Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen

by Jeff Burger

  PZ: Is this hard labor ever enjoyable for you?

  LC: It has a certain nourishment. The mental physique is muscular. That gives you a certain stride as you walk along the dismal landscape of your inner thoughts. You have a certain kind of tone to your activity. But most of the time it doesn’t help. It’s just hard work.

  But I think unemployment is the great affliction of man. Even people with jobs are unemployed. In fact, most people with jobs are unemployed. I can say, happily and gratefully, that I am fully employed. Maybe all hard work means is fully employed. We have a sense here that it’s smart not to work. The hustle, the con, these have been elevated to a very high position in our morality. And probably if I could mount a con or a hustle in terms of my own work I would probably embrace the same philosophy. But I am a working stiff. It takes me months and months of full employment to break the code of the song. To find out if there can be a song there.

  PZ: When you’re working to break that code, is it a process of actively thinking about what the song should say?

  LC: Anything that I can bring to it. Thought, meditation, drinking, disillusion, insomnia, vacations …

  Because once the song enters the mill, it’s worked on by everything that I can summon. And I need everything. I try everything. I try to ignore it, try to repress it, try to get high, try to get intoxicated, try to get sober. All the versions of myself that I can summon are summoned to participate in this project, this work force.

  PZ: In your experience, do any of these things work better than others?

  LC: Nothing works. After a while, if you stick with a song long enough it will yield. But long enough is way beyond any reasonable estimation of what you think long enough may be. In fact, long enough is way beyond. It’s abandoning that idea of what you think long enough may be.

  Because if you think it’s a week, that’s not long enough. If you think it’s a month, it’s not long enough. If you think it’s a year, it’s not long enough. If you think it’s a decade, it’s not long enough.

  “Anthem” took a decade to write. And I’ve recorded it three times. More. I had a version prepared for my last album with strings and voices and overdubs. The whole thing completely finished. I listened to it. There was something wrong with the lyric, there was something wrong with the tune, there was something wrong with the tempo. There was a lie somewhere in there. There was a disclosure that I was refusing to make.

  There was a solemnity that I hadn’t achieved. There was something wrong with the damn thing. All I knew is that I couldn’t sing it. You could hear it in the vocal, that the guy was putting you on.

  PZ: Is “Anthem” in any way an answer to Dylan’s song “Everything Is Broken”?

  LC: I had a line in “Democracy” that referred specifically to that Dylan song, “Everything Is Broken,” which was, “The singer says it’s broken and the painter says it’s gray …” But, no, “Anthem” was written a long time before that Dylan song. I’d say 1982 but it was actually earlier than that that that song began to form.

  PZ: Including the part about the crack in everything?

  LC: That’s very old. That has been the background of much of my work. I had those lines in the works for a long time. I’ve been recycling them in many songs. I must not be able to nail it.

  PZ: You said earlier that you had no ideas, but that certainly is an idea.

  LC: Yeah. When I say that I don’t have any ideas, it doesn’t come to me in the form of an idea. It comes in the form of an image. I didn’t start with a philosophical position that human activity is not perfectable. And that all human activity is flawed. And it is by intimacy with the flaw that we discern our real humanity and our real connection with divine inspiration. I didn’t come up with it that way. I saw something broken. It’s a different form of cognition.

  PZ: Do images usually come to you in that way?

  LC: Well, things come so damn slow. Things come and it’s a tollgate, and they’re particularly asking for something that you can’t manage.

  They say, “We got the goods here. What do you got to pay?” Well, I’ve got my intelligence, I’ve got a mind. “No, we don’t want that.” I’ve got my whole training as a poet. “No, we don’t want that.” I’ve got some licks, I’ve got some skills with my fingers on the guitar. “No, we don’t want that either.” Well, I’ve got a broken heart. “No, we don’t want that.” I’ve got a pretty girlfriend. “No, we don’t want that.” I’ve got sexual desire. “No, we don’t want that.” I’ve got a whole lot of things and the tollgate keeper says, “That’s not going to get it. We want you in a condition that you are not accustomed to. And that you yourself cannot name. We want you in a condition of receptivity that you cannot produce by yourself.” How are you going to come up with that?

  PZ: What’s the answer?

  LC: [Laughs.] I don’t know. But I’ve been lucky over the years. I’ve been willing to pay the price.

  PZ: How much does it cost?

  LC: [Pause.] It’s hard to name. It’s hard to name because it keeps changing.

  PZ: Is it a sense that you are reaching outside of yourself to write these songs?

  LC: If I knew where the good songs came from, I’d go there more often. It’s a mysterious condition. It’s much like the life of a Catholic nun. You’re married to a mystery.

  PZ: Do you consider the tower of song to be a place of exile or of retreat?

  LC: I think you can use it as a retreat but it doesn’t work. It’s best thought of as a factory. It’s some combination between a factory and a bordello. But it’s just the tower of song.

  PZ: You’ve spoken about the hard labor that goes into your songs, and part of that must be due to the fact that your verses are so rich, and that you write long songs with many verses. I think other songwriters might have come up with two of the verses in “Democracy” and stopped.

  LC: I’ve got about sixty. There are about three or four parallel songs in the material that I’ve got. I saw that the song could develop in about three or four ways and there actually exist about three or four versions of “Democracy.” The one I chose seemed to be the one that I could sing at that moment. I addressed almost everything that was going on in America.

  This was when the Berlin Wall came down and everyone was saying democracy is coming to the East. And I was like that gloomy fellow who always turns up at a party to ruin the orgy. And I said, “I don’t think it’s going to happen that way. I don’t think this is such a good idea. I think a lot of suffering will be the consequence of this wall coming down.” But then I asked myself, “Where is democracy really coming? And it was the USA. But I had verses:

  It ain’t coming to us European style / Concentration camp behind a smile / It ain’t coming from the East / With its temporary feast / As Count Dracula comes strolling down the aisle…

  So while everyone was rejoicing, I thought it wasn’t going to be like that, euphoric, the honeymoon.

  So it was these world events that occasioned the song. And also the love of America. Because I think the irony of America is transcendent in the song.

  It’s not an ironic song. It’s a song of deep intimacy and affirmation of the experiment of democracy in this country. That this is really where the experiment is unfolding. This is really where the races confront one another, where the classes, where the genders, where even the sexual orientations confront one another. This is the real laboratory of democracy. So I wanted to have that feeling in the song too. But I treated the relationship between the blacks and the Jews.

  For instance, I had:

  First we killed the Lord and then we stole the blues / This gutter people always in the news / But who really gets to laugh behind the black man’s back / When he makes his little crack about the Jews? / Who really gets to profit and who really gets to pay? / Who really rides the slavery ship right into Charleston Bay? / Democracy is coming to the USA.

  Verses like that.

  PZ: Why did you take that out?

 
; LC: I didn’t want to compromise the anthemic, hymn-like quality. I didn’t want it to get too punchy. I didn’t want to start a fight in the song. I wanted a revelation in the heart rather than a confrontation or a call-to-arms or a defense.

  There were a lot of verses like that, and this was long before the riots. There was:

  From the church where the outcasts can hide / Or the mosque where the blood is dignified / Like the fingers on your hand, like the hourglass of sand / We can separate but not divide from the eye above the pyramid / And the dollar’s cruel display / From the law behind the law / Behind the law we still obey / Democracy is coming to the USA.

  There were a lot of verses like that. Good ones.

  PZ: It’s hard to believe you’d write a verse like that and discard it.

  LC: The thing is that before I can discard the verse, I have to write it. Even if it’s bad—those two happen to be good, I’m presenting the best of my discarded work—but even the bad ones took as long to write as the good ones. As someone once observed, it’s just as hard to write a bad novel as a good novel. It’s just as hard to write a bad verse as a good verse. I can’t discard a verse before it is written because it is the writing of the verse that produces whatever delights or interests or facets that are going to catch the light. The cutting of the gem has to be finished before you can see whether it shines.

  You can’t discover that in the raw.

  PZ: I love the verse that has “I’m stubborn as the garbage bags that refuse to decay / I’m junk but I’m still holding up this little wild bouquet.”

  LC: Most of us from the middle class, we have a kind of old, nineteenth-century idea of what democracy is, which is, more or less, to oversimplify it, that the masses are going to love Shakespeare and Beethoven. That’s more or less our idea of what democracy is. But that ain’t it. It’s going to come up in unexpected ways from the stuff that we think is junk: the people we think are junk, the ideas we think are junk, the television we think is junk.

  PZ: You also have the line “The maestro says it’s Mozart, but it sounds like bubblegum.” That junk is sometimes promoted as great art.

  LC: Some stuff is being promoted as junk and it is great art. Remember the way that a lot of rock and roll was greeted by the authorities and the musicologists and even the hip people. And when people were putting me down as being one thing or another, it wasn’t the guy in the subway. He didn’t know about me. It was the hip people, writing the columns in the hip newspapers, college papers, music papers.

  So it’s very difficult to see what the verdict is going to be about a piece of work. And the thing that makes it an interesting game is that each generation revises the game, and decides on what is poetry and song for itself. Often rejecting the very carefully considered verdicts of the previous generations. I mean, did the hippies ever think that they would be the objects of ridicule by a generation? Self-righteous and prideful for the really bold and courageous steps they had taken to find themselves imbued in the face of an unmovable society; the risks, the chances, the dope they smoked, the acid they dropped? Did they ever think they would be held up as figures of derision, like cartoon characters? No.

  And so it is with every generation. There’s that remark: “He who marries the spirit of his own generation is a widower in the next.”

  PZ: You’ve written novels and books of poetry. And you once made a comment about having a calm, domestic life as a novelist before becoming a songwriter. Is the life of a songwriter entirely different from that of the poet or novelist?

  LC: It used to be. Because I used to be able to write songs on the run. I used to work hard but I didn’t really begin slaving over them till 1983. I always used to work hard. But I had no idea what hard work was until something changed in my mind.

  PZ: Do you know what that was?

  LC: I don’t really know what it was. Maybe some sense that this whole enterprise is limited, that there was an end in sight.

  PZ: An end to your songwriting?

  LC: No, an end to your life. That you were really truly mortal. I don’t know what it was exactly, I’m just speculating. But at a certain moment I found myself engaged in songwriting in the same way that I had been engaged in novel writing when I was very young. In other words, it’s something you do every day and you can’t get too far from it, otherwise you forget what it’s about.

  PZ: It wasn’t that way for you prior to that time?

  LC: It was, but I’m speaking of degree. I always thought that I sweated over the stuff. But I had no idea what sweating over the stuff meant until I found myself in my underwear crawling along the carpet in a shabby room at the Royalton Hotel unable to nail a verse. And knowing that I had a recording session and knowing that I could get by with what I had but that I’m not going to be able to do it.

  That kind of change I knew gradually was there and I knew that I had to work in a certain way that was nothing I had ever known anything about.

  PZ: In the early days, did a song such as “Suzanne” come easy to you?

  LC: No, no, I worked months and months on “Suzanne.” It’s just a matter of intensity. I was still able to juggle stuff: a life, a woman, a dream, other ambitions, other tangents. At a certain point I realized I only had one ball in my hand, and that was The Song. Everything else had been wrecked or compromised and I couldn’t go back, and I was a one-ball juggler. I’d do incredible things with that ball to justify the absurdity of the presentation.

  Because what are you going to do with that ball? You don’t have three anymore. You’ve just got one. And maybe only one arm. What are you going to do? You can flip it off your wrist, or bounce it off your head. You have to come up with some pretty good moves. You have to learn them from scratch. And that’s what I learned, that you have to learn them from scratch.

  There is some continuity between “Suzanne” and “Waiting for a Miracle” [sic]. Of course there is; it’s the same guy. Maybe it’s like you lose your arm, you’re a shoemaker. You’re a pretty good shoemaker, maybe not the best but one of the top ten. You lose your arm and nobody knows. All they know is that your shoes keep on being pretty good. But in your workshop, you’re holding onto the edge of the shoe with your teeth, you’re holding it down and hammering with your other hand. It’s quite an acrobatic presentation to get that shoe together. It may be the same shoe, it’s just a lot harder to come by and you don’t want to complain about it.

  So maybe that’s all that happened, is that I got wiped out in some kind of way and that just meant that I had to work harder to get the same results. I don’t have any estimation or evaluation. I just know that the work got really hard.

  PZ: Why did you move from writing novels and poems to songwriting?

  LC: I never saw the difference. There was a certain point that I saw that I couldn’t make a living [as a poet or novelist]. But to become a songwriter or a singer, to address an economic problem, is the height of folly, especially in your early thirties. So I don’t know why I did it or why I do anything. I never had a strategy. I just play it by ear.

  I just know that I had written what I thought was a pretty good novel, Beautiful Losers. It had been hailed by all the authorities as being a work of significance. Whether it is or not, who knows. But I had the credentials. But I couldn’t pay my bills. It had only sold a couple thousand copies. So it was folly to begin another novel. I didn’t want to teach; it just wasn’t my cup of tea.

  I didn’t have the personal style for that. I was too dissolute. I had to stay up too late, I had to move too fast. It wasn’t a good place for me.

  PZ: Have you ever had the desire to write another novel?

  LC: You toy with it but it’s the regime that I like very much, writing a novel. I like that you really can’t do anything else. You’ve got to be in one place. That’s the way it is now with songwriting. I’ve got to have my synthesizer and my Mac. I can’t really entertain a lot of distractions. [Otherwise] you forget what it’s about very easily.

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p; PZ: Is it more satisfying for you to write a song, something that you can enter again after writing and perform?

  LC: The performance of songs is a wonderful opportunity. It is a great privilege. It is a great way to test your courage. And to test the song. And even to test the audience.

  PZ: Earlier you said that you could only write something that you would be able to sing, that—

  LC: I’m not trying to suggest that this has any dimension or hierarchy of better, worse. It’s just a shape that it’s got to have. Otherwise I can’t wrap my voice around it.

  There are songs like “Dress Rehearsal Rag” that I recorded once and I will never sing. Judy Collins did a very beautiful version of it, better than mine. I would never do that song in concert; I can’t get behind it.

  But it’s not a matter of excellence or anything but just the appropriate shape of my voice and psyche.

  PZ: Earlier you said that you couldn’t sing an early version of “Anthem” because it had a lie in it. Does this mean that the songs have to resonate in truth for you to be able to sing them?

  LC: They have to resonate with the kind of truth that I can recognize. They have to have the kind of balance of truth and lies, light and dark.

  PZ: Jennifer Warnes said that you once told her that the most particular answer is the most universal one.

  LC: I think so. I think that’s advice that a lot of good writers have given me and the world. You don’t really want to say “the tree,” you want to say “the sycamore.”

  PZ: Why is that?

  LC: I don’t know. And it’s not even true. But there is a certain truth to it. We seem to be able to relate to detail. We seem to have an appetite for it. It seems that your days are made of details, and if you can’t get the sense of another person’s day of details, your own day of details is summoned in your mind in some way rather than just a general line like “the days went by.” It’s better to say “watching Captain Kangaroo” Not “watching TV.” Sitting in my room “with that hopeless little screen.” Not just “TV,” but “the hopeless, little screen.”