It seems so long ago,
none of us were strong;
Nancy wore green stockings
and she slept with everyone.
She never said she'd wait for us
although she was alone,
I think she fell in love for us
in nineteen sixty one,
in nineteen sixty one.

              Seems So Long Ago, Nancy
  Songs From a Room

Can. Pop: Leonard Cohen

by Jack Batten

When Leonard Cohen of Montreal stepped on stage at the Newport Folk Music Festival in August 1967, he was 32 and already secure in his reputation as a poet (The Spice Box Of Earth) and a novelist (Beautiful Losers, with over 500,000 copies sold around the world). He hardly needed another career, but he'd been strumming a guitar, jotting down ballads and singing them in private for years. Why not try his voice in public? He did, and on that debut day in Newport he scored a smash.

Later he recorded an album of his own songs for Columbia, and through 1969 it is still selling 3,000 copies a week. One song from the album, a gentle melancholy ballad, Suzanne, has assumed a permanent place in the songbook of classic North American folk ballads.

Cohen's appeal is at once both obvious and curious. His hushed voice, beside other, lustier singers, takes on a mildly monotonous and unmusical tinge; still, as Robert Christgau, the respected music critic for Esquire magazine, rightly points out, it is "the most miraculous vehicle for intimacy the new pop has produced." Cohen's song lyrics looked at on a printed page, read like conventional modern poetry, and yet, sung, they reveal themselves as compellingly rhythmic statements.

Cohen performs in public fairly infrequently, though he has released, late last spring, a second and equally successful recording of a batch of new songs. He moves around the world incessantly and nomadically, settling down for a few weeks at the Chelsea Hotel in New York, then lighting briefly with friends in Montreal, then heading off to Morocco. And he says that he has no intention of abandoning any one of his three vocations: "Every time I pick up a pen to write," he says, "I don't know if it's going to be a poem or a novel or another song."