a way that I couldn’t do with my guitar. There were these rhythms that I heard but I couldn’t really duplicate with my own instrument. So it’s changed the writing quite a bit.
PZ: Writing in that way could be either more freeing or more restrictive. You have a rhythm that is set but you are free from playing the guitar.
LC: “Freedom” and “restriction” are just luxurious terms to one who is locked in a dungeon in the tower of song. These are just … ideas. I don’t have the sense of restriction or freedom. I just have the sense of work. I have the sense of hard labor.