The Leonard
Cohen Biography
| "A song, by its
nature, has to move swiftly from heart to heart,"
Leonard Cohen says, his voice as intimately resonant as
on the 11 major-label albums that confirm his stature as
our time's most soulful seer. He's calling from a cabin
6,200 ft. up Mt. Baldy, a Zen Center southeast of Los
Angeles. Cohen's current residence may be remote, but his
influence has never been more immediate. An enigmatic
figure, elegant in trademark dark suits, he's now part of
popular music's very fabric: disclosing the secrets of
spirit and flesh, his songs are the bittersweet poetry of
the way we live. Ever since the 1967 release of The Songs of Leonard Cohen, the songwriter has been known for painstaking craft. In these days of pre-fab creativity, he perseveres, composing on guitar and synthesizer with the rare attentiveness of a master. "I tend to be blackening pages habitually," he says. "Some of the songs take years to bring to completion. None come easy." After all, he insists, "This is one's work. Everything else is kind of shipwrecked, bankrupt. So all you have left is your work - and that's what you're doing most of the time. That's the only area which you can somehow govern or clarify. All the other things remain somewhat mysterious and messy." Delving into the "mysterious and messy," the heart's truest joys and sorrows, has been the lifework of the Canadian artist who began in the Fifties as a poet. His award-winning first volume, Let Us Compare Mythologies, followed by ten collections which along with his two novels, The Favorite Game and Beautiful Losers, established his provocative, prophetic voice. But even in his twenties, music had also drawn him. In 1954, he began playing country with the Buckskin Boys - "The appetite to play and to stomp your feet and to move around to celebrate some sort of emotional and communal life...country music seemed to fill the bill for me." It was luminaries of the nascent Sixties folk scene, however, who first embraced his mature work. Judy Collins and Tim Hardin covered such stand-outs as "Suzanne," "Bird on a Wire" and classics ranging from his gorgeously orchestrated debut to the lean beauties of Songs From a Room, Songs of Love and Hate and New Skin for the Old Ceremony. Cohen refined his own highly distinctive sound - indelible minor-keyed melodies and lyrics of a riveting candor. Romance, of sound and body, became his signature subject, one of ambiguous ecstasies that few songwriters have captured so tellingly. By the late Seventies, Cohen had recorded Death of A Ladies' Man, an experiment that paired him with legendary "Wall of Sound" producer Phil Spector. In the mid-Eighties, on the Mariachi-inflected Recent Songs, he collaborated with singer Jennifer Warnes (who reciprocated with a set of Cohen tributes, Famous Blue Raincoat), and began employing synthesizers on Various Positions. At the decade's end, he released one of his strongest works, I'm Your Man. A subsequent three-night performance at London's Albert Hall furthered his European renown: in 1991, another Cohen tribute, featuringing R.E.M., Nick Cave and others reached an entire new generation. A year later, Cohen's The Future found him at the peak of his powers -- and popularity. Along the way, his songs provided film-makers inspiration: both "McCabe & Mrs. Miller" and "Pump Up the Volume" drew heavily on Cohen's imaginative work. Tower of Song presents Cohen's gems in brilliant new settings. Billy Joel lays bare the gospel soul of "Light as the Breeze," Sting and the Chieftains imbue "Sisters of Mercy" with Celtic fire and Elton John rocks "I'm Your Man." Willie Nelson delivers "Bird on a Wire" as a wise lament and Aaron Neville charges "Ain't No Cure for Love" with country yearning. Suzanne Vega sings "Story of Isaac" with crystalline grace. Tori Amos, alone with her piano turns in a lush, romantic "Famous Blue Raincoat"while Bono makes of "Hallelujah" a statement equally stark and sacred. "Everybody Knows" gets a wry, smart reading from Don Henley, and in the deft, contrasting takes of "Coming Back to You," Trisha Yearwood and Martin Gore find a message that's both timeless and absolutely contemporary. Riveting and indelible - the kind of music that demands repeated listening - these songs convey the essence of Cohen; his subtle understand of the ways of the heart. "I'm generally working with very complex emotions that I'm having a lot of trouble deciphering," he says. "So I have to keep paring things down to something I myself can grasp." That loving labor, like that of a sculptor unlocking the beauty of stone, has given these 11 singers - and us - art that lasts, that communicates in a language as strong and powerful as the mountain where the poet now, in the early hours of dawn, resumes his work.
Leonard Cohen Discography1959: Six Montreal Poets (spoken
word album) - Folkways
Leonard Cohen Bibliography1956: Let Us Compare
Mythologies - McClelland & Stewart |