A hallelujah for Leonard Cohen
People who quibbled about Bob Dylan getting the Nobel Prize probably would have less to complain about Leonard Cohen, a published poet and novelist in his native Canada before turning, in his 30s, to folk singing and wry observations on all things human. That journey took him from Montreal to the coffeehouses of Greenwich Village, through 14 albums and a towering reputation.
Still touring at age 82 before releasing his final critically acclaimed album earlier this year (“You Want It Darker”), Cohen was the embodiment of the modern troubadour, his foghorn croak perfecting tales of love gained and lost, spiritual angst, the human comedy and tragedy, and the way governments constantly game us. His death, the day after the election of Donald Trump, might have been the ultimate protest vote.
But I always go back to those songs. In Tower of Song (1988), Cohen imagines himself living in a high-rise hotel somewhere far below Hank Williams and other guitar-wielding poets. The thing that always got Leonard Cohen through was a self-deprecating sense of humor. He was the romantic warrior but also the romantic clown. And he could break a listener’s heart with a simple few strummed chords and the tale of a wayward wife or lover, as in Famous Blue Raincoat. That was a devastating track from his 1971 album “Songs of Love and Hate,” an album that opened with the insistent guitar filigree of Avalanche (“My one chop,” he would joke about his rudimentary guitar skills.)
Listeners got to know him before that, when his songs were used extensively by Robert Altman for the film McCabe and Mrs. Miller (his Sisters of Mercy offering a gentle waltz-like counterpoint to the Old West grit and frozen waste).
Then there was Hallelujah. John Cale covered this little-heard song from Cohen’s 1974 album “Various Positions,” but it was Jeff Buckley who transformed it into a swooning alternative ballad. After that, there was no shortage of heartfelt covers and karaoke renditions — even here in Manila.
Cohen’s financial straits were no doubt raised considerably by the onslaught of covers, which must’ve helped after it was reported in the mid ‘00s that his manager had embezzled all the singer’s amassed wealth. Cohen, ever the troubadour, simply started touring again to rebuild his stake. It was a rebirth for him, and a treat for fans who got to see him on the road over these past 10 years.
A Zen Buddhist Jewish Canadian, Cohen would take spiritual retreats, entering a monastery at one point; yet he remained rooted in the earthly. With a foggy, raspy croon that could still cast a spell, the chain-smoking singer was promoted by Columbia Records in the early ‘70s as the “master of erotic despair.” In truth, there were all kinds of emotions winding through Cohen’s music. His lyrics were no less probing then Dylan’s, often minus the metaphor. He could be as bleakly detailed as a story by Alice Munro or Andre Dubus III (as in Famous Blue Raincoat), or as richly allusive as The Stranger Song (“And Jesus was a sailor/who walked upon the water…”). Words and meter mattered much to him, which is why he had relatively few albums over his lengthy career. In Chelsea Hotel No. 2, he offered a song up to Janis Joplin with whom he shared a hotel tryst, managing to convey the poetic longing of the outsider, worn as a badge of honor (“Well, never mind/We are ugly, but we have the music”).
Like Dylan, Cohen allowed popular music to grow up — with lyrics and characters that felt true and real, and a voice that simply seemed to speak what was on its mind. In The Future, the title song from his Euro-synth 1982 album, he takes on the voice of a crazed prophet, mapping out America’s apocalyptic vision in the manner of Yeats’ “The Second Coming.” With lines taking in the widening gyre (“Things are going to slide, slide in all directions/ Won’t be nothing, Nothing you can measure anymore”), the song rings as true in Trumpland today as it did then. Yet the album also contained Anthem, a somewhat ironic benediction to America’s promise of democracy and freedom, with lines defiantly optimistic (“There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”).
Encountering the oeuvre of Cohen, growing to know it, feels like putting on a comfortable, well-worn jacket — whether a leather one or that famous blue raincoat. We’ll miss that raspy voice, that wry punchline delivered in AABA blues form, just as we’ll miss the other titans from 2016 — David Bowie, Prince — who are now joined by Cohen in the Tower of Song.
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And while we’re at it, songwriter Leon Russell — composer of Superstar, A Song For You, This Masquerade, Delta Lady and other ‘70s staples — will no doubt now be joining these cats on New Orleans boogie piano in that famed Tower.
