It's coming through a hole in the air,
from those nights in Tiananmen Square.
It's coming from the feel
that it ain't exactly real,
or it's real but it ain't exactly there.
From the wars against disorder,
from the sirens night and day,
from the fires of the homeless,
from the ashes of the gay:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A...
                     
                                      Democracy
                                      The Future

The Goddess of
Democracy Statute

Cohen's Future Is Now

By Jim Slotek

Sure he's a hotel, but Leonard Cohen is a man of many other moods. For example, in one relatively playful hour with the press yesterday, he went from being a garbage bag to being Henri Matisse.

The widely-influential poet/legend/singer-songwriter showed up at a Sutton Place press conference ready to talk lyrics -- preferably the ones in his long-awaited new album The Future (due out next week).

Take the garbage bag line in the single, "Democracy".

"That's me!" he said cheerfully, then quoting "I'm stubborn as those garbage bags that Time cannot decay; I'm junk but I'm still holding up this little wild bouquet."

The song, about democracy's rebirth worldwide, also defends "pop culture and this so-called lowest common denominator in which I often find myself situated.

"I was somewhat appalled however," he went on, "to see the song identified (by reviewers) with the victory of the Democrats in the U.S." Not that he has anything against Bill Clinton, understand. It's just that "my songs usually last as long as a Volvo -- about 30 years. Even if this administration lasts two terms, well, I just don't like to be identified with transitory events."

Heck, it often takes him two presidential terms to write a song. "I was in Paris a few years ago with Bob Dylan and spent a pleasant afternoon of shop talk. He d done a song of mine in concert called "Hallelujah," and he asked how long it took to write. I lied because I was ashamed to tell him how long it really took. I said two years.

"And I praised a song of his from, I think, Oh Mercy (actually Infidels) called "I and I" and I asked how long it took to write it. And he said 15 minutes."

Oh yeah. Dylan. Seems Leonard was felt out about attending that Dylan tribute in New York a few weeks ago. He thinks he might have sabotaged his invite. "I had dinner with the president of Columbia Records in America and he mentioned something about it. And I said, humorously, 'Bob Dylan? He disrupted our society, the fabric of our very life! And my daughter wrote 'Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command' on the edge of one of her textbooks. Thanks a lot, Bob!'"

That said, Cohen stated, "Dylan's achievement is so monumental. He was the Picasso. (Pause) I'm the Matisse," he said, adding (as the laughter dissipated). "I love Matisse, but I'm in awe of Picasso."

If it all sounds jocular, there was the doomsday-ish title track to discuss. "I think I left my antidepressant pills at home," he says, when asked what inspired "The Future".

"I've been presenting this rap for 15 or 20 years -- the only difference is that now journalists' eyebrows don't go up as high as they used to. My position is a catastrophe has already happened. We are in the flood. Everybody knows that the landmarks are down and the lights have gone out. Everybody senses that something is deeply wrong in our society."

His mood still undampened, Cohen added: "But ('The Future') is set to a good hot little dance track. It's an apocalyptic dance, but nonetheless, you can move to it."

The album also includes a co-producer credit for current flame, actress and weekend-songwriter Rebecca DeMornay (on "Waiting For the Miracle"). "I'm very scrupulous in my credits," Cohen says. "My (producer) criterion is: 'That person without whom the song wouldn't exist'.

"I recorded versions of that song and rejected it many times over 10 years. Then, I cued the song for Rebecca one night and she said 'What's wrong with that?'

"And she booked a studio that night. And I went down with the synthesizer and sang it. We worked on the arrangement together. She has a very good ear."

Cohen Grows into The Future
Gracefully, and with a Grin

By Peter Howell

You might call Leonard Cohen the Grinning Reaper.

Pop music's monarch of bad moods was all smiles and self-effacing humor yesterday, as he met the press in a downtown hotel room to talk about The Future, his first album in four years.

Outside the skies seemed to be fighting over whether to snow or pour rain. Inside, Cohen was dressed in dark black and blue.

It seemed the perfect setting for the legendary Montreal singer-songwriter, whose songs on The Future -- in stores Tuesday -- are fairly bursting with vivid scenes of death, mayhem and impending apocalypse.

"Give me back my broken night / My secret room, my secret life / It's lonely here, there's no one left to torture..." he sings on the title track.

"That's a terrible song," Cohen, 58, said in mock apology, to loud laughs from the room. "It's a grim vision, I think I left my anti-depressant pills at home."

But don't be fooled, because Cohen couldn't be happier. Without consciously trying to do it, he has in his 36-year writing career -- as first poet, then novelist, then singer-songwriter -- evolved from being a cynical street hustler to becoming a world-weary-but-wise elder statesman.

He is growing older gracefully, the way a bluesmaster ages, which is something no one could have predicted from his early work. A couplet in his new song "Closing Time", reads: "I lift my glass to the Awful Truth/Which you can't reveal to the Ears of Youth."

The question was put to Cohen: What exactly is the Awful Truth?

"I can't tell you," he deadpanned. "You're too young."

The line brought a big laugh, and another smile from the Reaper.

"You know, it was a great thing to be able to say that to the young. You used to be told that: 'Wait until you grow up, you'll understand.' Well, it's true..."

But don't get out the rocking chair and wool cardigan for Cohen just yet. He looks about 10 years younger than he is, and his new love is thirtysomething Rebecca De Mornay, who is listed as one of several co-producers on the album and whom Cohen praised as a great musician.

While he admitted he finds much of today's pop music incomprehensible ("I find it getting more and more arcane, difficult to penetrate") he has no time for people of older generations who put down such new music forms as rap, which he enjoys listening to.

"I would affirm the position in the Talmud, which is that there is good wine in every generation," he said.

"I think the notion that some art form or some kind of excellence has disappeared from the world or evaporated is very much the indulgence of the old. There will always be people who arise to speak with music and authority."

He also disputes the poplar notion of striving for perfection in all things. Beneath all the gloom on The Future, there's a strong voice urging the listener to carry on, regardless.

"There is this alibi of perfection, I would say a tyranny of perfection, which a lot of people use to get off the hook... If you're hung up on the idea that the relationship has to be perfect, the job has to be perfect, the embrace has to be perfect, you'll find yourself moving swiftly into autism, into the closet world."

While Cohen is proud of his own songwriting abilities ("My songs usually last about as long as a Volvo -- about 30 years") he pointed to his friend Bob Dylan as the world's master tunesmith.

"He is the Picasso, I am the Matisse," he said, drawing more laughs. "I love Matisse, but I am in awe of Picasso."

Cohen’s secret for success is simple, but unfashionable: Work hard.

"I know the hustler position is very popular today: Get by with as little work as possible. I'm not going to dispute that -- maybe it works. It never worked for me, and I think it's a venomous philosophy.

"I'm very well rewarded for my work, and I have no complaints about anything to do with my career. But it's hard work, and I want it to remain hard work, and that's the way it is."

The Ever-Dapper Leonard

Leonard Cohen, the Montreal poet whose singing voice is the musical equivalent of rotgut whisky, has launched his 11th record album but he admits the song-writing process remains a mystery.

"If I knew where songs came from, I'd go there more often," said Cohen, whose slate of pop music credits includes such lyrics as "Suzanne," "Bird On the Wire," "First We Take Manhattan" and "Sisters of Mercy."

"Somehow, to arrive at a lyric, a piece of music, every line of which and every word of which you can defend, seems to take a tremendous amount of labor," he explained. "I don't know why that is.

"Some people write great tunes in the back of taxicabs but it takes me endless amounts of writing and rewriting to come up with something I can wrap my voice around," he said over his kitchen table.

The ever-dapper 58-year-old, who roams Montreal bistros when he's not on a concert tour or in a Los Angeles recording studio, has produced dozens of songs that are now lodged in music lovers' memory banks.

His hour-long new release, The Future, contains several tracks that could strengthen Cohen's list of highly personal credits -- if the tunes get exposure. Most of them are too protracted for radio airplay.

They're tightly written, even when they run more than seven minutes like the apocalyptic heart-grabber, "Democracy." The song is an all-embracing vision of the future with a recurring line, "Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.", that has nothing to do with president-elect Bill Clinton.

The title track isn't likely to find a permanent niche on the pop charts either, because of tough, sometimes scatological language and its dark mood that recalls the spirit of Old Testament prophets.

But then, that's just Leonard Cohen, isn't it?

"I think this album really cooks," said Cohen, who had planned to make The Future with the Montreal team that produced his last record, I'm Your Man. The 1988 album, with tunes like "Ain't No Cure For Love" and "Tower of Song," topped the charts in several European countries.

He went to Los Angeles to get Jennifer Warnes -- who did the 1986 songbook album, Famous Blue Raincoat -- on his new record as a backup vocalist for the tune, "Democracy", "and I ended up continuing to work on the album there. I didn't leave there for a couple of years."

Songwriting is a painful process, said Cohen, who doesn't really get a whole lot of fun out of forming a tour band, either. "But once you're on the road, it's like being in a motorcycle gang."

With the right mix of group members and "especially if there's enough red wine backstage, you've got a shot at it."

The longest cut is "Always," an exuberant testimonial to the Irving Berlin classic. The eight-minute version includes boisterous background noise from a Needles, California, bar where it was recorded.

"The only reason we kept this particular cut is it was the shortest one. The others went the full length of the tape," said Cohen, who now has an 18-year-old daughter, a 20-year-old son and a bottomless tank of joie-de-vivre.

"We couldn't stop playing."

But writing isn't like that.  It's hard, and it gets harder.

"It's like the heart itself. Nobody masters the heart. They'd like us to buy that wisdom when we're younger.

"Somehow you're going to master the art of love, or something. But the heart just goes on cooking like shish kebab, in your breath [breast?], in the splutter and the splatter. No one masters these.

"No one masters love and I don't seem to ever master the song. You have to struggle with it, like it was the first time you ever did it," he said. Then he switched off his serious mood.

"Next time I'm going to say it's a cinch."

The Loneliness of
The Long-Suffering Folkie

By Wayne Robins

On his new album, The Future (Columbia), Leonard Cohen views history's changing currents with more than a little bit of wariness. "Give me back the Berlin Wall / Give me Stalin and St. Paul / I've seen the future, brother: it is murder," he sings in the title song.

While others assumed that the end of the Cold War would signal the triumph of democracy in Eastern Europe, Cohen wasn't so sure. There is a song called "Democracy" in which he sees it coming, all right, "through a hole in the air / From those nights in Tiananmen Square...From the fires of the homeless / From the ashes of the gay: Democracy is coming / To the U.S.A."

"I began to write it when the events in Eastern Europe began to indicate there was a democratic resurrection, and the Berlin Wall came down and people were saying, democracy is coming to the East," Cohen said last week in a Midtown hotel suite. "I was one of those people who weren't entirely convinced that this was going to happen, and that it wasn't going to come about without a tremendous amount of suffering."

From the genocidal Civil War in what was once Yugoslavia to the neo-Nazi-tinged violence against foreigners in Germany, events have proven Cohen's suspicions to be regrettably on the mark. But mixed with caution is the Canadian writer and musician's optimism about America.

"I was not unaware of the ironic impact of saying, 'Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.,' but the song is affirmative," he said. "I just can't keep my tongue in my cheek that long. I'm Canadian, and we watch America very carefully. Everybody in the world watches America. And regardless of the skepticism and irony, [wiseguy] superiority that most intellectual circles have about America, it is acknowledged that this is where the experiment is taking place, where the races are confronting one another, where the rich and poor are confronting one another, where men and women, the classes...this is the great laboratory of democracy."

Cohen's interests are only partly external. The 58-year-old writer, who divides his time between Montreal and Los Angeles, wrestles with shifting emotional states in "Waiting For the Miracle." "You wouldn't like it baby, you wouldn't like it here / There's not much entertainment, and the critics are severe," he sings in his husky, seductive growl over a spare but lushly melodic musical track.

"[There are] people who are bitten by this particular bug, where meaning has evaporated and significance has dissolved," Cohen said. "Many people now confess to me that they inhabit this kind of landscape, where nothing has much taste. I mean, they're not selling 50 million Prozac pills a week for nothing; we are undergoing some kind of nervous breakdown. And it's from the point of that nervous breakdown and beyond that the song is written... I've been talking about this catastrophe, this interior catastrophe for a long time. I find a lot more hospitality to this idea now. So all the songs are about that position, but I think treated vigorously, and if I may say so, cheerfully."

The courtly Cohen is dressed so impeccably in a designer suit that he makes the typical GQ model look frumpy. Despite his calm bearing and consummate manners, he is no stranger to the apocalyptic emotional struggles his songs describe. The Future took four years to finish.

"I tend to get shattered as I bring a project to completion," Cohen said. "I have to discard versions of myself, and version of the songs, until I can get to a situation where I can defend every word, every line. But that place often involves a real shattering of equanimity, or of balance...I have to go to this naked and raw place. And it usually involves the breakdown of my personality, and I flip out...I can't go into crowds, I don't want to leave my house, I don't want to leave my room, I don't want to answer the phone, all my relationships collapse."

When the work is over, Cohen climbs back. "You try slowly to repair your relationships or support system, so you try the Prozac or Deseryl [another antidepressant], or you go to synagogue or the meditation hall, you go back to yoga or start running, whatever repair mode is accessible, you embrace."

Cohen has been the laureate of creative agony since the 1960s, when he was a celebrated triple threat as poet (The Spice-Box of Earth), novelist (Beautiful Losers and The Favorite Game) and singer-songwriter. His songs such as "Suzanne," "Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye" and "Bird on the Wire" are folk-pop standards.

Though his recording career went through something of an eclipse in the 1970s, he has come back strong in the last decade. Singer Jennifer Warnes had a surprise best-seller in 1986 with the critically acclaimed Famous Blue Raincoat, an album of Cohen material; the often wry songs of his 1988 album I'm Your Man helped generate a renaissance of Cohen's own career. Last year, a number of left-of-center rockers released a tribute album of Cohen songs called I'm Your Fan, with appearances by the Pixies, Nick Cave, House of Love, John Cale, and R.E.M., the latter of which contributed a stunning version of "First We Take Manhattan."

Cohen is philosophical about the attention he's receiving from a new generation. "You live with wild dreams of yourself and your own importance that are chronically disappointed, and when some of them aren't you're pleased," he said.

Cohen has never married ("I was able to find ideological justification for my fright, which was developed quite extensively in my young manhood," he said), but has two children. His daughter, 18, lives with him in Los Angeles; his son, 20, attends Syracuse University.

Back in the 1960s, Cohen's sensitive, passionate writing made him a figure of romantic obsession to young educated women, and he is still, to some, an intellectual sex symbol. In retrospect, he finds it amusing that he was the object of such lust.

"It's so curious, because I couldn't get a date," he said. "I couldn't find anybody to have dinner with. By the time that first record came out, which rescued me, I was already in such a shattered situation that I found myself living at the Henry Hudson Hotel on West 57th Street, going to the Morningstar Cafe on Eighth Avenue, trying to find some way to approach the waitress and ask her out. I would get letters of longing from around the world, and I would find myself walking the streets of New York at three in the morning, trying to strike up conversations with the women selling cigarettes in hotels. I think it's always like that. It's never delivered to you."

******

Retreat from Paradise -- The Greek Island of Hydra was the source of much of Leonard Cohen's creative inspiration in the 1960s. He doesn't go there much anymore.  "I stil lhave my house there that I bought for $1,500 in 1960, my kids still use it," he said.  "But it's a long way to go to find yourself not very far from the place you've left.  When I got there there was no electricity or running water, it was a very different kind of place. Not that I fault anyone for wanting to have linoleum and electricity as opposed to rough stone floors and chopping firewood.  But it's not that far away anymore."

Growing Old Passionately

By Alan Jackson

Leonard Cohen recently walked along a street crowded with college students while in the company of a writer friend, a man in his mid-seventies. "We passed a cafe, outside were a number of lovely young women, and suddenly he grabbed my arm and said with an urgency, 'Leonard, don't believe anyone who tells you you're not going to feel something about this matter when you're older.'"

A still handsome and charismatic 58 himself, Cohen smiles at the memory and notes wryly, "How you adjust yourself to that fact is something else, of course, and certainly we would hope that we civilise ourselves as we grow older. But the idea that your creative impetus is over by 30, that you immolate yourself on this pyre of energy and sexuality and can then go back to cleaning up and doing the dishes...it just ain't so. The fire continues to burn fiercely as you get older. It's passionate."

Although evidence of this enduring life-force is everywhere in his lyrics, non-devotees remain unfamiliar with Cohen the Sensualist. Instead there is the lingering stereotype of Cohen the Miserablist, a hangdog, beat-generation character forever intoning depressive lyrics in some bedsit twilight zone. But the man himself, soberly suited and hunched over strong coffee in a Mayfair hotel suite, proves a conversational delight: funny, sage, generous and warm.

No wonder, then, that he remains the muse of folk-rock princesses such as Suzanne Vega and Jennifer Warnes, whose superior LP of Cohen interpretations, Famous Blue Raincoat, released in 1986, helped to refocus attention on his then-neglected catalogue of songs. He deflects the idea that he is king of a court of gifted women admirers, however ("What a lovely idea..."), and will confirm reports that he is romantically involved with the actress Rebecca De Mornay, to whom his new LP, The Future, is dedicated, only in the most decorous of tones -- "There is a formal arrangement between us, yes."

Appropriately enough, the album -- his first for four years -- reads and sounds like the work of a man in love. Its concerns are more than merely romantic and interpersonal, however. "Democracy", the centrepiece, is a six-verse epic on the changing political mood of America, and was distilled from an original 80 verses. "It ain't coming to us European-style, a concentration camp behind the smile," says Cohen, snatching a discarded segment from memory. "It ain't coming from the East, with its temporary feast, as Count Dracula comes strolling down the aisle..."

Even in its truncated, recorded form, the song is an intense piece of work, and one which would have been seen as highly prophetic had it been released immediately after it was written in late 1988. At that point Cohen stopped work on the album to help nurse his teenage son back from a near-fatal road accident, then found it hard to re-engage with the project. "There was the normal, dismal process of assembling and rejecting, medication, heavy drinking, giving up smoking, changing girlfriends, y'know...all the stuff that goes into these things," he says of the ensuing hiatus.

Reading the lyrics of "Democracy" before playing the song, it is impossible not to be struck by Cohen's still-developing talent as a writer -- each word and line is perfectly weighted to give a momentum independent of any melody or arrangement, each image makes its point with astonishing precision. "You've no idea how that is music to my ears," says Cohen of the observation.

"I don't do anything else -- this is the front line for me. I try and keep my human associations going, but this is my pledge and my consecration. And though it's not necessary to talk about it in such high-falutin' terms, it's all that's going on for me. I'm a miniaturist. I'm trying to do what the microchip has done -- find a form in which deep experience can be manifested with brevity, so that a six-minute song can have the qualities of a novel, can really take you on a trip. And I think I'm on the edge of doing it."

The audience for Cohen's current experimentation may well be his biggest for 20 years. He admits that he felt shut out by the music industry between the years 1972 and 1985, and says that it felt like a near-religious experience when record companies began to return his calls. He is sincerely grateful too for all the signs of interest in his work by other artists, not only last year's hip I'm Your Fan, on which R.E.M., The Pixies, John Cale and Ian McCulloch covered classics from his songbook, but also such ponderous if well-meant tributes as Neil Diamond's doleful "Suzanne".

"Although I kept working, I was effectively out of the business and a kind of joke for quite a long time, so my critical faculties still go into immediate but grateful suspension the minute anyone covers one of my songs," he says. "It's only recently that things have turned around for me, so I'm still not interested if it's any good or not -- I'm just thrilled. But out of everything I would have to single out Jennifer's album. It's such a perfect and dedicated interpretation of my songs that there's nothing for me to do but tip my head in awe."

With perfect manners and a still-passionate spirit, Cohen is committed to continuing his quest to refine his songwriting skills further. "There is a wisdom appropriate to each age of man, and the early wisdoms all embrace notions of glorious finality, of burning beautifully -- not a bad idea.

"But after a certain point in life, the allure of all that fades," he says. "Now that I'm in advanced middle-age I've discovered a certain buoyancy. Life weighs heavily upon one's shoulders, but then you find that, with a certain kind of shrug, it will just lift off for a moment or two."

He drinks deeply from his coffee cup and then admonishes himself for such relative optimism. "Having spoken in such a cavalier fashion I will, of course, be smitten with an acute clinical depression very shortly," he says, with a short, sharp smile.

The Future is released tomorrow on Columbia, all formats.

Leonard Cohen,
the Lord Byron of Rock-and-Roll

By Karen Schoemer

Leonard Cohen has stopped to smell a rose. He was in the middle of a train of thought, sitting at a table in a piano lounge of a ritzy hotel in midtown Manhattan. But the lure of blood red petals, the possible prick of thorn and the whiff of romance have proven irresistible. He leans forward, bends the stem toward him and breathes. The fragile petals contrast sharply with the chiseled age of his face. The strong reds and greens accentuate his iron-gray hair and tailored charcoal suit.

Mr. Cohen is a man made for such poetic moments. Songwriter, icon of 60's folk, sometime novelist and perennial sage, he is in town to talk about his new album, The Future(Columbia), his first record since the critically lauded I'm Your Man in 1988. He says he enjoys doing interviews, but he says it with a bit more flourish: "I'm very happy to cooperate with the convention of promoting the record."

Mr. Cohen speaks like a poet. He culls a phrase like "blacken pages" where lesser mortals might simply say "write"; he has a store of aphorisms at his beck and call. "If I knew where songs came from I would go there more often," he says at one point. He is prone to quoting poetry at will, although the poet he most likes to quote is himself. "Sail on, sail on, oh mighty ship of state / To the shores of need, past the reefs of greed, through the squalls of hate," he rejoinders on the general topic of America's post-election political climate, borrowing lyrics from his song "Democracy."

And Mr. Cohen, who is 58 years old, has lived the life of a poet, full of deeds and escapades that qualify for the realm of the extraordinary. Born in Montreal, he played in a country band called the Buckskin Boys when he was a teen-ager. He was already embroiled in the bohemian life by the mid-50's, when he published his first volume of poetry, Let Us Compare Mythologies. He spent several years living on the Greek island Hydra, and in the mid-60's, he became part of the Greenwich village folk scene, hanging out with Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell and releasing dark and voluptuous albums like The Songs of Leonard Cohen and Songs From a Room. His lyrics chronicled affairs with women both mysterious and infamous. "Suzanne" contained the consummate line "You've touched her perfect body with your mind." "Chelsea Hotel No. 2," from the 1974 album New Skin For the Old Ceremony was about Janis Joplin.

He has even more anecdotes up his sleeve. Out of the blue, Mr. Cohen is liable to begin a tale by saying, "You know, I was a close friend of Michael X, who was the leader of the black Muslims in England..."

After New York, Mr. Cohen lived for a year on a 1,500-acre homestead in Franklin, Tenn., rented for $75 a month. "Ah, that was a very pleasant period of my life," he says wistfully. "There was a shack -- a well-equipped shack, but not much more than that -- beside a stream. There were peacocks and peahen. They used to come to my cabin every morning. I'd feed them. I had one of those centennial rifles that Remington put out, I think, in '67." He pauses. "When was this country founded? '76?" He seems somewhat dismayed that mathematics could interfere with a colorful detail of his story. "Anyway, I had some kind of centennial rifle. I would amuse myself by shooting icicles on the far side of the creek."

In the mid-70's, a volatile partnership with the legendary producer Phil Spector resulted in the album Death of a Ladies' Man. Since the 80's, Mr. Cohen has matured into a hero of the disaffected musical intelligentsia. Last year, younger fringe artists like Nick Cave, Lloyd Cole and Ian McCulloch contributed to a Leonard Cohen tribute album, I'm Your Fan, released by Atlantic. Like a handful of his peers -- Tom Waits, Marianne Faithful -- Mr. Cohen is revered to a level that renders his modest commercial success irrelevant. He is a singular entity: a kind of rock-and-roll Lord Byron, a cultural scholar in the unlikely medium of pop.

Mr. Cohen has been working consistently on The Future since the release of I'm Your Man. "Some people write good songs in the back of taxicabs," he remarks. "I wish I were in that tribe." Throughout the album, the time he spent is evident. Never has Mr. Cohen's low, groaning voice sounded quite so world-weary and edged with disgust. Never has his outlook seemed quite so grim. The song "The Future" pledges that whatever lies ahead is unquestionably uglier than the dismal state of things today; "Democracy" is an iconoclast's lament on contemporary politics.

These songs, Mr. Cohen says, were "occasioned by the collapse of the Berlin wall, which all my friends rejoiced about. I was the only dour person at the party, saying, 'This isn't that good news. This is going to produce a great deal of suffering. You're going to settle for the Berlin wall when you see what's coming next.'" The tension in his voice rises. "You're going to settle for a hole in the ozone layer. You'll settle for crack. You'll settle for social unrest. You'll settle for the L.A. riots. This is kindergarten stuff compared to the homicidal impulse that is developing in every breast!"

Mr. Cohen stops short, catching himself being carried away on the waves of despair. "Oh, forgive me for going on like that," he sighs. "I have these gloomy visions of things."

He finds the subject of America's new President somewhat more calming. "I'm a Canadian," he says, "and Canadians are educated to watch America very closely -- just as women are educated to watch men very closely -- because what America does affects us. My song 'Democracy,' which was begun in '88 or '89, was certainly not designed as promotional material for the Democratic Party. I believe my songs last as long as the Volvo, which is about 30 years. So I don't want to identify this song with this Administration, which may last eight years. I've still got 22 years.

"But of course, as a Canadian, I wish the Administration well," he continues. "I can summon many blessings for the man, and especially for his wife, whom I find immensely attractive."

As the evening wears on, the lights in the hotel lounge are brought down a notch, and Mr. Cohen's reflection turns inward. "I find that more and more I inhabit the front line of my own life, with missiles and shrapnel flying through the air," he says. "You really don't have the opportunity to develop much of a strategy about things. Certainly not about your career, and not even about your loves or dreams. So there's a certain urgency to the moment, and how to negotiate from one instance to the next."

A blonde woman in a close-fitting gold dress sits down at the piano and begins to sing. "They say that falling in love is wonderful / It's wonderful, so they say..." Mr. Cohen falls silent, listening. Gently and abstractly, he fingers the rose.