by Jeff Burger
SLD: And so it will hopefully continue then?
LC: I hope so. Because it’s wonderful having friends like this.
SLD: And what about the writer who failed his trade?
LC: I still scribble away. I think everybody fails their trade. When you look at the tradition and who you’re up against, it’s hard to come away with a sense of real accomplishment. You’re happy that you can do your work. But you can’t fool yourself about where you stand in the great tradition. Ultimately, you’re up against Shakespeare and Homer and King David …
SLD: Yes, but I remember reading that James Joyce is not dead—he’s living in Montreal and his name is Leonard Cohen.
LC: I don’t think they’re gonna put that on my tombstone. One knows very well … [The late French singer, songwriter, poet, composer, artist, actor, and director] Serge Gainsbourg, who used to drink at this bar here, when he was … described as a poet, he said, “I’m not a poet” and they asked him, “Well, what are you?” He said, “I am a kind of pseudo poet,” and I think that’s a good description. I always think of myself as a minor poet. That’s not some kind of artificial modesty. That’s an accurate assessment of my work in relationship to the work that has been done.
SLD: So are you writing what’s going to be on your tombstone?
LC: No. Listen, it’s hard for me to write and that’s one writing job that I can ignore.
SLD: Do you care what will be on it?
LC: [Laughs.] No. I don’t care. It’s not for me.
SLD: So what is most important for you now?
LC: [Long pause.] It’s a good question but it doesn’t seem to register on my dial. I don’t know what’s most important. I guess the health and welfare of one’s children is the most important thing. After that comes one’s own health and one’s own work. And then playing with the dogs has a big importance in my life.
COHEN CLIP
On “A Thousand Kisses Deep” and Life in General
“We don’t write the play, we don’t produce it, we don’t direct it, and we’re not even actors in it. Everybody eventually comes to the conclusion that things are not unfolding exactly the way they wanted, and that the whole enterprise has a basis that you can’t penetrate. Nevertheless, you live your life as if it’s real. But with the understanding: it’s only a thousand kisses deep, that is, with that deep intuitive understanding that this is unfolding according to a pattern that you simply cannot discern.”
—from “State of Grace,” by Doug Saunders,
the Globe and Mail, September 1, 2001
COHEN CLIP
On Antidepressants
“I was involved in early medication, like Desipramine. And the MAOs [monoamine oxidase inhibitors], and the new generation—Paxil, Zoloft, and Wellbutrin. I even tried experimental antiseizure drugs, ones that had some small successes in treating depression. I was told they all give you a ‘bottom,’ a floor beneath which you are not expected to plunge. I plunged. And all were disagreeable, in subtly different ways…. On Prozac, I thought I had attained some kind of higher plateau because my interest in women had dissolved. Then I realized it was just a side effect. That stuff crushes your libido….A few years ago … I threw out all the drugs I had. I said, ‘These things really don’t even begin to confront my predicament.’ I figured, if I am going to go down I would rather go down with my eyes wide open.”
—from “A Happy Man,” by Mireille Silcott, Saturday Night (Canada),
September 15, 2001
COHEN CLIP
On Depression
“Memories were not the cause of that depression. During the course of my life, there have been some wonderful women. And it was not that I could not find love, but that I could not accept love, because I did not know how. Perhaps the breakup [with Marianne] was an element in that depression, but I really never knew where my depressive condition came from, but it had to do with an isolation of myself. It has been the force, the determinant mechanism that made me adapt this attitude in life. I lived trying to avoid it, to escape it, to understand it, to handle it. It made me turn to drink, it pushed me to drugs, and it led me to Zen.”
—from “An Intimate Conversation with Leonard Cohen,” by Elena Pita,
El Mundo (Spain), September 26, 2001
COHEN CLIP
On Rap Music
“In the case of Eminem and some of the other rappers, the lyrics are impressive. I think it’s great. I studied and was formed in this tradition that honored the ancient idea of music being declaimed or chanted, of lyrics being declaimed or chanted to a rhythmic background. So I feel this is not at all a threat to Western civilization…. If it is in bad taste, you know, much of what we cherish today was once considered in bad taste. I have no idea where these things are going to go, but if it endures, it’s not going to be because someone affirmed to the good taste or the bad taste of it.”
—from “Cohen on Wry,” by Michael Krugman, Flaunt (US), October 2001
COHEN CLIP
On Being Signed to Columbia Records
“I wasn’t deeply aware of an impending explosion. But there was a sense of freedom and opportunity in the air. I was heard by a very great A&R man called John Hammond, who signed everybody from Billie Holiday to Bruce Springsteen. He was a very kind man, he had heard Judy [Collins’s] version of ‘Suzanne’ and he invited me out to lunch near the Chelsea Hotel. Afterward, he asked me if I would mind playing some tunes. So I did, very nervously, and he said just three words to me: ‘You got it.’ About the best words I ever heard.”
—from “Leonard Cohen: Love’s Hard Man,” by Alan Franks, the Times
Magazine (London), October 13, 2001
COHEN CLIP
On Life in the Monastery
“A strange thing happened when I was liberated from everyday communication. I didn’t want to, but I found myself thinking in terms of songs again. I was amused by it at first, like I was being taunted.…A lot of the time in the meditation hall, when I was expected to have my mind on other matters, I was instead concentrating deeply on the problem of finding rhymes for words like ‘orange.’”
—from “Cohen Emerges from Monastery with New CD,” by Tom Moon,
Philadelphia Inquirer, October 24, 2001
COHEN CLIP
On Playing a Heroic Role
“Heroism is very high maintenance. After a while, when tremendous energy is devoted to maintaining this hero as the center figure of the drama, the evidence accumulates that this hero is relentlessly defeated. So at a certain point the modest wisdom arises that it would be best to let this hero die and get on with your life.”
—from “Leonard Cohen: Down from the Mountain, Singing with More Serenity,” by Ann Powers, the New York Times, October 28, 2001
HAPPY AT LAST: THE POET RETURNS FROM HIS ZEN RETREAT WITH A NEW ALBUM AND A SUNNIER DISPOSITION
J. POET | November 2001, Pulse! (US)
“I met Leonard Cohen at his home in Los Angeles, a modest, sparsely furnished cottage in a middle-class neighborhood,” recalled the journalist who goes by the pen name j. poet. “There were no trappings of stardom, no gold records or photos of himself on the wall. He’d just returned from a few years meditating and studying Zen in semi-seclusion and he radiated a calm, serene aura. He greeted me warmly, and as we conversed, he recalled meeting me once before, many years earlier, which I found flattering. He answered all my questions slowly and deliberately, showing off flashes of ironic wit.
“After the interview,” poet told me, “Cohen showed me his garden, home studio, and bedroom. As I was leaving, he mentioned a still-untitled book of poems and drawings he was working on, Book of Longing, which was published in 2006. He printed out a caricature of himself that made me laugh out loud. He gave it to me as a parting gift and I still treasure it.” —Ed.
“Welcome to my public relations crisis,” Leonard Cohen says, as he opens the door to his apartment. His speaking voice and his singing voice share the same qualities, a low, measu
red rumble that’s both world weary and comforting, but his somber tone is undercut by the warm smile that often punctuates his conversation.
It’s a hot summer day in L.A., but Cohen is dressed almost formally— a black fedora, black and white hound’s tooth jacket, gray T-shirt, black slacks, and black Chinese meditation slippers.
“A few weeks after I turned in this record, the company told me I was going to have a promo emergency if I didn’t get busy, so they’ve had me on the phone for the last two months talking to people about it,” he said, walking through his sparsely furnished, two-bedroom unit. There’s a small electric keyboard in the guest room, and his classical guitar leans against the wall of his own bedroom. “Would you like a drink? Water? Alcohol? A cigarette?” He’s a considerate host and sets up the sunny kitchen for the interview with precise, efficient movements.
The work that caused the emergency is Ten New Songs, his first album of new material since The Future, released nine years ago. It’s an unexpected pleasure, in light of rumors that Cohen had retired to a monastery to shun the public life and meditate. “I did spend five or six years on Mount Baldy with Kyozan Joshu Sasaki, Roshi,” Cohen said. “But a Zen Center is a very social place, so it’s hardly withdrawing from the world. There’s a Zen saying: ‘Like the pebbles in a bag, the monks polish one another.’ I’ve been involved in this community for almost thirty years now.”
Like Zen, Cohen’s work has an economy of line and an attention to detail that is missing from most popular music. His work takes us deep into the recesses of the romantic soul, a place where love, sex, death, and redemption spin together in a slow melancholy waltz, occasionally highlighted by a sizzling laser burst of ironic humor.
“I’d like to think that there may be a chuckle or two in the songs,” Cohen said, that sly half smile coming again to his lips, “but it seems to evade my critics, who haven’t always been kind. I’ve been called everything over the years. [“The Prince of Bummers” and “Duke of Doom” are just two of the colorful, and facile, epithets that have been hung around the poet’s neck.] One writer even suggested the record company include a packet of razor blades with the albums, and market them as a do-it-yourself suicide kit.”
Cohen is an unusually deliberate artist, known for the protracted effort he puts into his work. “I was reading Billboard magazine a few months ago, and learned that my first album, Songs of Leonard Cohen, had just gone gold.” He smiled, considering the patterns his cigarette smoke traced in the air. “That’s what, thirty-three years? That’s a pace I’m comfortable with.”
In the past, Cohen has characterized the songwriting process as a holy ordeal, like wrestling with angels. “These songs were written up on Mount Baldy, part of a larger body of work, and I wouldn’t dramatize the process quite so extravagantly,” the singer said. “Not to say it didn’t take a lot of work, but it’s gotten easier since I’ve accepted the fact that I sweat over every word. I’m not of the school that can write a song in a taxicab or jot down a tune on the back of a napkin. Which is not to say that laboring over them is any guarantee of excellence.”
One thing that may have made the process easier this time is Cohen’s collaboration with his longtime friend and fellow Zen student Sharon Robinson, the Grammy-winning (Patti Labelle’s “New Attitude”) singer, composer, and musician who contributed her considerable composing and arranging skills to the album. They’d collaborated before on songs for Cohen—“Everybody Knows” (on I’m Your Man) and “Waiting for the Miracle” (on The Future)—and Diana Ross (“Summertime”) but this is the first complete record they’ve done together.
“I had melodies in progress for some of these songs when I ran into Sharon and decided to revisit our collaboration. I wound up liking her take on the songs better than mine and kept inviting her to make more and more contributions. She’d pick out a verse and turn it into a chorus and reshape the music. In terms of the writing and performance it became a duo, and in terms of production it was a trio.” (Cohen’s longtime engineer, Leanne Ungar, helped supervise the mix.)
The album was recorded at Still Life, the name Cohen has given to his small backyard studio, and the performances have a warm, underproduced sound. “The conventional wisdom was, and still is, that you have to drop the tracks onto analog tape before you mix, to recover the warmth and presence you lose in the digital format. We found that we lost the warmth we had in digital, so we boldly mixed it using Pro Tools [audio software].”
The only minor problem was the fact that Cohen’s home studio wasn’t soundproofed, but since he gets up early to meditate, he was able to do the vocal tracks before dawn, or late at night, when ambient sound was at a minimum. “It was a luxury to be able to try different readings of a song, and I did innumerable takes on most of them.”
The melodies on Ten New Songs are still low key, but Robinson’s rhythm tracks have hints of country, R&B, and, on “Boogie Street,” even a bit of hip-hop. “We had several models in the back of our minds when we were working on the music—a slow R&B song might be referred to for ‘In My Secret Life,’ a country song might be referred to for ‘That Don’t Make It Junk,’ the model of a protest folksong might be referred to in ‘Land of Plenty.’ The temptation is that [digital music programs] offer you so many possibilities. You can get lost for months trying to explore them all. I kept in mind what the beats used to say: ‘First thought, best thought.’”
One of the most striking, and Zen-like, tunes on Ten New Songs is “Love Itself,” which draws its inspiration from the motes of dust dancing in a sunbeam. Every poet has played with this universal phenomenon, but few as successfully as Cohen. “The song does have a pedestrian genesis. I was sitting in a sunny room, watching the motes of dust, and accepted their graceful invitation to join in their activity and forget who I was, or remember who I was. It’s that rare experience of dissolution of self, not the careful examination of self that I usually work with. I played it for a couple of brother monks and sister nuns and they said it was better than sesshin—a seven-day session of intense meditation.”
Cohen also designs the cover art for his albums and singles and his desk was littered with various treatments for the single Columbia is releasing of “In My Secret Life,” mostly for the European market, where he is more commercially successful. He also shot a video for the tune with the Canadian visual artist Floria Sigsmondi. “MTV doesn’t want anything to do with me,” Cohen said, “but they have content laws in Canada. A certain percentage of everything on TV has to be Canadian, and they show the videos there.”
As he moved with his guest to the door, Cohen suddenly grinned. “I’ve been really happy for the past three years,” he said, in an almost confessional tone. “I read somewhere that in some people, the brain cells that cause anxiety die as you get older. I don’t know if it’s that, or the discipline [of sitting Zazen], but life does seem to be getting easier. And I’m not touring for this album. I’m taking the next month off to finish a book I’ve been working on. I have about 250 poems and a bunch of goofy little drawings that I want to put together and get out. [He goes to the computer and boots up a hilariously self-effacing self-portrait.]
“And I have a couple of songs I did with Sharon that didn’t make it onto Ten New Songs. The process went so smoothly that I’m looking forward to starting a new record.”
EXILE ON MAIN STREET
BRETT GRAINGER | November 2001, Elm Street (Canada)
Another of Cohen’s late 2001 conversations was with journalist Brett Grainger, who got a green light for his meeting with the artist while on his honeymoon. “I more or less went straight from my honeymoon to the interview in Montreal,” Grainger told me. “The first thing that struck me was that he answered the door wearing sunglasses. This despite the fact that he’d been alone in a hotel room that didn’t appear to have any windows. I thought, ‘This is the real deal.’”
Grainger also concluded that Cohen was “exactly the gentleman I thought he would be— patient, refle
ctive, genuinely engaged with the questions. A rarity for anyone in entertainment, at least my experience of it. It was certainly the highlight of my career as an entertainment journalist.
“The one thing I regret not asking was what it was like growing up in Catholic Montreal,” Grainger continued. “While Cohen is Jewish and has engaged in Buddhist practice, his work has always been permeated by a Christian—and specifically Roman Catholic—sensibility. I’d have loved to hear his thoughts about that, what it is about Catholicism he finds or found interesting and compelling, especially at a time when anti-Semitism was still very much alive and well in Catholic Quebec.”
One thing Grainger doesn’t regret is including a paragraph about hearing Cohen urinate through a wall. “I debated about whether to mention that because I feared the detail was too intrusive and indiscreet,” he said. “But in the end I felt it made him seem more like a man, an elderly man at that. It brought him a little bit off the pedestal, which is what Buddhists say one should do with all idols. Including the Buddha. So I suspected he would have approved.
“All the same,” Grainger concluded, “the article is definitely the work of a young man. I wish I could have that hour with him again at age thirty-nine.” —Ed.
I’m on Sainte-Catherine Street in downtown Montreal. It’s my first visit in a few years, and the strip is looking decidedly less seedy than I’ve ever seen it. A minor economic recovery has given the old lady a major lift— signs for shoe stores and reputable eateries now easily outnumber those for danseuses nues.
After lunch at Reuben’s, I head to the corner of Rue de la Montagne and turn right, continuing north with the mountain in my sights until I arrive at the entrance to the Hotel Vogue, ready for my appointment with the city’s favorite son, Leonard Cohen. Right off the top, I’m not crazy about the location. I dislike the anonymous, controlled environments that hotels offer a person in my profession. Interviewing a celebrity in a hotel room is like sun tanning with your clothes on: it’s safe, but it won’t give you much color.