Leonard Cohen:
Pondering His Past and 'The Future'
By Scott Crawford
I'm halfway through a telephone interview with Leonard Cohen, at a momentary loss for a question, when he says, with more inflection than normal, "A friend of mine is arranging flowers in my house now. It's very beautiful. One vase after another is emerging."
Since I have only a limited time to speak with the celebrated songwriter-singer-poet-novelist, I go on with my questions concerning his past work and his new album, The Future. Still, it comes as no surprise that he would just as soon talk about the flowers. Cohen is anything but self-important about his role as a songwriter.
"I never thought of myself as a musician or a writer. I just happened upon these instruments, and I've used them in the most direct and immediate way just to produce a setting for something I have to say. What I have to say is not based on any particular idea, but just on an urgency."
So says one of the most respected songwriters over the past three decades, on the eve of a European and American tour to promote his 10th album, his first in four years. You may know him from his most famous song, "Suzanne"; you may know his music from the Robert Altman film, "McCabe and Mrs. Miller"; or you may never have heard of him at all. Throughout what he describes as his "shabby career," he has had no strategy but to pursue honesty in his art.
In its latest incarnation, that art is a powerful combination of keyboards, strings and percussion behind Cohen's voice, which is about an octave lower and 20 grains rougher than it was on "Suzanne."
Cohen, 58, grew up in Montreal. He published his first book of poetry, Let Us Compare Mythologies, in 1956. It contained a mixture of the religious, sexual and violent imagery which would characterize much of his work.
Over the next 12 years, he would release four more books of poetry and two novels, establishing himself as one of the leading Canadian writers of his generation. His 1968 anthology, Selected Poems, won Canada's highest literary prize, the Governor General's Award. Around this time, though, to the chagrin of many of the literary cognoscenti coming to praise him, he began a career in music.
Several of the songs on his first album, Songs of Leonard Cohen, had appeared in his fourth poetry book, Parasites of Heaven. Concerning the transition from writing to singing, Cohen says, "No thought was given to it at all. I've always played guitar...and there was always an invisible guitar behind all my work, whether it was prose or poetry or song."
Still, his music is not a mere echo of his books. Cohen once commented that his 1984 Book of Mercy "isn't aimed the way a song is aimed." When asked how he manages to "aim" his songs, there is a long pause. Then, in his unmistakable baritone -- building in intensity, but not pitch nor volume -- he offers, "You know, you close one eye, squint with the other, look down the barrel and try to line one end up with the other."
In similarly creative ways, Cohen has often resisted over-analysis of his words. Throughout his career, he has displayed genius at pitting his work against his public persona. Let Us Compare Mythologies contained the lines, "I heard of a man / who says words so beautifully / that if he only speaks their name / women give themselves to him." Cohen tells that this particular poem will lead off a new written anthology soon to be published, and that "it was both a fear and an aspiration. There's always someone who is going to be speaking words more beautifully than you, so it's a very hazardous aspiration."
As he says the words, though, with his friend in the background arranging flowers in his Los Angeles home, he can take comfort that he has valiantly struggled on behalf of such beauty. In the past he has compared his work to an ice cube in a drink, which acts "to give comfort."
"I like the metaphor, and I'm not sure what it means, but it seems to be right, that I feel my work is like ice cubes in a drink. It just changes the drink. Even though the songs are dense and carefully worked out, it's very difficult to say exactly what they mean or stand for. But like the taste of cold water, it's refreshing."
Despite the obvious irony of attempting "to give comfort" by singing as he often does about chaos and despair, he maintains he has yet to go far enough in that direction. "I haven't exposed enough discomfort. I still feel the songs are hedging their bets and are alibis for the real thing. They've got to get clearer and more disclosing, more disclosing."
This unyielding drive for honesty is one way in which Cohen has separated himself from the wave of "poet"-singers who rode Bob Dylan's success into recording contracts in the 1960's and 1970's. Another is how he has remained surprisingly free of political pretense:
"I'm not impressed by my opinions at all. It is the kind of information that arises from the work of making the songs that interests me, and those are positions.
"I call them positions rather than opinions. Those are positions that I don't command and I don't use in arguments. They just are positions, they just are constellations of feelings and thoughts that as I say are often empty and just act as refreshment or oxygen, rather than slogans or manifestoes."
Since he generally declines to advertise any particular message in the songs, one takes notice when he does offer commentary: "For some time there have been recurring scenes or intimations that have run through the work, and one is that the social contract has deteriorated and that a catastrophe has already taken place on the interior level.
"That we are in the days of the Flood, and it is more appropriate for us to discern what is proper behavior in a flood. In other words, if you're holding onto your piece of orange crate and you pass somebody who's holding onto his broken spar, what is the appropriate salutation? Do you really want to say 'I'm a liberal' or 'I'm a conservative' -- 'I'm for abortion' or 'I'm against abortion?'
"Aren't these positions highly inappropriate to the situation? This notion of a catastrophic reality that we are all inhabiting is a recurring position through the songs of the past 10 or 15 years. And where they used to produce a lot of raised eyebrows 10 or 15 years ago, the eyebrows don't go up quite so high anymore."
Cohen speaks from and about this wasteland on the new album, explicitly in songs like the growling "The Future" and "Democracy," and also on an interpersonal level in the "Waiting for the Miracle." This latter song investigates the "new courtesy" that must arise with the realization of the catastrophe: "I think this is the contract, the possible contract, between lovers or partners in this shattered landscape.
"It's the other side of waiting. It is the acknowledgment of both parties that they are waiting for the miracle, but having acknowledged that, they are free from waiting for the miracle."
In the song, Cohen even issues a marriage proposal, which belies the familiar End of Love scenes between men and women in his older songs. "Well, [the marriage proposal] is the other side, when it's clear that the other [person] also has acknowledged...the extremely remote possibility of coherence that exists today...then it's possible to address that other [person] now."
This need for coherence, that people must accept the chaos that surrounds them in order to relate to each other, riddles the new album.
"But while one person hangs on to the notion that things are as they were before, that the landscape is intact, that the landmarks are still erect, that the lights are still shining, that the whole operation is business as usual -- then there can't really be any kind of declaration or proposal between people on either side of this divide."
While chaotic images are not new to Cohen's work, the finale of "The Future" is a new step for him. "Tacoma Trailer" is a rich instrumental, with a very tender piano lead backed up by deep strings and percussion. The musical content of Cohen's work has often been overlooked. When asked about his reaction to this bias, he says, "I'm very accustomed to it now. For a long time it was commonly understood that I only knew three chords, when I knew five! So I felt, yes, neglected."
At the same time, Cohen has always expressed appreciation for any audience his work finds. He duly acknowledges and makes peace with the power of the audience when he says poetry and songwriting are "verdicts rather than intentions." He elaborates:
"Well, the fact that the lines don't come to the end of the page does not guarantee the poem. And the fact that there is a highly urgent and irrefutable intention to be a poet also does not guarantee the poem. So there doesn't seem to be any way to guarantee the poem, it seems to be the verdict of the people who read it, and this itself is not secure because each generation changes that verdict on what is poetry."
So although Leonard Cohen has never felt he was pursing a particular career, he has always answered the "urgency" within him in a forum subject to the mercurial force of his audience.
In 1965, he proclaimed himself to be on a search for a "state of grace," a state of balance with the chaos that surrounded him. He says he has since taken the advice "that the search itself stands in the way of the experience," and consequently has called it off. It is not surprising that at the same time he is making statements within and without his music that embrace the chaos.
In closing, Cohen responds to the reading of a line from his 1978 book, Death of a Lady's Man: "Greater is he that answers Amen than he that says the blessing," explaining his sentiments:
"That's a quotation from...the section of the Talmud called Ethics of the Father. It's quite a wise and profound saying, and it has many resonances. That confession to yourself that you cannot innovate, but you might be able to affirm that which is worthwhile affirming, is a wonderful notion and the beginning of a kind of wisdom."
And as to whether, in his music, he is innovating or affirming he takes a long pause.
I wonder if he's deciding whether or not I deserve the real answer.
"If the affirmation is passionate and sincere, then it has the refreshment of innovation."
Amen.
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