In a year of great loss, and in a sick twist of fate in the same week that Donald Trump became president, last night at the age of 82 we lost one of music’s great songwriters: Leonard Cohen.
“I am ready to die,” Cohen told the New Yorker earlier this year. He’d been suffering ill health for quite some time. “At a certain point, if you still have your marbles and are not faced with serious financial challenges, you have a chance to put your house in order. It’s a cliché, but it’s underestimated as an analgesic on all levels. Putting your house in order, if you can do it, is one of the most comforting activities and the benefits of it are incalculable.”
Leonard Cohen always was so much more than just a ‘singer-songwriter’. From the first tumbling acoustic notes and bruised resonant tone set to record for the first time in the mid-60s, he has been unmistakably the last of a dying breed. Born in 1934 in Montréal, Quebec to a Jewish family, in his lifetime he was a novelist, a besuited ladies man, a reclusive monk but most of all a poet, a teacher, a philosopher…
“The baffled king composing Hallelujah”
From the romantic lyricism of ‘Suzanne’ , and ‘So Long Marianne‘,the extraordinary ‘Hallelujah’ reworked by John Cale and Jeff Buckley to astounding effect, to the insistent majesty of ‘First We Take Manhattan‘. The list of classics he has committed to record is endless: his words questioning, his healing voice as deep as an anchor rooted to the bottom of an ocean, a guiding beacon leading you to shore. Any words on a screen can never do this colossal outsider figure justice. That he was still making records into his late 70s and 80s is utterly remarkable as witnessed by 2014’s superlative ‘Popular Problems’ and what’s turned out to be his croaking swansong ‘You Want It Darker’ that’s bathed deep themes of religion and mortality.
“You want it darker/We kill the flame”
It’s a credit to him that even despite the few missteps in his long and varied career, he never released anything until he felt he absolutely ‘must’, until he feels the call of the muse. The themes that permeated his work were universal and existential, riven with experience and wisdom weathered by the passing of time: Why are we here? What are we doing here? Do you still love me? Why are our leaders so corrupt and compromised? What happens when we die? Each song told through poetic, personal metaphor shot through with Leonard‘s unfaltering eye for detail. Leonard‘s extraordinary folkish 1967 debut album Songs from a Room to the stripped back, genre transcending darkness of Songs of Love and Hate.Through to the pulsing post-electro melodrama of the 1988 album ‘I’m Your Man’ , the transcendental majesty of his 1992 album ‘The Future’. To his wilderness years as a Buddhist monk and his triumphant return with a run of shows in 2008 and a series of quality swansongs, Cohen has been a master of the artform.
“I have tried in my way to be free”
The phrase great songwriter is overused sometimes but in 2016 we have lost three: David Bowie, Prince and now Leonard Cohen, for he was the embodiment of a magisterial melancholia, words that could teach and nourish. He peered into the eyes of darkness of humanity and survived to tell the tale, one of music’s greats who constructed his own imperious tower of song.
“there’s a crack in everything that’s how the light gets in”
