An Interview with Leonard Cohen

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SHELAGH ROGERS

Brick 77

Posted on November 14, 2016

I have known of Leonard Cohen since I was twelve. My babysitter used to play the album Songs of Leonard Cohen on our hi-fi, over and over again. I didn’t understand the songs, but I sang along. I didn’t know what love was, but his songs pointed the way. “So Long, Marianne,” “Hey, That’s No Way To Say Goodbye,” “Suzanne” . . . the songs sent me to his poetry. I bought Selected Poems of Leonard Cohen and memorized his words. His poems are vivid on the page, but spellbinding when you hear him read them. That voice.

      Leonard Cohen was born in Montreal in 1934, and lived in that city until the mid-fifties. He first made his mark as a poet, with the collections Let Us Compare Mythologies (1956) and Spice-Box of Earth (1961), the latter of which brought him international acclaim. He moved to Hydra, Greece, in 1960 and during a seven-year period there, published another collection of poetry, Flowers for Hitler (1964), and the novels The Favorite Game (1963) and Beautiful Losers (1966). It was not until he was thirty-three, however, that Cohen transformed into a singer/songwriter. Judy Collins recorded his song “Suzanne” in 1966 for her album In My Life, and when the album went gold in 1967, she encouraged Cohen to make the transition to public performer. She brought him to sing live for the first time at a Vietnam protest concert on April 30, 1967, and although Cohen, too shy to continue, walked off the stage halfway through “Suzanne,” Collins and the audience convinced him to return, and he completed the performance to raucous applause. That year he released his first album, The Songs of Leonard Cohen. In the nearly thirty years since his debut as a troubadour, Cohen has recorded thirteen other albums, including Songs of Love and Hate (1971), Death of a Ladies’ Man (1977), Various Positions (1984), and Ten New Songs (2001), and he collaborated with Anjani Thomas on her album Blue Alert, which will be released this year. McClelland & Stewart is also publishing a new collection of his poetry and drawings this spring, entitled Book of Longing.

Leonard Cohen and Perla Batalla

Leonard Cohen is John Donne to Bob Dylan's Shakespeare

by Edward Docx

Cohen, like Donne, had that rare ability to render the concerns of the mind, body and spirit with equal fidelity in his work

Saturday 19 November 2016 09.00 GMT

T

he first time I thought consciously about Leonard Cohen’s death was in 2002. I was listening to his 2001 album Ten New Songs while crawling my way through the writing of a novel in which each chapter took its title from one of the poems in The Songs and Sonnets of John Donne. I remember hearing the following lines, among the hundreds of Cohen’s that I’ve come to revere: “So come, my friends, be not afraid/ We are so lightly here/ It is in love that we are made/ In love we disappear.”

In that moment, a network of biographical and thematic connections between Donne and Cohen suddenly rose up in my mind. No man is an island. Death be not proud. The bearable and the unbearable lightness of our being. The way that love makes us and remakes us. The secular sacrament of our lovemaking itself. The lover as saint. The high seriousness of love and death so entwined. The abiding generosity towards their listeners. Can there be two poets who credit their audience with more intelligence than Donne and Cohen? I wrote a few notes about the idea, the last line of which I underlined: Leonard Cohen is John Donne to Bob Dylan’s Shakespeare.

Leonard Cohen_
Madrid, 2012
Photo by Bernardo Pérez

The pair have long been linked in my mind. And ever since I was a teenager, Dylan and Cohen have been an essential gloss on my experience, a significant part of my feeling for human iniquity and transcendence. This is to do with their eloquence, of course, their revivifying poetic intelligence, their seasoned wit. But also the sensibility they share – that their affirmations are narrowly won after much hand-to-hand fighting with discouragement in both the private and the public realms. “The world’s whole sap is sunk” – so Donne says – but intimately to know this and then to write and sing about such a defeat is somehow to seize something back. “I’m junk,” Cohen sings, “but I’m still holding up this little wild bouquet.” The fallen state is the only state and, it turns out, the holiest, most resonant and most truthful.

And yet while Dylan’s lyrical gift is wild, copious, and immoderate, Cohen’s is precise, supplicatory and cloistral. Where Dylan rambunctiously inhabits the multifarious world, Cohen more often circles the many mortal contrarieties that lie between the lovers’ bed and the altar – regularly, for him, the same thing. Where Dylan’s genius often has a dizzying and effortless quality, Cohen’s feels mesmerisingly measured. You have your Dylan days and your Cohen days, and they’re very different.

Like Donne, Cohen began as the great lover-poet anatomist of the heart and ended as the priestly-poetical anatomist of the soul. And, of course, as with Donne, when you start to look a little closer, you find that the amorous and the ascetic, the profane and the sacred, Eros and Thanatos have been intimately bound throughout. “I’ve heard the soul unfolds,” Cohen sings, “In the chambers of its longing.”

There’s also consonance in the way the verse itself is made. Like Donne, Cohen has that rare ability to render the concerns of the mind, body and spirit with equal fidelity in a single work, or sometimes in a single line, and none at the expense of the other. His writing has that same feeling of being wrought to its purpose by a fierce animus – “there’s a blaze of light in every word” – of being vividly alive with the intelligent energy of human paradox: assertions are instantly countered, beliefs undermined, theses overtaken by antitheses, the profound and serious valiantly foregrounded only to disappear through trapdoors of irony, wit and self-mockery. Thus, the drama of Cohen’s intelligence, as with Donne’s, somehow becomes the drama of every human intelligence; for we are all of us busy deep down with the back and forth between love and death; between the redemptions of human intimacy and our need for a redeemer God to rescue us from transience. A God, by the way, in whom Cohen and Donne have a great deal of trouble believing. “Thou hast made me, and shall thy work decay?” (Donne). “A million candles burning for the love that never came” (Cohen). Their holy verses are not so much about the divine as they are about humankind’s search for the divine; for both of them, God is the Great Absentee who nonetheless presents his long list of demands.

Perhaps some of these correspondences can be attributed to a surprising similarity in certain aspects of their biographies. Donne was born in 1572 into an eminent Catholic family when persecution was the Catholic birth-right. On his mother’s side, he was descended from Sir Thomas More and his uncle was the head of the secret Jesuit mission to England. Cohen was born in 1934 into an eminent Jewish family in Montreal. On his mother’s side he was descended from a rabbi and Talmudic writer. The boyhood of both was lived with close awareness of brutal religious oppression: for Cohen elsewhere, in Europe, but terrifyingly extensive; for Donne right there in his own family and terrifyingly particular. Both came from families that prized intelligence, both knew the Bible intimately and both sought salve for their wounds – maybe even salvation in their relationships with women.

It is this fusing of the sacred and the sensual that they share most of all. Think of the end of Donne’s “Holy Sonnet 14” where the speaker startingly addresses God as if wishing for a violent lover: “Take me to you, imprison me, for I, / Except you enthrall me, never shall be free, / Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.” Think of the couplet in the fifth verse of Cohen’s “Hallelujah” which seems, on first hearing, to contain a non sequitur: “Maybe there’s a God above/ As for me all I’ve ever learned from Love …” Until, that is, you realise that for Cohen, love and God are one and the same.

The last recorded words on the last song of Cohen’s last album – released only last month – seem to me to be the ultimate distillation of this mingling. The human lover and the love of a difficult God addressed together – in one final, beautiful breath of unrequitable longing: “I wish there was a treaty we could sign/ Between your love and mine.”

THE GUARDIAN

Stars and world leaders pay tribute to Leonard Cohen

Stars and world leaders 

pay tribute to Leonard Cohen

Singers from Bob Dylan to Elton John led tributes to the musician, who died at his LA home on Thursday

Hannah Ellis-Petersen
Friday 11 November 2016 18.42 GMT

In a year in which so many musical greats have passed away, few have been so honoured in their own words as Leonard Cohen. News of the singer’s death, at his home in LA on Thursday, prompted an outpouring of tributes from world leaders, musicians, poets and writers who often turned to Cohen’s lyrics to express their sadness.

The 82-year-old had alluded to his own death in a recent and wide-ranging interview with the New Yorker editor, David Remnick, in which he talked about his unfinished poems and lyrics.

“I am ready to die,” he said. “I hope it’s not too uncomfortable. That’s about it for me.”

The singer-songwriter later said he had been exaggerating. “I’ve always been into self-dramatisation. I intend to live forever.”

Some of the world’s biggest artist count the Canadian-born Cohen, who was a poet and novelist as well as a musician, among their influences. He was a songwriting peer and friend of Bob Dylan, who told the New Yorker: “When people talk about Leonard, they fail to mention his melodies, which to me, along with his lyrics, are his greatest genius ... As far as I know, no one else comes close to this in modern music.”

Cohen’s son Adam released a brief statement on Friday to say his father had passed away peacefully and in the knowledge that with his latest album, You Want it Darker, Cohen had completed “one of his greatest records”.

•  The Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, said he had “managed to reach the highest of artistic achievement. His ability to conjure the vast array of human emotion made him one of the most influential and enduring musicians ever.”
• Elton John called Cohen “unique – a giant of a man and a brilliant songwriter. Irreplaceable. Loved him and his wonderful music.”
•  Nick Cave: “For many of us Leonard Cohen was the greatest songwriter of them all. Utterly unique and impossible to imitate no matter how hard we tried. He will be deeply missed by so many.”
• Robert Cory, Cohen’s producer: “Unmatched in his creativity, insight and crippling candour, Leonard Cohen was a true visionary whose voice will be sorely missed. I was blessed to call him a friend, and for me to serve that bold artistic spirit firsthand was a privilege and great gift. He leaves behind a legacy of work that will bring insight, inspiration and healing for generations to come.”
•  Sylvie Simmons, Cohen’s biographer: “In this year of losses, so many losses, in this black week for the world, this tops them all … he went out in a blaze of glory. Died with his boots on – or his suit on – having delivered a masterpiece before he left. You Want it Darker is one of his richest, deepest and most beautiful albums in a lifetime of rich, deep and beautiful work. So many stories about musicians and poets have an unhappy ending but not Leonard. He was ready, and he didn’t linger once his work was done. He knew darkness, looked right into its eyes, could even see the funny side.”
•  Clive Davis: “Leonard Cohen was truly a master songwriter. No one sounded like him either vocally or lyrically. He penetrated your soul with his haunting voice and his piercing words. Leonard was absolutely one-of-a-kind, a poet and an artist who put you under his spell time and time again.”
•  John Cale: “Very upsetting news to learn of Leonard’s passing. The world has one less gentle soul tonight. We thank you for the multitude of gifts you left us.”
•  Beck: “So long Leonard, thank you for your words, your songs, your life – a gentleman, a master, a hero – thank you for looking so deeply, for sharing your time, giving us your finely wrought diamonds, for lighting the dark corners where the soul lives, for translating the otherness we recognise but fail to express, tonight we celebrate you and send you our gratitude.”
•  Simon Le Bon: “Spent a good deal of my early teens, just me & #LeonardCohenalone together in my suburban bedroom. It was a gentle & fulfilling love affair.”
•  Cat Stevens: “The fragileness of life has been once again exposed with the passing on of Leonard Cohen. May God grant him peace … forever.”
•  Russell Crowe: “Dear Leonard Cohen, thanks for the quiet nights, the reflection, the perspective, the wry smiles and the truth.”
• Bianca Jagger: “In this dark moment after the US election let’s remember Leonard Cohen ‘There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.’”
• Boy George: “We have lost a great artist, poet and poignant force of energy. R.I.P Leonard Cohen.”

EL PAÍS

Leonard Cohen, legendary singer-songwriter, dies aged 82

Leonard Cohen

Leonard Cohen, legendary singer-songwriter, dies aged 82

‘We have lost one of music’s most revered and prolific visionaries,’ says announcement of the Canadian singer’s death on his Facebook page

Leonard Cohen, the legendary singer-songwriter whose work inspired generations, has died at the age of 82.

A post to his official Facebook page on Thursday 10 November announced the musician’s passing in Los Angeles.

“It is with profound sorrow we report that legendary poet, songwriter and artist, Leonard Cohen has passed away. We have lost one of music’s most revered and prolific visionaries,” the post said.

My favourite album / Songs of Leonard Cohen by Leonard Cohen

My favourite album: Songs of Leonard Cohen by Leonard Cohen

Our writers are picking their favourite albums. Here, Andrew Pulver explains how he fell for the dark charms of a figure who used to be a joke to him

Andrew Pulver
Thursday 6 October 2011 15.59 BST

I

'd be lying if I said Leonard Cohen's records soundtracked my adolescence, or comforted me during student awkwardness. The sad truth is, as I suspect it was for most gormless teenagers growing up in 80s suburban Britain on a steady diet of post-punk, Berlin-era Bowie, and the Velvet Underground, Cohen was a joke.

Blame, if you will, The Young Ones. Looking back, I don't quite understand how, but the show was an early-80s religion, and their running gags at Cohen's expense. Consequently, Cohen's actual music was a sealed book to me; if I ever thought about it, I suppose I assumed he was a hippy, like Neil. File under lame.

Leonard Cohen wore earplugs to a Dylan show?

Leonard Cohen wore earplugs 

to a Dylan show?

Brian D. Johnson

June 12, 2008

Here’s the full transcript of my backstage interview with Leonard Cohen last week at Hamilton Place. Watch the video here.

Q: Tell me about the hat.

A: I’ve been wearing a fedora for a long, long time. This particular hat is from a little hat store just opposite my daughter’s antique store in Los Angeles. They have a very good hat store there.

Q: You never used to perform with a hat.

A: I’ve never performed with a hat. But I always wore a hat. I started wearing the hat more and more, independent of these preparations. I stopped wearing a fedora after 9/11. I didn’t think it was appropriate to wear this kind of hat, and I switched to a cap.

Leonard Cohen / Too Young to Die, Too Old to Worry

Leonard Cohen

Leonard Cohen

Too Young to Die, Too Old to Worry

By JASON KARLAWISH


SEPT. 20, 2014

hoto

Leonard Cohen, 1988. 

Last year he announced he would start smoking again 

when he turned 80.

CreditAlfred Steffen/Corbis Outline

THIS weekend, the singer and songwriter Leonard Cohen is celebrating his 80th birthday — with a cigarette. Last year he announced that he would resume smoking when he turned 80. “It’s the right age to recommence,” he explained.

At any age, taking up smoking is not sensible. Both the smoker and those who breathe his secondhand smoke can suffer not only long-term but acute health problems, including infections and asthma. And yet, Mr. Cohen’s plan presents a provocative question: When should we set aside a life lived for the future and, instead, embrace the pleasures of the present?

At the start of the 20th century, only one-half of 1 percent of the United States population was over the age of 80. Industrialized nations were preoccupied with infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and polio. Many of the common diseases of aging, such as osteoporosis, were not even thought of as diseases.

Today, 3.6 percent of the population is over 80, and life is heavily prescribed not only with the behaviors we should avoid, but the medications we ought to take. More than half of adults age 65 and older are taking five or more prescription medications, over-the-counter medications or dietary supplements, many of them designed not to treat acute suffering, but instead, to reduce the chances of future suffering. Stroke, heart attacks, heart failure, kidney failure, hip fracture — the list is long, and with the United States Department of Health and Human Services’ plan to prevent Alzheimer’s disease by 2025, it grows ever more ambitious.

Aging in the 21st century is all about risk and its reduction. Insurers reward customers for regular attendance at a gym or punish them if they smoke. Physicians are warned by pharmaceutical companies that even after they have prescribed drugs to reduce their patients’ risk of heart disease, a “residual risk” remains — more drugs are often prescribed. One fitness product tagline captures the zeitgeist: “Your health account is your wealth account! Long live living long!”

But when is it time to stop saving and spend some of our principal? If you thought you were going to die soon, you just might light up, as well as stop taking your daily aspirin, statin and blood pressure pill. You would spend more time and money on present pleasures, like a dinner out with friends, than on future anxieties.

When it comes to prevention, there can be too much of a good thing. Groups like the United States Preventive Services Task Force regularly review the evidence that supports prevention guidelines, and find that after certain ages, the benefits of prevention are not worth the risks and hassles of testing, surgeries and medications. Recent guidelines for cholesterol treatment from the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association, for example, set 79 years as the upper limit for calculating the 10-year risk of developing or dying from heart attack, stroke or heart disease. They also suggest that, after 75, it may not be beneficial for a person without heart disease to start taking statins. But that doesn’t mean everyone follows this advice.

Besides, isn’t 75 the new 65? Age seems a blunt criterion to decide when to stop. Is Mr. Cohen at 80 really 80? In his mid-70s, he maintained a rigorous touring schedule, often skipping off the stage. Maybe 80 is too young for him to start smoking again.

Advances in the science of forecasting are held out as the answers to these questions. Physician researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, and at Harvard, have developed ePrognosis, a website that collates 19 risk calculators that an older adult can use to calculate her likelihood of dying in the next six months to 10 years. The developers of ePrognosis report that frail older adults want to know their life expectancy so they can not only plan their health care but also make financial choices, such as giving away some of their savings.

Even more revolutionary is RealAge, a product of Sharecare Inc. that has quantified our impression that as we age, some of us are really older, while others are younger than the count of their years. It uses an algorithm that assesses a variety of habits and medical data to calculate how old you “really” are.

Websites like these can be a convenient vehicle to disseminate information (and marketing materials) to patients. But complex actuarial data — including its uncertainties and limitations — is best conveyed during a face-to-face, doctor-patient conversation.

We are becoming a nation of planners living quantified lives. But life accumulates competing risks. By preventing heart disease and cancer, we live longer and so increase our risk of suffering cognitive losses so disabling that our caregivers then have to decide not just how, but how long, we will live. The bioethicist Dena Davis has argued that emerging biomarkers that may someday predict whether one is developing the earliest pathology of Alzheimer’s disease (like brain amyloid, measured with a PET scan) are an opportunity for people to schedule their suicide. Or at least start smoking.

Our culture of aging is one of extremes. You are either healthy and executing vigorous efforts to build your health account, or you are dying. And yet, as we start to “ache in the places where [we] used to play,” as one of Mr. Cohen’s songs puts it, we want to focus on the present. Many of my older patients and their caregivers complain that they spend their days going from one doctor visit to the next, and data from the National Health Interview Survey suggests one reason. Among older adults whose nine-year mortality risk is 75 percent or greater, from one-third to as many as one-half are still receiving cancer-screening tests that are no longer recommended.

I don’t plan to celebrate my 80th birthday with a cigarette or a colonoscopy, and I don’t want my aging experience reduced to an online, actuarial accounting exercise. I recently gave a talk about Alzheimer’s disease to a community group. During the question and answer session, one man exclaimed, “Why doesn’t Medicare pay us all to have dinner and two glasses of wine once a week with friends?” What he was getting at is that we desire not simply to pursue life, but happiness, and that medicine is important, but it’s not the only means to this happiness. A national investment in communities and services that improve the quality of our aging lives might help us to achieve this. Perhaps, instead of Death Panels, we can start talking about Pleasure Panels.

THE NEW YORK TIMES

DE OTROS MUNDOS
Leonard Cohen / Todo empezó en esta tierra
Leonard Cohen / En el invierno de 1969
Leonard Cohen se despide de Marianne
Leonard Cohen / Hasta siempre Marianne
Leonard Cohen / La razón por la que escribo
Hydra, la isla de Leonard Cohen
Nueve canciones de Leonard Cohen / Una carrera repleta de joyas
Leonard Cohen vuelve a fumar
Leonard Cohen / Maldiciones envenenadas de arcoíris
Leonard Cohen / Elegante y libre


DRAGON
So long, Marianne / Leonard Cohen writes to muse just before her death
So long, Marianne./ Leonard Cohen's final letter to his muse
Leonard Cohen / 10 of the best
Leonard Cohen / Too Young to Die, Too Old to Worry
Leonard Cohen wore earplugs to a Dylan show?
My favourite album / Songs of Leonard Cohen by Leonard Cohen
Leonard Cohen, legendary singer-songwriter, dies aged 82
Leonard Cohen / 10 of his best songs

PESSOA
Leonard Cohen se despede de Marianne
Leonard Cohen / “Se soubesse de onde saem as boas canções, iria até lá mais vezes”

Leonard Cohen / 10 of the best

Leonard Cohen

Leonard Cohen: 10 of the best

From his 1967 debut album to last year’s Popular Problems, here’s the pick of the great man’s career. Think we’ve missed out on something great? Let us know in the comments

1 Suzanne

Too clever for his own good, and certainly far too clever for anybody else’s: that was the sniffy verdict on Leonard Cohen’s brief stint as a highfalutin novelist. He was already an acclaimed poet, but his first piece of long-form fiction, 1963’s The Favourite Game, made little impact. And 1966’s follow-up Beautiful Losers was both puzzling, with its complex symbolism, and shocking, with its lewd depictions of grubby sex. Songs, though, made all the difference. His debut LP, Songs of Leonard Cohen, reinvented him as a devilish bard whose modern hymns of love, lust, faith and betrayal had far more life than they’d ever have as just ink on a page. Suzanne was first published as a poem in 1966, but Cohen’s recorded version, with its soft acoustic guitar cushioning his warm, clipped voice, is far more special. It’s a love song, but love with limits: his muse Suzanne Verdal was dating someone else, and so all he has to feed off are platonic scraps. Her habit of feeding him “tea and oranges that come all the way from China”, then, is mythologised into a spiritual ritual; their strolls near the Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours chapel in Montréal are divine pilgrimages that link them to the old sailors who’d be blessed at the church before braving the sea. And although it’s all a beautiful lie, it’s more beautiful than the truth. “You touched her perfect body with your mind,” sighs Cohen, and though there’s longing in his voice there’s contentment too – because he knows that consummating the relationship would just stain its purity.

Leonard Cohen and Marianne Ihlen

So long, Marianne. Leonard Cohen's final letter to his muse

Wednesday August 03, 2016

The woman who was Leonard Cohen's muse and inspired songs like "Bird on a Wire" and "So Long, Marianne" has died. Marianne Ihlen passed away on July 29th. She was 81 years old. 

She and Cohen were lovers in the 1960s after they met in Greece. When Cohen learned Ihlen's health was deteriorating, he immediately penned her a letter. Her close friend Jan Christian Mollestad, a documentary filmmaker, read Cohen's letter to her before she died. 

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Ihlen's funeral is planned for Friday in Oslo.

As It Happens guest host Rosemary Barton spoke to Mollestad in Norway.

"When I read the lines 'stretch out your hand,' she stretched out her hand"- Jan Christian Mollestad

Leonard Cohen and Marianne Ihlen

Rosemary Barton: We're very sorry to hear about the death of Marianne. How did you meet her?

Jan Christian Mollestad: I met her while I was making a documentary film about her first husband, who was a very famous Norwegian writer.  We went to Hydra, the same place they went on their first big trip but as we got closer to Hydra, more and more of the talk was about Leonard because her husband deserted her right after the birth of their son.

Leonard Cohen wrote So Long, Marianne about Marianne Ihlen, whom he met on the Greek island of Hydra. Photograph: K & K Ulf Kruger OHG/Redferns

So long, Marianne: Leonard Cohen writes to muse just before her death

Cohen’s letter to Marianne Ihlen said ‘our bodies are falling apart and I think I will follow you very soon’

Pádraig Collins
Sunday 7 August 2016 01.46 BST

Leonard Cohen penned a poignant final letter to his dying muse Marianne Ihlen, a longtime friend of hers revealed on Canadian radio.

Ihlen, whom Cohen wrote about in So Long, Marianne and Bird on a Wire, died in Norway on 29 July, aged 81.