leonardcohenforum.com

Summer run for Cohen
Kevin Bourke
13/ 6/2008

THE songs of Leonard Cohen endure. They last far beyond the lifespan of most pop tunes because they touch people’s lives in a mysterious, inexplicable way that very few others do.

It’s no wonder that his admirers very often talk about Cohen’s songs almost in the same way as they might if they were prayers. A strong sense of religiosity inhabits many of the songs, one of the most famous of which, albeit not as sung by the man himself, is even called Hallejulah!

“I’ve been very fortunate. I have a kind of popularity, not mass popularity,” the unfailingly modest 73-year-old observed last year, when he was in Manchester to open A Private Gaze, the unique exhibition of his artworks at the Richard Goodall Gallery in the Northern Quarter.

Typically, Cohen had penned a poem for the exhibition catalogue, beginning with: “If there were no paintings/Mine would be very important. Same with the songs.”

Just about the most common comment from those less knowledgeable about his songs is that ‘they’re miserable’, whereas, in fact, they’re blessed with a mordant, deeply intelligent wit.

Bono, of all people, seems to get it. In the film Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man, he pointed out that "as well as bringing you to your knees, he makes you laugh, and that’s the shock! It’s the divine comedy! There are very, very few people who occupy the ground that Leonard Cohen walks on. As dark as it gets, you still feel that beauty is truth.

“He makes something beautiful out of this blackness. He finds shades in the blackness that feel like colour. And he has you at any stage in your life. He has your youthful idealism. He has you when your relationship is splitting up. He has you when you can’t face the world and you look for something higher to get you through. Inside of a pop song there were some big ideas, big dreams.”

Grandiose

Although he would never be quite so grandiose about himself, Cohen agrees. “Popular song is very useful. It provides the soundtrack to courting, to loss, to love, to doing the dishes, to various chores. It has a real utilitarian aspect.

“That’s what I love about it, that people have been able to use the songs as the background to important moments in their lives.

“I like my songs to last as long as a Volvo,” he laughs. “Thirty or 40 years is what they used to advertise. If the song can be useful for a couple of generations, it’s a really wonderful feeling. I think what we like about music – and what we like about art in general, or what we call art – is that it’s that enterprise that stops our minds from spinning. Because we’re always all over the place.

Bewildering

“A good song, a good lyric, is a movie. It will just focus and calm and confer significance on this completely bewildering reality that all of us live in. Whether you use a very complex approach like I use (Hallejulah famously took him five years to write and actually runs to 80 verses!), or a very simple approach like a blues singer would use, what brings a song to life and drives it home, drives it to the heart, is a process I really can’t penetrate.”

Many of his songs are, though, to some extent autobiographical. There really was a Suzanne, who fed him tea and oranges that came all the way from China, The Sisters Of Mercy actually existed in a human form more welcoming than the Goth band, and there is, of course, a crack in everything.

That’s how the light gets in.

“My writing is, I would say, exclusively about my own life. I have a very poor imagination, so I’ve always thought of myself as a kid of journalist just reporting from the field as accurately as I can. I think everybody’s work is thoroughly autobiographical. That’s all we really have – our shabby little lives to provide us with a few anecdotal material moments of some significance.

“It’s not modesty that compels you to see where you stand in this whole affair,” he insists. “I tried to cultivate a small corner of a garden and I’ve done it the best I can, as a novelist and as a poet and as a songwriter.

"It’s a very limited corner but it’s the one I know and it’s the one I’ve worked on as best I can.

“When you no longer see yourself as the hero of your own drama, expecting victory after victory, and you understand deeply that this is not paradise, I found that things became a lot easier.”