Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen

by Jeff Burger

  LC: Am I sure that I’m going to die? Yes.

  JG: Well said. Is there a way to prepare for that?

  LC: Well, like with anything else, there’s a certain degree of free will. You put in your best efforts to prepare for anything but you can’t command the consequences. So yes, there are whole religious and spiritual methodologies that invite you to prepare for death and you can embark upon them and embrace them … but I don’t think there’s any guarantee that it’s going to work. Because nobody knows what’s going to happen in the next moment.

  JG: Back to that fear: Are you fearful of death?

  LC: I think any reasonable person is going to [be]. It’s not so much death, as Layton said—it’s the preliminaries. Of course, everyone has to have a certain amount of anxiety about the conditions of one’s death—the actual circumstances, the pain involved, the effect on your heirs. But there’s so little that you can do about it. It’s best to relegate those concerns to the appropriate compartments of the mind and not let them inform all your activities. We’ve got to live our lives as if they’re real, as if they’re not going to end immediately, so we have to live under those … some people might call them illusions.

  JG: Bringing us back to the present day and that Tennessee Williams quote. And you’ve said, “How it ends is nobody’s business. It is generally accompanied by some disagreeable circumstances.”

  LC: Yes, that seems to be the way it is.

  JG: I guess the latest disagreeable circumstances, if 2005 can be considered the latest, were these financial difficulties that you had. You were defrauded by someone you personally worked with closely for many years…. Was it important to you to rebuild the nest egg when that money was gone?

  LC: Well, it was presented in much more urgent terms than that. It was a matter of financial survival so I didn’t sit around thinking it’s important to build the nest egg; it’s important to produce some income. So I got busy and I was able to put some things into motion. But as I said, you can put forward your best effort but there’s no guarantee that the circumstances are going to yield the results that you intend. Nobody can do that. So I put in my best efforts and luckily they’ve been rewarded with a certain amount of financial remuneration.

  JG: And this current tour is very lucrative. You seem like such a modest man. Your house is certainly modest. It’s Spartan. You don’t seem to require a lot. How important is material wealth to you at this point?

  LC: You can’t ignore it. I like to live simply but that’s not a virtue; it’s just a preference. There are people who like to have vast marble halls and ballrooms and that sort of thing. That kind of living has never attracted me. So I don’t consider it anything special to live simply. I love this house. It’s been very kind to me and my children over the years. I’m sorry that you blacked out the windows [for the TV broadcast] because this is a lovely view of the Parc du Portugal. It’s a really nice place to live. It is simple but that’s just a preference.

  JG: Let me ask you about “Hallelujah” for a moment because it’s been an interesting year for “Hallelujah.” If it hadn’t been a song that Canadians and people around the world have been singing—versions by Jeff Buckley, Rufus Wainwright, k. d. lang—it took on a whole new energy, a song that you wrote in 1984, this past Christmas. Cover versions appeared as number one and number two on the UK bestseller charts and your version was also in the Top 40 from 1984. What did you make of that?

  LC: I was happy that the song was being used, of course. There were certain ironic and amusing sidebars because the record that it came from, which was called Various Positions, that record Sony wouldn’t put out— they didn’t think it was good enough. It had songs like “Dance Me to the End of Love,” “Hallelujah,” “If It Be Your Will,” but it wasn’t considered good enough for the American market and it wasn’t put out. So there was a certain mild sense of revenge that arose in my heart. I was happy about it. But I was just reading a review of a movie called Watchmen that uses it. And the reviewer said, “Can we please have a moratorium on ‘Hallelujah’ in movies and television shows?” And I kind of feel the same way.

  JG: [Laughs.] I was going to say, “… to which you placed a stern phone call saying, ‘No! Let’s keep it going.’” It’s interesting … the song kind of transcends musical genres. It’s not a typical pop song but not only does it not seem to go away, it seems to grow in its popularity with each year. I know it’s one of your favorite songs.

  LC: I like the song, I think it’s a good song, but I think too many people sing it. I think people ought to stop singing it for a little while.

  JG: What is the magic of “Hallelujah”?

  LC: I don’t know. One is always trying to write a good song and like everything else you put in your best effort but you can’t command the consequences. It took a long time. I think the song came out in ’83 or ’84. And then the only person who seemed to recognize the song was Dylan, and he was doing it in concert. Nobody else recognized the song until quite a long time later, I think. When was Jeff Buckley’s?

  JG: In ’92.

  LC: So it’s almost ten years later. I knew his father [the late folksinger Tim Buckley] very well, incidentally. They were both fine young men and I think John Cale, whom I knew personally … he asked me for a bunch of lyrics and I sent him a whole bunch. Where did he put it out? Is his in Shrek or is that Rufus Wainwright’s?

  JG: That’s a good question. I think it’s Rufus’s, yeah.

  LC: In Shrek it’s Rufus’s?

  JG: There is a John Cale one that’s in a movie too, though, I think.

  LC: I don’t know about this. Anyway, they’re both beautiful versions. I think John Cale’s might be in the movie and Rufus’s on the soundtrack. There was some curious distribution of the song between those two singers. But they’re both great singers. I was in the room when k. d. lang sang it at the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame. That really touched me.

  JG: Do the songs ever feel like possessions? Is there ever somebody working with your writing that you don’t appreciate?

  LC: I’m not sure that has ever happened. I had a very modest career for most of my life and I was always happy when someone did one of my songs, so that overrode most of the critical concerns I might have had. In fact, my critical faculties went into suspended animation when someone would do one of my songs and I generally was just delighted. And I still feel that way.

  JG: Leonard, in 2001, you told the story of your affection for watching eighty-two-year-old Alberta Hunter sing love songs in New York.

  LC: That was great.

  JG: And you said at the time, “I love to hear an old singer lay it out and I’d like to be one of them.”

  LC: That’s right. I would like to be. She was around eighty-two, I think. Yes, I would love to hear me at eighty-two. [Laughs.] That would be good.

  As I get older, I like to hear stories from the elderly. I’m reading Irving Layton’s poems now over again, especially the poems he wrote toward the end of his life, and they’re deep and deeply instructive, not in a pedagogic way but in some kind of information for which the heart is hungry.

  JG: You say you hope to hear yourself at eighty-two. What do you hope to sound like at eighty-two?

  LC: Alberta Hunter.

  JG: [Laughs.] You’ve got your model. We’ve been talking about three acts. Is there ever a fourth act? You seem like you’ve got a lot going on still.

  LC: There might be a fourth act but we’ll leave that to the theologians.

  JG: Leonard Cohen, it’s a great pleasure to sit here with you. Thank you again for inviting us into your home.

  LC: You’re most welcome. Have you got enough?

  JG: I think so. Thank you very much.

  LC: Oh, most welcome. A pleasure. Did we get anything that’s interesting? Because if we didn’t let’s go on. We might get something interesting.

  JG: Well, you wouldn’t talk to me too much about death. I was trying to learn from that. I’ve always been te
rrified.

  LC: Really?

  JG: Yeah, once or twice a year I wake up in the middle of the night and freak out like I’m on this treadmill toward death and it’s something I can’t control and I don’t know how to deal with it.

  LC: If someone could guarantee me that the preliminaries will not be too disagreeable, I’d look forward to …

  JG: Really?

  LC: Yeah.

  “ALL I’VE GOT TO PUT IN A SONG IS MY OWN EXPERIENCE”

  DORIAN LYNSKEY | January 19, 2012, the Guardian (London)

  Another first-rate concert video, Songs from the Road, appeared on DVD and Blu-ray in 2010. Then, on January 31, 2012, Columbia released Old Ideas—only the twelfth studio album of Cohen’s nearly half-century recording career—which reached number three on the US Billboard charts, his highest ranking there ever. The album also climbed to number one in Canada—his first chart-topper in his native country—as well as in Belgium, the Czech Republic, Holland, Finland, Hungary, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, and Spain. It hit number two in Australia, Denmark, Ireland, Sweden, and the UK. Not bad for a seventy-seven-year-old singer.

  Shortly before the album’s release, London-based journalist Dorian Lynskey received the news he’d been anticipating for a long time: he’d be meeting with Leonard Cohen.

  “For many years, he had topped my wish list of interviewees,” Lynskey told me, “but it looked increasingly unlikely that I’d ever have the pleasure. Though he talked to the press at length to promote I’m Your Man and The Future, he returned years later, happier but considerably more press-shy. Perhaps he felt that by this age his reputation spoke for itself so there was no need to subject himself to another grilling.

  “In late 2011,” continued Lynskey, “I was told I could fly to Los Angeles to attend a playback of Old Ideas, where I might get a few minutes with Cohen, but that plan fell through. Then there was the prospect of Paris. Again, it was debatable whether I would get any time with him but Paris wasn’t so far away so it seemed worth a try and I could at least write a profile of him using existing sources and press conference quotes.

  “After the predictably witty and enjoyable Q&A session [with multiple journalists],” Lynskey recalled, “Cohen’s manager beckoned me to one side and said that because he was a Guardian reader, he had convinced Leonard to answer a few questions in private. I consulted my dream list of questions and pared them down to five as I was ushered into an opulent hotel suite and seated opposite Cohen. If he was reluctant to talk he hid it well. His courtesy was as old-fashioned and elegant as his suit, and his humor was as lively as I expected but clearly came from a calmer place than it had back when he was haunted by depression.

  “The timer on my voice recorder told me at the end that we’d talked for just six and a half minutes but he gave me more good quotes than most musicians can muster in an hour. As you would imagine from his lyrics, he’s not a man to waste words. I left the room not disappointed by the brevity of the encounter but elated that it had happened at all. A photograph of the two of us in conversation hangs on my office wall—a reminder of how thrilling and moving the job of sitting down with a favorite musician and asking a few questions can be.” —Ed.

  On Leonard Cohen’s grueling 1972 world tour, captured in Tony Palmer’s documentary Bird on a Wire, an interviewer asked the singer to define success. Cohen, who at thirty-seven knew a bit about failure and the kind of acclaim that doesn’t pay the bills, frowned at the question and replied: “Success is survival.”

  By that reckoning, Cohen has been far more of a success than he could have predicted. There have been reversals of fortune along the way but forty years later he enters an ornate room in Paris’s fabled Crillon Hotel to a warm breeze of applause. Looking like a grandfatherly mobster, he doffs his hat and smiles graciously, just as he did every night of the 2008-’10 world tour that represented a miraculous creative revival. The prickly, saturnine, dangerously funny character witnessed in Bird on a Wire has found a measure of calm and, as he often puts it, gratitude.

  These days, Cohen rations his one-on-one interviews with the utmost austerity, hence this press conference to promote his twelfth album, Old Ideas, a characteristically intimate reflection on love, death, suffering, and forgiveness. After the playback, he answers questions. He was always funnier than he was given credit for; now he has honed his deadpan to such perfection that every questioner becomes the straight man in a double act. Claudia from Portugal wants him to explain the humor behind his image as a lady’s man. “Well, for me to be a lady’s man at this point requires a great deal of humor,” he replies. Steve from Denmark wonders what Cohen will be in his next life. “I don’t really understand that process called reincarnation but if there is such a thing I’d like to come back as my daughter’s dog.” Erik, also from Denmark, asks whether he has come to terms with death. “I’ve come to the conclusion, reluctantly, that I am going to die,” he responds. “So naturally those questions arise and are addressed. But I like to do it with a beat.”

  Cohen falls into the odd category of underrated legend. To his fans, including many songwriters, he is about as good as it gets, but he has never enjoyed a hit single or (outside his native Canada and, for some reason, Norway) a platinum album. He has said that a certain image of him has been “put into the computer”: the womanizing poet who sings songs of “melancholy and despair” enjoyed by those who wish they could be (or be with) womanizing poets too. These days the database will also note that he wrote “Hallelujah,” a neglected song on a flop album that, via an unlikely alliance of Jeff Buckley, Shrek, and The X Factor, eventually became a kind of modern hymn.

  Its creator was born in Montreal on September 21, 1934, three months before Elvis Presley. When he first shopped his songs around New York, the ones that became 1967’s Songs of Leonard Cohen, agents responded: “Aren’t you a little old for this game?” By then he had already lost his father while very young, met Jack Kerouac, lived in a bohemian idyll on the Greek island of Hydra, visited Cuba during the Bay of Pigs invasion, and published two acclaimed novels and four volumes of poetry. In short, he had lived, and this gave his elaborate, enigmatic songs a grave authority to younger listeners who sensed that he was privy to mysteries that they could only guess at. He was neither the best singer nor the best musician nor the best-looking man around, but he had the charisma and the words, and the eroticized intelligence. Perhaps because his style owed more to French chansonniers and Jewish cantors than American folk, he was always more loved in Europe than North America. An early write-up in folk gazette Sing Out! remarked: “No comparison can be drawn between Leonard Cohen and any other phenomenon.”

  Under interrogation he would explain certain details in his songs, such as whether his friend’s wife Suzanne Vaillancourt [née Verdal —Ed.] really served him “tea and oranges” (kind of: she drank a brand of tea flavored with orange peel) or whether Janis Joplin really gave him “head on the unmade bed” in the Chelsea Hotel (yes, but he later regretted his ungallant candor), but never their meanings.

  He still resists explaining them and his relentlessly dry self-deprecation works as a very effective, very entertaining shield. Two nights after the Paris playback, Cohen appears at one in London, hosted by Jarvis Cocker. A fan since adolescence, Cocker keeps running up against Cohen’s reluctance to delve too deeply into the “sacred mechanics” of songwriting, lest they stop working. Songs come painfully slowly to him, and when he has a good idea he perseveres with it: “Hallelujah” took around two years and eighty potential verses. During the playback, a screen shows pages from his notebooks, full of scribbled amendments and discarded verses. “There are people who work out of a sense of great abundance,” he says. “I’d love to be one of them but I’m not. You just work with what you’ve got.”

  Cohen’s modest star began to wane with 1977’s raucous Death of a Ladies’ Man. In the studio a crazed Phil Spector held a gun to Cohen’s head and the producer handled the songs just as roughly. Columbia Re
cords mogul Walter Yetnikoff declined even to release 1984’s Various Positions (the one with “Hallelujah”), reportedly explaining: “Look, Leonard, we know you’re great, but we don’t know if you’re any good.” But his next album, I’m Your Man, was both. Armed with synthesizers, acrid wit, and a voice that now sounded like a seismic disturbance, he was reinvigo-rated just in time to enjoy an avalanche of praise from younger admirers including Nick Cave and the Pixies. But on songs such as “First We Take Manhattan,” “Everybody Knows,” and “The Future,” his depression took on geopolitical proportions. He told the journalist Mikal Gilmore: “There is no point in trying to forestall the apocalypse. The bomb has already gone off.” In Paris someone asks him what he thinks about the current economic crisis and he replies simply: “Everybody knows.”

  In 1993, resurgent and well-loved but in a dark frame of mind, Cohen disappeared from the public gaze. He spent the next six years [Actually, closer to five. —Ed.] in a monastery on Mount Baldy, California, studying with his old friend and Zen master Kyozan Joshu Sasaki, whom he calls Roshi and who is now a resilient one hundred and four years old. “This old teacher never speaks about religion,” Cohen tells the Paris audience. “There’s no dogma, there’s no prayerful worship, there’s no address to a deity. It’s just a commitment to living in a community.”

  When he came down from the mountain, his lifelong depression had finally lifted. “When I speak of depression,” he says carefully, “I speak of a clinical depression that is the background of your entire life, a background of anguish and anxiety, a sense that nothing goes well, that pleasure is unavailable and all your strategies collapse. I’m happy to report that, by imperceptible degrees and by the grace of good teachers and good luck, that depression slowly dissolved and has never returned with the same ferocity that prevailed for most of my life.” He thinks it might just be down to old age. “I read somewhere that as you grow older certain brain cells die that are associated with anxiety so it doesn’t really matter how much you apply yourself to the disciplines. You’re going to start feeling a lot better or a lot worse depending on the condition of your neurons.”