Leonard Cohen: "I'm blessed with a certain amnesia" (The Guardian)

After his comeback to performing and Hallelujah's unlikely chart domination, Leonard Cohen has had a remarkable year. He talks to Jian Ghomeshi about love, death and taking risks

What have you learned from being back on stage?

Leonard Cohen: I learned that it's hard to teach an old dog new tricks. I've been grateful that it's going well. You can't ever guarantee that it's going to continue doing well, because there's a component that you really don't command.

What component is that?

LC: Some sort of grace, some sort of luck. It's hard to put your finger on it - you don't really want to put your finger on it. But there is that mysterious component that makes for a memorable evening. You never really know whether you're going to be able to be the person you want to be or that the audience is going to be hospitable to the person that they perceive. So there's so many unknowns and so many mysteries connected - even when you've brought the show to a certain degree of excellence.

In 2001, you said to the Observer that you were at a stage of your life you refer to as the third act. You quoted Tennessee Williams saying: "Life is a fairly well-written play except for the third act." You were 67 when you said that, you're 74 now - does that ring more or less true for you still?

LC: Well, it's well written, the beginning of the third act seems to be very well written. But the end of the third act, of course, is when the hero dies. My friend Irving Layton said about death: it's not death that he's worried about, it's the preliminaries.

Are you worried about the preliminaries?

LC: Sure, every person ought to be.

Let me come back to the beginning of the first act. This was a brand new career for you that started in your 30s. How fearful were you of starting a second career?

LC: I've been generally fearful about everything, so this just fits in with the general sense of anxiety that I always experienced in my early life. When you say I had a career as a writer or a poet, that hardly begins to describe the modesty of the enterprise in Canada at that time - an edition of 200 was considered a bestseller in poems. At a certain point I realised that I'm going to have to buckle down and make a living. I'd written a couple of novels, and they'd been well received, but they'd sold about 3,000 copies. So I really had to do something, and the other thing I knew how to do was play guitar. So I was on my way down to Nashville - I thought maybe I could get a job. I love country music, maybe I'd get a job playing guitar. When I hit New York, I bumped into what later was called the folk-song renaissance. There were people like Dylan and Judy Collins and Joan Baez. And I hadn't heard their work. So that touched me very much. I'd always been writing little songs myself, too, but I never thought there was any marketplace for them.

Some people would think it's ironic to go into music to make money, given that it's not necessarily the most lucrative of professions for most artists.

LC: Yeah, I know. In hindsight it seems to be the height of folly. You had to resolve your economic crisis by becoming a folk singer. And I had not much of a voice. I didn't play that great guitar either. I don't know how these things happen in life - luck has so much to do with success and failure.

People talk about the fact that you've written songs that you've almost grown into as you get older. How did starting a career in your 30s inform what you were writing?

LC: I always had a notion that I had a tiny garden to cultivate. I never thought I was really one of the big guys. And so the work that was in front of me was just to cultivate this tiny corner of the field that I thought I knew something about, which was something to do with self-investigation without self-indulgence. Just pure confession I never felt was really interesting. But confession filtered through a tradition of skill and hard work is interesting to me. So that was my tiny corner, and I just started writing about the things that I thought I knew about or wanted to find out about. That was how it began. I wanted the songs to sound like everybody else's songs.

You say you've always been fearful of everything. When did you give yourself permission to think of yourself as, and call yourself, a legitimate singer and musician?

LC: You cycle through these feelings of anxiety and confidence. If something goes well in one's life, one feels the benefits of the success. When something doesn't go well, one feels remorse. So those activities persist in one's life right to this moment.

Have the women in your life been a source of your strength or weakness?

LC: Good question. It's not a level playing ground for either of us, for either the man or the woman. This is the most challenging activity that humans get into, which is love. You know, where we have the sense that we can't live without love. That life has very little meaning without love. So we're invited into this arena which is a very dangerous arena, where the possibilities of humiliation and failure are ample. So there's no fixed lesson that one can learn, because the heart is always opening and closing, it's always softening and hardening. We're always experiencing joy or sadness. But there are lots of people who've closed down. And there are times in one's life when one has to close down just to regroup.

Are there times when you've lamented the power that women have had over you?

LC: I never looked at it that way. There's times when I've lamented, there's times when I've rejoiced, there's times when I've been deeply indifferent. You run through the whole gamut of experience. And most people have a woman in their heart, most men have a woman in their heart and most women have a man in their heart. There are people that don't. But most of us cherish some sort of dream of surrender. But these are dreams and sometimes they're defeated and sometimes they're manifested.

Do you think love is empowering?

LC: It's a ferocious activity, where you experience defeat and you experience acceptance and you experience exultation. And the affixed idea about it will definitely cause you a great deal of suffering. If you have the feeling that it's going to be an easy ride, you're going to be disappointed. If you have a feeling that it's going to be hell all the way, you may be surprised.

Do you regret not having a lifelong partner?

LC: Non, je ne regrette rien. I'm blessed with a certain amount of amnesia and I really don't remember what went down. I don't review my life that way.

Even in the face of a very successful record that you made in 1992, The Future, do you think dealing with depression was an important part of your creative process?

LC: Well, it was a part of every process. The central activity of my days and nights was dealing with a prevailing sense of anxiety, anguish, distress. A background of anguish that prevailed.

How important was writing to your survival?

LC: It had a number of benefits. One was economic. It was not a luxury for me to write - it was a necessity. These times are very difficult to write in because the slogans are really jamming the airwaves - it's something that goes beyond what has been called political correctness. It's a kind of tyranny of posture. Those ideas are swarming through the air like locusts. And it's difficult for the writer to determine what he really thinks about things. So in my own case I have to write the verse, and then see if it's a slogan or not and then toss it. But I can't toss it until I've worked on it and seen what it really is.

What do you consider your darkest hour?

LC: Well I wouldn't tell you about it if I knew. Even to talk about oneself in a time like this is a kind of unwholesome luxury. I don't think I've had a darkest hour compared to the dark hours that so many people are involved in right now. Large numbers of people are dodging bombs, having their nails pulled out in dungeons, facing starvation, disease. I mean large numbers of people. So I think that we've really got to be circumspect about how seriously we take our own anxieties today.

How much do you reflect upon your own mortality?

LC: You get a sense of it, you know - the body sends a number of messages to you as you get older. So I don't know if it's a matter of reflection, I don't know that implies a kind of peaceful recognition of the situation.

Is there a way to prepare for death?

LC: Like with anything else, there's a certain degree of free will. You put in your best efforts to prepare for anything. There are whole religious and spiritual methodologies that invite you to prepare for death. And you can embark upon them and embrace them and give themselves to you. But I don't think there's any guarantee this could work, because nobody knows what's going to happen in the next moment.

Are you fearful of death?

LC: Everyone has to have a certain amount of anxiety about the conditions of one's death. The actual circumstances, the pain involved, the affect on your heirs. But there's so little that you can do about it. It's best to relegate those concerns to the appropriate compartments of the mind and not let them inform all your activities. We've got to live our lives as if they're not going to end immediately. So we have to live under those - some people might call them illusions.

Let me ask you about Hallelujah, because it's been an interesting year for Hallelujah - it took on a new energy. A song that you wrote in 1984, and it appeared at No 1 and No 2 on the UK charts, and your version was also in the top 40. What did you make of that?

LC: I was happy that the song was being used, of course. There were certain ironic and amusing sidebars, because the record that it came from which was called Various Positions - [a] record Sony wouldn't put out. They didn't think it was good enough. It had songs like Dancing to the End of Love, Hallelujah, If It Be Your Will. So there was a mild sense of revenge that arose in my heart. But I was just reading a review of a movie called Watchmen that uses it, and the reviewer said "Can we please have a moratorium on Hallelujah in movies and television shows?" And I kind of feel the same way. I think it's a good song, but I think too many people sing it.

• This is an edited transcript of an interview conducted for the Canadian broadcaster CBC. Leonard Cohen plays Mercedes Benz World in Weybridge, Surrey, tomorrow, and the Liverpool Arena on Tuesday. Leonard Cohen Live in London is out now on CD and DVD (Sony).

Leonard Cohen - Live At The Beacon Theatre (NPR)

Link

The New York Times

By LARRY ROHTER

The day after his first American concert in more than 15 years, Leonard Cohen sat in a Manhattan hotel suite warily submitting to an interviewer’s questions, including one about the music in his laptop’s iTunes. In response, he played a klezmer-style Hebrew hymn, then followed it by singing along with one of George Jones’s weepy country morality tales.

“I’ve had choices since the day that I was born,/There were voices that told me right from wrong,” Mr. Cohen crooned in his stern baritone. “If I had listened, no, I wouldn’t be here today,/Living and dying with the choices I’ve made.”

Religious devotion weighs heavily in both music and life for Mr. Cohen, and it takes many forms. After a five-year stint in a Zen Buddhist monastery and various legal distractions, he is back on the road: an undertaking that seems to combine his quest for spiritual fulfillment with an effort to regain his financial footing, lost when his former business manager made off with his money while Mr. Cohen was living as a monk on a mountaintop above Los Angeles.

“It was a long, ongoing problem of a disastrous and relentless indifference to my financial situation,” Mr. Cohen said on Friday of the resulting legal proceedings, which awarded him $9.5 million — money he has yet to collect. “I didn’t even know where the bank was.”

So on April 2, for reasons both practical and aesthetic, Mr. Cohen will embark on a two-month North American tour, including a performance at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival on April 17 and an appearance at Radio City Music Hall on May 16. In addition, Columbia Records on March 31 will release a live CD/DVD of a show he did in London last year, and songs from the concert he played last Thursday at the Beacon Theater will begin streaming online on Thursday on the National Public Radio Web site (npr.org/music or nprmusic.org).

Mr. Cohen’s world tour, which actually began in May 2008 in his native Canada, is scheduled to continue through the end of this year, a feat of endurance for a man his age. At 74, Mr. Cohen is nine years Mick Jagger’s senior and two years older than John McCain. But he is remarkably limber, skipping on and off the stage during his three-hour show and repeatedly dropping to his knees to sing.

Roscoe Beck, Mr. Cohen’s musical director, says that even on the longest flights Mr. Cohen sits cross-legged and straight-backed in his seat, in a monk’s posture. Asked whether he also does yoga to build strength and agility for his stage shows, Mr. Cohen, his demeanor courtly but reserved, smiled and replied, “That is my yoga.”

In fact, Mr. Cohen appears to see performance and prayer as aspects of the same larger divine enterprise. That may not be surprising, coming from an artist whose best-known songs mingle sacred concerns with the secular and the sexual and sound like “collaborations between Jacques Brel and Thomas Merton,” as the novelist Pico Iyer put it.

“There’s a similarity in the quality of the daily life” on the road and in the monastery, Mr. Cohen said. “There’s just a sense of purpose” in which “a lot of extraneous material is naturally and necessarily discarded,” and what is left is a “rigorous and severe” routine in which “the capacity to focus becomes much easier.”

Mr. Cohen said he stopped touring in 1993 partly because he was drinking “too much red wine” between shows. But even with his money problems, he had to be persuaded to go out on the road again, said Rob Hallett, the promoter of the tour, in which Mr. Cohen performs with a nine-piece band.

“For three years, every time I’d go to Los Angeles, I’d try to convince him to do it,” Mr. Hallett said. “But he didn’t think anyone cared.”

After 99 concerts in places as far-flung as Bucharest and Auckland, Mr. Cohen now knows that is not true. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008, but unlike many other pop music figures who emerged in the 1960s he never overexposed himself, and he has maintained an air of mystery around his person and his songs.

“In the years he was away, the work was still there to be found, and people caught up with him,” said Hal Willner, the music producer responsible for “Came So Far for Beauty,” a Cohen concert tribute that toured the world in 2004 and 2005. “The records always kept surfacing, being talked about as influences on the young kids coming up, like Kurt Cobain and Jeff Buckley, and those who listened found themselves being drawn into the songs, in a Venus’ flytrap sort of way.”

Thanks to that new generation of artists and listeners, more recent songs like “Hallelujah” have now become as widely known as “Suzanne” and other compositions from Mr. Cohen’s early years. “Hallelujah” has been recorded almost 200 times, with two different versions reaching the Top 10 in Britain late in 2008, and was even sung by a contestant on “American Idol” last year, which gave it another boost.

Because so many of Mr. Cohen’s songs have been recorded by others, many of his new admirers associate his work mainly with the artists who have popularized them, like Rufus Wainwright and Mr. Buckley. But Mr. Cohen dismissed the idea of reclaiming possession of his songs as one of the motives for going back on tour.

“My sense of ownership with these things is very weak,” he responded. “It’s not the result of spiritual discipline; it’s always been that way. My sense of proprietorship has been so weak that actually I didn’t pay attention and I lost the copyrights on a lot of the songs.”

About the meaning of those songs, Mr. Cohen is diffident and elusive. Many are, he acknowledges, “muffled prayers,” but beyond that he is not eager to reveal much.

“It’s difficult to do the commentary on the prayer,” he said. “I’m not a Talmudist, I’m more the little Jew who wrote the Bible,” a reference to a line in “The Future,” a song he released in 1992. “I feel it doesn’t serve the enterprise to really examine it from outside the moment.”

Mr. Cohen said he hoped to make a new record when the tour ends, and offered to play one of his newer compositions. Tentatively called “Amen,” it features a Farfisa-style keyboard, a trumpetlike solo played by Mr. Cohen on his synthesizer and lyrics like this: “Tell me again when the filth of the butcher is washed in the blood of the lamb.”

Jennifer Warnes, the singer whose 1986 recording of “Famous Blue Raincoat” helped revive interest in Mr. Cohen at a time when he was out of critical favor, said: “He has investigated a lot of deities and read all the sacred books, trying to understand in some way who wrote them as much as the subject matter itself. It’s for his own healing that he reaches for those places. If he has one great love, it is his search for God.”

Mr. Cohen is an observant Jew who keeps the Sabbath even while on tour and performed for Israeli troops during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. So how does he square that faith with his continued practice of Zen?

“Allen Ginsberg asked me the same question many years ago,” he said. “Well, for one thing, in the tradition of Zen that I’ve practiced, there is no prayerful worship and there is no affirmation of a deity. So theologically there is no challenge to any Jewish belief.”

Zen has also helped him to learn to “stop whining,” Mr. Cohen said, and to worry less about the choices he has made. “All these things have their own destiny; one has one’s own destiny. The older I get, the surer I am that I’m not running the show.”

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Music Review | Leonard Cohen

By NATE CHINEN

Leonard Cohen kept returning to the stance of a supplicant at the Beacon Theater on Thursday night, dropping to one knee, or both, to intone his wry and ruminative songs. At the same time, he basked in the rapture of the crowd, artfully courting adulation. His mix of humility and sovereignty felt effortless, entirely true to form. And it girded the concert, his first in the United States in 15 years, with a vibrant and effective tension.

Mr. Cohen, 74, left little room for disappointment in a show that lasted just over three hours (with an intermission) and featured more than two dozen songs. The evening doubled as a preview, coming with the eagerly anticipated announcement of a North American tour this spring. (The tour includes a stop at Radio City Music Hall on May 16.) Mr. Cohen began his return to the road last year, with a slew of dates in Europe and his native Canada; one of them yielded “Live in London,” an album and DVD due out next month from Columbia.

The rigors of performing have reinvigorated Mr. Cohen, whose trademark black suit and fedora conveyed a somber chic. He literally skipped offstage at the end of each half, and after each of his several encores. He sashayed back on, with the slyest of grins. And his voice, that grave and inflexible instrument, occasionally escaped its granitelike restraints. On “Chelsea Hotel #2,” one of the best-received songs of the night, he sang with the resonant candor of his younger self, though that moment was brief and bittersweet.

Comforts are fleeting in Mr. Cohen’s songs, and contradictions are eternal. He was unsparing with his song choice, delving early on into “The Future” (“I’ve seen the future, brother/It is murder”) and savoring the sting of “Everybody Knows” (“Everybody knows that you’ve been faithful/Ah, give or take a night or two”). He fleshed out a liturgical cadence on “Who by Fire,” sounding grim; on “Famous Blue Raincoat,” an encore, he struck a complicated but familiar chord of contempt, compassion and self-pity.

Mr. Cohen’s backing ensemble, led by the bassist Roscoe Beck, matched these songs to a warm, gauzy glow, muting all textures. If anything the band was too polished, evoking smooth jazz and the more homogenized strains of world music. (It should be noted that the flamenco-tinged flourishes by Javier Mas, on bandurria and laúd, were more palatable than the ardently cloying solos by Dino Soldo, on saxophones.) When most of the group dropped out for an austere “Suzanne,” with Mr. Cohen on acoustic guitar, the effect was salutary: suddenly there was flow in the music, a feeling of breath and fluctuation.

But Mr. Cohen, like anyone else who isn’t João Gilberto, would have struggled to cast that spell over the course of the concert. He needed the band for atmosphere as well as support. And what he got from his backup singers, Sharon Robinson and the Webb Sisters, was abidingly deep: their airy harmonies offset Mr. Cohen’s sepulchral tone.

Ms. Robinson, a longtime collaborator of Mr. Cohen’s, also sang a solo feature, “Boogie Street,” with authority. The Webb Sisters had their own moment, claiming “If It Be Your Will” as an ethereal Celtic ballad, with Hattie Webb on harp and Charley Webb on acoustic guitar. (This week they released an EP on StratArt, “Comes in Twos,” which contains that arrangement.)

That was one of a handful of songs with philosophical overtones, befitting Mr. Cohen’s experience as a Zen Buddhist monk. The strongest in this vein was “Anthem,” which he prefaced with an allusion to troubled times; a joke about his medications (he mentioned a litany of name-brand antidepressants); and a quip about how he tried a course of religious study, but “cheerfulness kept breaking through.” Then came the song, and its chorus:

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack, a crack in everything

That’s how the light gets in.

Mr. Cohen sang these words with a kind of gracious generosity. Then he introduced everyone onstage, with practiced eloquence. And before dashing into the wings to end the first half he stood for a moment, hat in hand, awash in wild applause.

Leonard Cohen’s Beacon Theater concert will be broadcast at nprmusic.org/music on Thursday. Tickets for his tour go on sale Friday at leonardcohen.com.