Leonard Cohen, who has written some of the most intimate and absorbing love songs of the modern pop era, has come down from the mountain.
After five years of living a spartan lifestyle at a Zen center near the resort village of Mount Baldy, Cohen has traded his modest robes for the finely tailored suits that were once his trademark. More important, he has recorded his first group of new songs in nine years.
In the album "Ten New Songs," due in stores Tuesday from Columbia Records, Cohen again displays the insight and grace that have been his forte since the '60s, when he gave us such hauntingly personal songs as "Bird on a Wire" and "Suzanne."
One of the most affecting of the new tunes, "The Land of Plenty," is an especially heartfelt expression from someone trying to find the inner strength to be the person of his ideals. It's a look at brotherhood and compassion in a society blinded by selfishness and greed.
In an interview at his Los Angeles home before the Sept. 11 attacks, Cohen, 67, spoke about his return to the pop world and the challenge of songwriting.
Question: What led you to leave the Zen center after all these years?
Answer: It wasn't anything dramatic, certainly not a renunciation or anything. The reason I decided to spend time there was I was approaching 60 after my last tour [in 1993] and my old friend and teacher, Roshi, was approaching 90, so I wanted to spend some time with him. It wasn't a religious decision. I have a perfectly good religion. I just wanted to intensify our association, and it was a very good, enriching experience.
But then it seemed like it was time to address other things in my life. I wanted to come down and see the world again and spend time with my kids [a son, Adam, who is a singer-songwriter, and a daughter, Lorca, who owns a furniture boutique].
Q: Did you also want to get back to music? It must be hard to step away so long from something that was such a major part of your life.
A: I wasn't cut off from music at the center. I had a little synthesizer in my room and I probably wrote some 250 poems. I had even started recording some of these tunes, but the album really got going when I bumped into [songwriter-producer] Sharon Robinson once I got back here. I had written "Hallelujah" with her and I showed her some of the new lyrics and asked her to see what [music] she could come up with. I ended up liking her treatments better than some of the ones I had, so we decided to collaborate on the entire album.
Q: What about "The Land of Plenty"? You're better known for stories of the heart than social commentary.
A: I don't think we can look at the world without feeling a sense of distress at the vast suffering we see around us, and I wanted to comment on that. But I didn't want to produce a slogan. I wanted to produce something that was closer to the heart and convey the sense of impotence we have about dealing with it.
Q: After all these years, is writing easier or more difficult for you?
A: In a way I think it's easier because there are less personal distractions, those pedestrian demons that enter your life when you are young. I believe you get a chance to think about things more deeply now and can dedicate yourself to the task at hand. I think the training with Roshi helped with that also.
Q: Your music has always tended to be melancholy and focused on open wounds, but you seem to be at a point in your life where you are very comfortable emotionally. Was your personal life as stark as the songs suggested over the years?
A: I have gone through periods of depression. That's certainly not unique. There were the natural anxieties and ambiguities that accompany youth and making a living in this racket.
But for many years it hasn't been the determining component in my life. I read somewhere that in some cases the brain cells connected with anxiety begin to die as you get older, so that may have contributed to it. [Laughs.] Or it may be the Zen training. I don't know. I do think I've been lucky to survive life's adventure for so long. There are so many of my friends who haven't.
I think one of the reasons one plunges into work is because one's other activities--including relationships--are so chaotic, so unsuccessful, so disastrous. At work, at least you have the illusion that rewards will yield to a great effort. Even if you put everything into a relationship, you can't always guarantee what will develop.
I remember something Tennessee Williams said about life being a fairly well-written play except for the third act. By this point in my life, we have the experience of the first two acts, but we haven't really encountered what is in store in the third.
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