Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen

by Jeff Burger

  I think those are the details that delight us. They delight us because we can share a life then. It’s our sense of insignificance and isolation that produces a great deal of suffering.

  PZ: It’s one of the great things about your work, your rich use of details. So many songs we hear are empty, and have no details at all.

  LC: I love to hear the details. I was just working on a line this morning for a song called “I Was Never Any Good at Loving You.” And the line was—I don’t think I’ve nailed it yet—“I was running from the law, I thought you knew, forgiveness was the way it felt with you” or “forgiven was the way I felt with you.” Then I got a metaphysical line, about the old law and the new law, the Old Testament and the New Testament: “I was running from the law, the old and the new, forgiven was the way I felt with you.” No, I thought, it’s too intellectual. Then I thought I got it: “I was running from the cops and the robbers too, forgiven was the way I felt with you.” You got cops and robbers, it dignifies the line by making it available, making it commonplace.

  PZ: Each of those three versions works well. And so many of your lines— though I understand how hard you work on them and revise them—have the feeling of being inevitable. They don’t feel forced; they just feel like the perfect line.

  LC: I appreciate that. Somebody said that art is the concealment of art.

  PZ: Is there much concealing?

  LC: Unless you want to present the piece with the axe-marks on it, which is legitimate, [to show] where the construction or the carving is. I like the polished stuff too.

  At a certain point, when the Jews were first commanded to raise an altar, the commandment was on unhewn stone. Apparently the god that wanted that particular altar didn’t want slick, didn’t want smooth. He wanted an unhewn stone placed on another unhewn stone. Maybe then you go looking for stones that fit. Maybe that was the process that God wanted the makers of this altar to undergo.

  Now I think Dylan has lines, hundreds of great lines that have the feel of unhewn stone. But they really fit in there. But they’re not smoothed out. It’s inspired but not polished.

  That is not to say that he doesn’t have lyrics of great polish. That kind of genius can manifest all the forms and all the styles.

  PZ: When you’re working on lines such as those that you mentioned, is that a process of working just with words, separate from music?

  LC: No. I don’t remember the chicken or the egg. I know the song began. But I keep moving them back and forth between the notebook and the keyboard. Trying to find where the song is. I had it as a shuffle. I had it as a kind of 6/8 song like “Blueberry Hill.”

  PZ: So when working on a lyric, there’s always a melody in your mind that accompanies the lyric?

  LC: Usually, yes, the line will have a kind of rhythm that will indicate, at the very least, where the voice will go up and where the voice will go down. I guess that’s the rudimentary beginnings of what they call melody.

  PZ: I asked that because your songs, unlike most, are always in perfect meter and perfect rhyme schemes. It seems it would be possible to work on them just as lyrics, without music.

  LC: It doesn’t seem to work that way. Because the line of music is very influential in determining the length of a line or the density, the syllabic density.

  PZ: You mentioned working on a Mac. Is that musical work as well as lyrical work?

  LC: I like to set them up. They usually go from the napkin to the notebook to the Mac. And back and forth. And there’s a certain moment when there’s enough. I like to see it.

  They say that the Torah was written with black fire on white fire. So I get that feeling from the computer, the bright black against the bright background. It gives it a certain theatrical dignity to see it on the screen. And also word processing enables you to cut and paste. But I generally have to go back to the napkin and the notebook. But at certain periods during the making of the song, I’ll mock it up as a song just to be able to study it in a certain way.

  PZ: You mentioned that whole verse about the Jews in “Democracy” that you took out, and in “The Future” there is that line, “I’m the little Jew who wrote the Bible.” There are so many great Jewish songwriters, yet it’s so rare that any of them mention being Jewish in a song—

  LC: [Laughs.] I smiled to myself when that line came. A friend of mine said, “I dare you to leave that line in.”

  PZ: You were tempted to remove it?

  LC: I’m tempted to remove everything. At any time. I guess I’ve got a kind of alcoholic courage. Most people are reluctant to remove things. My sin is on the other side. I’m ready to discard the whole song at any time and start over.

  And I think it’s just as grave a defect because probably, at some point down the line, I’ve thrown away some songs that were pretty good. And they’re buried out there somewhere.

  PZ: Do you ever construct songs from things you’ve discarded?

  LC: I continually recycle.

  PZ: Do you think being Jewish affects your writing?

  LC: I have no idea. I’ve never been anything else. So I don’t know what it would be like not to have this reference. This reference that you can reject or embrace. You can have a million attitudes to this reference but you can’t change the reference.

  PZ: You’ve studied the Torah and the Talmud?

  LC: Yeah, yeah, in a modest way.

  PZ: When you’re writing a song like “The Future,” for example, which is in A minor, do you choose a key that will match the tone of the song?

  LC: Yeah. I choose a key not so much as Garth Hudson [of the Band] would—he has a whole philosophy of music based on keys and colors and what moods different keys produce. I think that’s quite valuable, I just don’t have the chops to be able to do that because I can’t play in all the keys. So I can’t really examine the effects of all the keys. With the synthesizer I could play in all of them but I don’t try that.

  PZ: Do you think that there are colors that coincide with each key?

  LC: I think there are but mostly for me it’s range. Some keys will place the voice a little deeper than others. My voice has gotten very, very deep over the years and seems even to be deepening. I thought it was because of fifty thousand cigarettes and several swimming pools of whiskey that my voice has gotten low. But I gave up smoking a couple of years ago and it’s still getting deeper.

  PZ: You actually do sound like a different person on the earlier records.

  LC: Sounds like a different person. Something happened to me too. I know what it was. My voice really started to change around 1982. It started to deepen and I started to cop to the fact that it was deepening.

  PZ: That very low voice is such a resonant sound. Are you happy with how it has evolved?

  LC: I’m surprised that I can even, with fear and trembling, describe myself to myself as a singer. I’m beginning to be able to do that. I never thought I would but there is something in the voice that is quite acceptable. I never thought I would be able to develop a voice that had any kind of character.

  PZ: In terms of keys again, do you ever change keys while writing?

  LC: Oh, yeah. It’s funny, today I was thinking about modulating in a tune, which I have never done. I’ve never modulated a song in midstream.

  PZ: Key changes can be quite corny. I can’t think of a song of yours where you would want one.

  LC: No, I don’t know. I think it could be nice. I’ve never tried it. I might find a way to do it—maybe in the middle of a line except in the beginning of a verse. There might be some sneaky ways to do it.

  I did it in a certain kind of way in “Anthem.” When I went up to the B-flat from the F. It threw it into another key. So in a sense, that chorus is in another key and then it comes back through suspended chords and into the original key.

  So I have looked into them.

  PZ: Do you feel that minor keys are more expressive than major keys?

  LC: I think the juxtaposition of a major chord with no se
venth going into a minor chord is a nice feel. I like that feel.

  PZ: In “Famous Blue Raincoat,” which is A minor, the chorus shifts into C major, which is very beautiful.

  LC: Yeah. That’s nice. I guess I got that from Spanish music, which has that.

  PZ: You mentioned how much you discard of what you write. Is your critical voice at play while writing, or do you try to write something first and then bring in the critic?

  LC: I bring all the people in to the team, the workforce, the legion. There’s a lot of voices that these things run through.

  PZ: Do they ever get in the way?

  LC: Get in the way hardly begins to describe it. [Laughter.] It’s mayhem. It’s mayhem and people are walking over each other’s hands. It’s panic. It’s fire in the theater. People are being trampled and they’re bullies and cowards. All the versions of yourself that you can summon are there. And some you didn’t even know were around.

  PZ: When you finally finish a song, is there a sense of triumph?

  LC: Oh, yes. There’s a wonderful sense of done-ness. That’s the thing I like best. That sense of finish-ness.

  PZ: How long does that last?

  LC: A long time. I’m still invigorated by having finished this last record and I finished it six months ago and I still feel, “God, I finished this record. Isn’t it great?” You have to keep it to yourself after a while. Your friends are ready to rejoice with you for a day or a week. But they’re not ready to rejoice after six months of “Hey, let’s go get a drink. I finished my record six months ago!” It’s an invitation people find easy to resist.

  PZ: Does drinking ever help you write?

  LC: No. Nothing helps. But drinking helps performing. Sometimes. Of course you’ve got to be judicious.

  PZ: Would it be OK with you if I named some of your songs to see what response you have to them?

  LC: Sure.

  PZ: “Sisters of Mercy.”

  LC: That’s the only song I wrote in one sitting. The melody I had worked on for some time. I didn’t really know what the song was. I remember that my mother had liked it.

  Then I was in Edmonton, which is one of our largest northern cities, and there was a snowstorm and I found myself in a vestibule with two young hitchhiking women who didn’t have a place to stay. I invited them back to my little hotel room and there was a big double bed and they went to sleep in it immediately.

  They were exhausted by the storm and the cold. And I sat in this stuffed chair inside the window beside the Saskatchewan River. And while they were sleeping I wrote the lyrics. And that never happened to me before. And I think it must be wonderful to be that kind of writer.

  Because I just wrote the lines with a few revisions and when they awakened I sang it to them. And it has never happened to me like that before. Or since.

  PZ: “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye.”

  LC: The first band I sang that for was a group called the Stormy Clovers, a Canadian group out of Toronto. I wrote it in two hotels. One was the Chelsea and the other was the Penn Terminal Hotel. I remember Marianne looking at my notebook, seeing this song, and asking, “Who’d you write this for?”

  PZ: “Chelsea Hotel No. 2.”

  LC: [Pauses.] I came to New York and I was living at other hotels and I had heard about the Chelsea Hotel as being a place where I might meet people of my own kind. And I did. [Laughs.] It was a grand, mad place. Much has been written about it.

  PZ: That song was written for Janis Joplin?

  LC: It was very indiscreet of me to let that news out. I don’t know when I did. Looking back I’m sorry I did because there are some lines in it that are extremely intimate. And since I let the cat out of the bag, yes, it was written for her.

  PZ: “Hallelujah.”

  LC: That was a song that took me a long time to write. Dylan and I were having coffee the day after his concert in Paris a few years ago and he was doing that song in concert. And he asked me how long it took to write it. And I told him a couple of years. I lied actually. It was more than a couple of years.

  Then I praised a song of his, “I and I,” and asked him how long it had taken and he said, “Fifteen minutes.” [Laughs.]

  PZ: Dylan said, around the time that “Hallelujah” came out, that your songs were almost like prayers.

  LC: I didn’t hear that but I know he does take some interest in my songs. We have a mutual interest. Everybody’s interested in Dylan but it’s pleasant to have Dylan interested in me.

  PZ: It seems that his comment is true. Songs like “Hallelujah” or “If It Be Your Will” have a sanctity to them.

  LC: “If It Be Your Will” really is a prayer. And “Hallelujah” has that feeling. A lot of them do. “Dance Me to the End of Love.” “Suzanne.” I love church music and synagogue music. Mosque music.

  PZ: It’s especially resonant in this time because so few songs that we hear have any sense of holiness.

  LC: Well, there’s a line in “The Future”: “When they said repent, I wonder what they meant.” I understand that they forgot how to build the arch for several hundred years. Masons forgot how to do certain kinds of arches; it was lost.

  So it is in our time that certain spiritual mechanisms that were very useful have been abandoned and forgot. Redemption, repentance, resurrection. All those ideas are thrown out with the bathwater. People became suspicious of religion plus all these redemptive mechanisms that are very useful.

  PZ: “Famous Blue Raincoat.”

  LC: That was one I thought was never finished. And I thought that Jennifer Warnes’s version in a sense was better because I worked on a different version for her, and I thought it was somewhat more coherent. But I always thought that that was a song you could see the carpentry in a bit. Although there are some images in it that I am very pleased with. And the tune is real good. But I’m willing to defend it, saying it was impressionistic. It’s stylistically coherent.

  And I can defend it if I have to. But secretly I always felt that there was a certain incoherence that prevented it from being a great song.

  PZ: I’d have to disagree.

  LC: Well, I’m glad to hear it. Please disagree with any of this.

  PZ: I think the greatness of that song lies in the fact that you’re alluding to a story without coming out and giving all the facts, yet the story is more powerful because of what you don’t say, or can’t say.

  LC: Yes. It may be. When I was at school there was a book that was very popular called Seven Types of Ambiguity. One of the things it criticized was something called “The Author’s Intention.” You’ve got to discard the author’s intention. It doesn’t matter what the author’s intention in the piece is, or what his interpretation of the piece is, or what his evaluation or estimation of the piece is. It exists independently of his opinions about it. So maybe it is a good song, after all. I’m ready to buy your version.

  This is all part of this make-believe mind that one has to present socially and professionally if you care about these matters. It’s like asking somebody in a burning building if they care about architecture. [Laughs.] Where’s the fire escape? That’s all I care about in terms of architecture. Can I open the window?

  PZ: “First We Take Manhattan.”

  LC: I felt for some time that the motivating energy, or the captivating energy, or the engrossing energy available to us today is the energy coming from the extremes. That’s why we have Malcolm X. And somehow it’s only these extremist positions that can compel our attention. And I find in my own mind that I have to resist these extremist positions when I find myself drifting into a mystical fascism in regards to myself. [Laughs.] So this song, “First We Take Manhattan,” what is it? Is he serious? And who is “we”? And what is this constituency that he’s addressing? Well, it’s that constituency that shares this sense of titillation with extremist positions.

  I’d rather do that with an appetite for extremism than blow up a bus full of schoolchildren.

  PZ: When I first started
playing guitar and writing songs, one of the first songs I ever learned was “Suzanne.” And I remember thinking, “How does anyone write a song this beautiful?” And to this day, it’s a miracle.

  LC: It is a miracle. I don’t know where the good songs come from or else I’d go there more often. I knew that I was on top of something.

  I developed the picking pattern first. I was spending a lot of time on the waterfront and the harbor area of Montreal. It hadn’t been reconstructed yet.

  It’s now called Old Montreal and a lot of the buildings have been restored. It wasn’t at that time. And there was that sailor’s church that has the statue of the Virgin. Gilded so that the sun comes down on her. And I knew there was a song there.

  Then I met Suzanne [Verdal], who was the wife of Armand Vaillan-court, a friend of mine. She was a dancer and she took me down to a place near the river.

  She was one of the first people to have a loft on the Saint Lawrence. I knew that it was about that church and I knew that it was about the river. I didn’t know I had anything to crystallize the song. And then her name entered into the song and then it was a matter of reportage, of really just being as accurate as I could about what she did.

  PZ: It took you a long time to finish?

  LC: Yes, I had many work sheets. Nothing compared to the work sheets I have now. But it took me several months.

  PZ: Did she feed you tea and oranges, as in the song?

  LC: She fed me a tea called Constant Comment, which has small pieces of orange rind in it, which gave birth to the image.

  PZ: I always loved the line, “And she shows you where to look among the garbage and the flowers, there are heroes in the seaweed.” They’re hopeful lines.

  LC: Yes. It is hopeful. I’m very grateful for those lines and for that song.

  PZ: “Bird on a Wire.”

  LC: It was begun in Greece because there were no wires on the island where I was living to a certain moment. There were no telephone wires. There were no telephones. There was no electricity. So at a certain point they put in these telephone poles, and you wouldn’t notice them now, but when they first went up, it was about all I did—stare out the window at these telephone wires and think how civilization had caught up with me and I wasn’t going to be able to escape after all. I wasn’t going to be able to live this eleventh-century life that I thought I had found for myself. So that was the beginning.