Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen

by Jeff Burger

  LC: Mostly. Actually it was cognac. He taught me to be able to distinguish by taste between the different kinds of cognac. He would say, “Remy Martin, slightly feminine taste. Courvoisier, a slightly masculine taste.” After you’ve drunk a bottle or so, these possibilities become very rich.

  VS: I see. So “Waiting for the Miracle” is not necessarily a Zen sort of—

  LC: Even when he’s got a translator, nobody can quite figure out what he’s saying.

  VS: [Laughs.] I thank you for being my guest on Idiot’s Delight tonight.

  LC: I thank you for inviting me.

  COHEN CLIP

  On His Musical Forebears

  “The kind of training I had as a young writer, a young composer, made me very much aware of where I stood in a long line of singers or poets: musicians from the Troubadours; even before that, from Homer; and even before that, from Isaiah and King David; coming all the way down through the various strains into English literature; into poetry; into folk poetry like Robbie Burns; into folksingers like Pete Seeger, Allan Lomax, and Woody Guthrie; and down to my own generation. I’ve always been aware of that tradition, and to be one of the figures that allows the tradition to continue is very gratifying.”

  —from interview with Jim O’Brien, B-Side Magazine (UK),

  August/September 1993

  THE PROPHET OF LOVE LOOKS INTO THE ABYSS: A CONVERSATION WITH LEONARD COHEN

  THOM JUREK | August 18, 1993, Metro Times (Detroit)

  What Thom Jurek remembers most about his Cohen interview is how excited the singer was to be performing in Detroit. “While he’d played Ann Arbor a few years before,” Jurek told me, “he hadn’t played in Detroit for more than a decade at that point and he was clearly looking forward to it—he kept talking about its landmarks and Motown. The [June 19] show had sold out long in advance, and he was quite thrilled to be playing in a proper rock club—the State Theater (now the Fillmore), which held a few thousand people. The reason, he said, was knowing people could walk around or sit, could mingle and talk with one another as well as enjoy the music. That it could be a community event rather than just a concert.”

  Jurek also recalled that during the interview, Cohen had on his lap a then recently published collection of all of Hank Williams’s lyrics. “He would stop speaking for a moment and sing the tunes, or quote from them often, especially when it was apropos in our discussion,” Jurek remembered. “He commented on Williams’s humanity, that he was both quite strong to be that fearless in showing his vulnerability, especially during that time in country music. He called Williams’s lyrics the epitome of poetry and compassion, because it was clear that the experiences Williams sang about were not only ones people could relate to but ones that the country singer had lived through.

  “The interview was supposed to be for twenty minutes,” Jurek added. “It lasted nearly two hours. I still have the tape somewhere. This was before he went to live on Mount Baldy, when he was still with Rebecca De Mornay.”

  Jurek recalled asking Cohen why it had taken so long after the release of The Future for him to tour. “He explained that it was because backing vocalist Julie Christensen had borne a child; it was important to hold off on the tour to give that new family time to bond.” What about finding another singer? Cohen said he hadn’t even considered that. “The reason, he said—and I am pretty sure I remember this by heart—was: ‘She shouldn’t be punished for bringing life into the world.’” —Ed.

  For more than thirty years, Leonard Cohen has hungrily pursued the truth in both his poetry and his music. Since his first collection of poems, Let Us Compare Mythologies, appeared in 1956 in his native Montreal, Cohen has publicly chronicled standing on the edge of an emotional abyss. He accepts and even celebrates carnality, despair, apocalypse, hope, holiness, and disintegration as equal and necessary parts of the human journey.

  At fifty-eight, Cohen is considered by many to be Western culture’s prophet of love and the elder statesman of the bedroom, due to his uncanny ability to chart the commonality of the unspeakable—the joy, ecstasy, guilt, panic, and regret that take place in the recesses of the human soul when expressing its desire for another.

  His oeuvre is impressive, if not prolific. It includes two published (and many unpublished) novels, among them Beautiful Losers, which has to date sold more than eight hundred thousand copies; eight collections of poems; eleven records, including a live album and a “best of” collection; and a film. He recorded the soundtrack to Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller. His songs have been recorded by everyone from Judy Collins (who in 1966 brought Cohen’s songwriting to international attention) to Joan Baez to Nick Cave; he has been the subject of a number of film documentaries; his music and poetry have been used in a Broadway production and ballet; two tribute recordings have been done in his honor— Jennifer Warnes’s phenomenal Famous Blue Raincoat: The Songs of Leonard Cohen, released in 1985, and last year’s I’m Your Fan, which included such artists as R.E.M. and John Cale. He has also edited Stranger Music, a collection of his lyrics and poems, for publication by Knopf later this year. The publisher is also reprinting Cohen’s novels.

  While Cohen’s infrequent recordings regularly reach the Top 10 in Canada and throughout Europe, in America he remains a cult figure whose records sell steadily, but not in great numbers. But that is changing. His 1988 release, I’m Your Man, was universally acclaimed and went gold within months of its release, and his latest album, The Future, may even surpass that achievement. This most recent collection of sharp art songs may be his finest recorded moment. He examines the apocalyptic course the world is on with both moral authority and empathy, calling himself on the title track, “the little Jew who wrote the Bible.” The album examines amorous relationships as if they too were at the end of time, calling for trust and emotional risk in proportions that have never before been witnessed. As with all of his records, it is at once pastoral, shocking, seductive, vulnerable, and direct—qualities that have guaranteed Cohen’s endurance in the pop marketplace.

  Cohen spoke to me from Montreal, where he lives half the year (the rest is spent in Los Angeles). In interview, Cohen was gracious and intense, listening carefully to questions, attempting to put as much information in his answers as possible. His smoky voice never quavered, but he sounded insistent and sure of himself.

  Thom Jurek: To what do you attribute your longevity? It’s as if you’re in your prime right now, and a whole new generation of young people is getting hip to your work and claiming it as having relevance to them.

  Leonard Cohen: From the very beginning, I was in it for the long haul. And the long haul for all of us is a lifetime. At fifty-eight, if I’m in my prime, I believe that’s how it should be. Any artist should get better with time; there’s more experience, more maturity, hopefully more vision, perhaps one even looks death a little squarer in the eye. As far as continuing relevance, I feel blessed to be part of a continuum that includes both Bob Dylan and Nick Cave. I’m gratified that I can speak to someone who is twenty-five as well—though I believe differently—as to someone who is fifty-five.

  TJ: Although you’ve been recording for twenty-six years, your output hasn’t been exactly prolific—nine studio records in all that time. Is there a reason you work so slowly?

  LC: The process of songwriting for me is arduous and painful because I have to go to the place where the song is. I have to inhabit it and allow it to have its way with me. I have to write perfectly many verses that get thrown away because they are imperfect for a particular song; and it takes time and patience and tears to get there. I have to get ripped apart in the process.

  TJ: Did this happen to you on The Future?

  LC: Yes. This record was every minute of the four years it took to get it out. Some of the songs were ten years in the making; in fact, many of them were old songs that weren’t finished for one reason or another until now. I’m speaking to you after the struggle. It’s easy to talk about now, but in the process of making t
hat record, just like all the ones that came before it, I get wrecked. I wish I could say to you, “I write my songs in fifteen minutes in a taxi, or in a hotel lounge,” but, unfortunately, it isn’t true.

  TJ: Perhaps this is why your records last: What you put into them is possibly evident to the listener?

  LC: I don’t know if it is or not. I don’t have any sense of that, but it would be agreeable if that were the reason. The Future as a record is here and will stay here because there’s flesh and blood in it.

  TJ: The title track has such an apocalyptic feel to it. There seems to be a nostalgia for the conflicts of old: “Give me crack and anal sex….Give me Stalin and Saint Paul….”

  LC: I think the future is already here. I think that there is a collective despair that everything has collapsed, that the world has been destroyed. People are saying to each other that they can’t take the reality they’re living in anymore; they’re actually admitting it to one another. The evidence that everything is still running is in place—the mail, garbage pickup, going to work—but there’s a panic that everything isn’t what it seems.

  TJ: And that’s essentially what the song says. That’s a real trait with you— you speak elegantly, but so accessibly. It’s easy for people to understand the things you say. You never try to cover them in alliteration or specialized language. Even your metaphors are spare and to the point.

  LC: Because I have no secrets. A lot of writers have secrets that they spend their whole lives getting to, hinting at in their work, that there is something there that they’re not revealing. I am completely open and transparent, and therefore it’s easy for anyone to grasp the emotion that’s there. I’m the person who tries everything, and experience myself as falling apart. I try drugs, Jung, Zen meditation, love and it all falls apart at every moment. And the place where it all comes out is in the critical examination of those things—the songs. And because of this, I’m vulnerable. There’s the line in “Anthem” that says, “There’s a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.” That sums it up; it is as close to a credo as I’ve come.

  TJ: Perhaps that’s why the critics who have derided you used the adage about “Leonard Cohen has continually rewritten the same song, he never has any new ideas.”

  LC: And they’re absolutely right. I have explored the same territory— in many different ways—because I have no answers to the problems and because I keep going to the same sources because they are timeless. And as I get older, I hope I can explore them more deeply, and with more courage and honesty rather than just urgency. Irving Layton, the great Canadian poet, once wrote about me that “Leonard Cohen has been blessed with never having had an original idea,” and I take that as a compliment because these things are what everybody goes through.

  Everybody lives the life of the heart, and we all know what it’s like to feel and break down, and I think we cherish that in our musicians and singers when they reveal that.

  TJ: These themes you explore so often: sex, religion, contact, disintegration, war, and apocalypse—you were far from being P.C. in the sixties and seventies—all seem connected in your songs and poems. Do you look at life and art that way?

  LC: They are all connected. If you leave God out of sex, it becomes pornographic; if you leave sex out of God, it becomes self-righteous. Religion and war are obviously connected, and all of it is connected to the person who has to live through it; I am living through it, trying to make sense out of it, or not or let it go. Those themes are timeless in themselves. One of the reasons I use biblical references continually is because even though the culture has changed in terms of where it gets its information—from television, mostly—the images contained in the Bible have remained.

  TJ: So how does it feel to be a “commercial success” in the US?

  LC: I have never shunned success. I have always tried to write hits that people would find enjoyable. My record company and I have an agreeable relationship; I sell enough records to keep them happy but few enough so that they don’t worry about the next one. If anything, I would have liked for them to treat me more as a commodity than an artist because I worry about the artist part enough for both of us. At the times when commercial defeats and setbacks happened, I wasn’t too troubled, because I knew the worth of the work, and I look back on a lot of my songs and poems and feel good about them because a lot of them have lasted. But it’s an agreeable thing. Even my books, which haven’t been in print in America for a while, are being reprinted. I have always been able to provide for my children and make a decent living, so I haven’t much to complain about.

  TJ: Sounds like a nice life.

  LC: It is, but it’s a fragile one, too.

  COHEN CLIP

  On Music He Admires

  “If I hear George Jones singing ‘Grand Tour,’ it can blow me away. If I hear Otis Redding singing ‘These Arms.’ But your interest in music diminishes dramatically when you’re on the road. In fact, we’ve created a ‘music crime’ on the bus, which is, y’know, if you play music … The first time was the night before last, when we actually listened to some bebop, some jazz, some Miles, Bud Powell. It’s been a long time since anybody dared to play a note of prerecorded music on the bus.” [Laughs.]

  —interview with Dev Sherlock, Musician, November 1993

  COHEN CLIP

  On His Inner Life

  “I find as you get older the range of your inner life widens. It’s not that you get any better or worse. It’s that you’re more sad and you’re more happy. You’re more competent and you’re more out of it. You’re more attentive and you’re more withdrawn. The polarities seem to get very, very strong and they seem to get wider and wider apart. And the extremes seem to be more and more acute, more and more emphasized. So the range just gets bigger and bigger until finally it gets so big that it embraces the whole cosmos and you dissolve and that’s called death.”

  —interview with Laurie Brown, Prime Time News,

  CBC (Canada), December 3, 1993

  “I AM THE LITTLE JEW WHO WROTE THE BIBLE”

  ARTHUR KURZWEIL | November 23, 1993, interview | January 1994, the Jewish Book News (US)

  The following conversation took place in conjunction with the publication of Cohen’s book, Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs. It occurred in a conference room of the New York office of Random House, which published the collection. At the time, interviewer Arthur Kurzweil was editor-in-chief of the Jewish Book Club, and he had selected Cohen’s anthology as an offering to the club’s more than twenty thousand members. An abbreviated version of the interview appeared in the Jewish Book News. This is the complete conversation, which includes more discussion of Cohen’s Jewish roots and thinking than any other interview I’ve seen. —Ed.

  Arthur Kurzweil: I want to tell you at the outset that I’m a big fan and have been for years.

  Leonard Cohen: Oh, thank you very much. That’s very kind of you.

  AK: I have more memorabilia about you than I’m willing to admit to most people. For example, this particular book [indicates a copy of The Favorite Game]: there was a time when I wouldn’t let anyone else touch it. [Cohen laughs.] It was just a crazy thing. But I just wouldn’t let anybody touch it.

  LC: Oh, so you know my background?

  AK: I know … lots about you, I think, or at least, I know what they say. And I also want to let you know I saw you in concert in New York not long ago.

  LC: Thank you very much for coming.

  AK: It was a great night. I’m interested in your grandfather who I understand wrote some books.

  LC: Both my grandfathers were distinguished. My mother’s father— “Rabbi Solomon Klonitsky-Kline” is the way that they transcribed his name in the publications that were printed here—was known as Sar HaDikduki, the Prince of Grammarians. And he wrote a thesaurus of Talmudic interpretation and a dictionary of synonyms and homonyms. They were used in institutions of higher learning until Israel took over the grammatical institution.

&nbs
p; He was a wonderful man, and my mother always used to tell me that “people came from a hundred miles” to hear him speak. My grandfather was the principal of a yeshiva in Kovno [now Kaunas, Lithuania’s second-largest city]. He was a disciple of Rabbi Yitzchak Elchanan and, in fact, my grandfather closed his teacher’s eyes when his teacher died.

  He had a very strong secular side to him. He liked to ride horses, for instance. He was a kind of confrontational teacher, especially when he got to New York, where he ended up. He came first to Atlanta, where his daughter married into the Alexander family of Georgia, who were Jews who arrived in 1708, and he originally moved to Atlanta. But there was nothing there for him, so he moved to New York and he became part of the Forward and that group of Yiddish writers, although I don’t think he contributed to any of the newspapers. But he kept on with his grammatical and Talmudic studies.

  AK: And your other grandfather?

  LC: My other grandfather, Rabbi Lyon Cohen, was also a very distinguished man who helped found many of the institutions that defined Jewish life in Canada. He was a vice president of the first Zionist organization in Canada. He made a trip to the Holy Land.

  AK: A trip to the Holy Land at that point would have been a pretty interesting journey.

  LC: Yes, a very interesting journey. He met Baron de Hirsch and he planned and helped establish, for Canada, the Jewish Colonization Association, which was to settle Jewish refugees in the prairie provinces and on farms. He was the founder of the first Anglo Jewish newspaper in North America. It was called the Jewish Times, published in Montreal. He was also one of the founders of Congregation Shaar Hashomayim in Montreal.

  AK: Was he involved in the Jewish Public Library in Montreal?

  LC: Yes, he was involved in that, although that was a different branch, a different expression of Montreal Jewry.