Leonard Cohen has two audiences. You may be a member of one or the other, or perhaps both. But if you have an interest in Canadian letters or in popular music, you'll find it hard to ignore Cohen's work. Members of the first audience remember the remarkable literary persona of the 1960s: the author whose two novels were to sell a million copies each and the poet who was named the winner of the Governor General's Award (although he declined to accept the honour).
Members of the second audience know Cohen through the songs he has recorded over a period of more than 20 years. This audience is the larger one, and it is the one that has seemed to propel Cohen's career as a public figure. From the first album, Songs of Leonard Cohen, to Famous Blue Raincoat (recorded by Jennifer Warnes in 1987), Cohen is most widely known as an icon of popular culture. He admitted as much in a 1988 interview in Musician magazine: "Now I know what I am: I'm not a novelist. I'm not the light of my generation. I'm not the spokesman for new sensibility. I'm a songwriter living in L.A., and this is my new record."
Marco Adria, spoke by phone with Leonard Cohen in July, 1990 at the songwriter's home in Montreal.
Cohen reads the verse from his song "Democracy."
Aurora: It seems your album, I'm Your Man, is a kind of celebration and rebirth of your creative life. Is that accurate?
Cohen: It's a nice way to put it. It certainly represented a rebirth of my career. I've always scratched away at my work, so I don't have the sense that the public may have of the ebb and flow of my work.
Aurora: I have a sense that the songs on I'm Your Man are more direct than some of your previous works, that there's something less allegorical about them.
Cohen: That's a good insight. I think that's true. Somehow, the nature of a popular song is that it moves swiftly from lip to lip and from heart to heart. The allegorical approach becomes less and less interesting to me in popular song.
Aurora: Many diverse elements go into writing, producing, and recording a pop album. How do you maintain a creative voice in that kind of process?
Cohen: Well, if I knew where the songs came from, I'd go there more often. You just have to wait in attendance most of the time. I'm in the midst of a song to the Muses right now, which seems to describe the process as accurately as I can. It goes: "There's blood on every bracelet. You can see it. You can taste it. But she comes to you, light as the breeze. Now you can drink it, or you can nurse it. It don't matter how you worship. As long as you're down on your knees."
Aurora: What about the actual co-ordination of an album? Does it take a lot of energy to ensure that what comes out at the other end reflects what you wanted?
Cohen: I wish the process was as deliberate as you present it, but it isn't. There's a technology that you have to master, but the elements in it are often haphazard. The only thing that I've learned about writing and about making records is that if you stick with it long enough, it will yield. But "long enough" is beyond any reasonable duration that you might conceive. For me, it's just a matter of hanging in until the material yields, until the form is discovered.
Aurora: Do you think popular music has allowed the poem to return to where it started as part of oral culture? It seems to me that words are being sung, chanted, and passed on from poet to poet the way they were many centuries ago.
Cohen: I think there has always been a popular culture and a mandarin culture. There have always been men who want to get together and exchange ideas in a very specific and intellectual form. And people have always sung to get through doing the dishes or as a background to the courting procedure. So I don't know if there have been any radical changes. It's very hard for me to speak historically.
Aurora: The part of Montreal where you live seems very much a community. Does a poet need a community, and if so what are your feelings about the changes that seem likely to occur in Montreal in the political and social areas in the next while?
Cohen: That's a tough question. I don't know if I have the goods to answer that. As far as my neighbourhood is concerned, it's changing, as all neighbourhoods are, and changing very swiftly. They've built about ten bars since I was here last. Whatever community there is, is certainly being modified. I don't know whether it's the poet's task to have a handle on all social phenomena. I think if the handle is too well made or too well defined, then he isn't a writer. I think that's the realm of the sociologist or the political analyst. I've never had a handle on exactly what was going on around me.
Aurora: The writings of Norman Mailer seem to parallel yours in that both of you feel that you're somewhat apart from society, and also, if I could venture this, you both feel that you're conservatives at heart.
Cohen: I think Mailer describes himself as a radical conservative, or he used to.
Aurora: A conservative on the left.
Cohen: A conservative on the left. I don't know. It's hard to say. I've been working on a song for a long time now. It's called Democracy. I'll give you the verse from the point of view of an American. The last verse goes:
I'm sentimental, if you know what I mean. I love the country, but I can't stand the scene. I'm neither left nor right. I'm just staying home tonight, getting lost in that hopeless little screen. But I'm stubborn as those garbage bags that time cannot decay. I'm mud, but I'm still holding up this little wild bouquet. Democracy is comin' to the U.S.A.
I think that we respond to social phenomena in that way. That's what makes a writer or a songwriter. Everybody is for saving the environment, but the songs about the environment are really quite weak. When you start off with a position and the song is some kind of modification of a slogan, no matter how high minded and righteous the cause, the work is going to be weak. So, it's better to start off with how you feel about the tree on your lawn.
Aurora: How connected are you with mainstream society? Do you watch TV, for example?
Cohen: There are periods when I watch it a lot. There are times when I don't look at it at all. I like to sit with the remote in my hand and watch five or ten programs at the same time, and that does give me some sense of location in the culture. God knows those moments are hard to come by.
Aurora: A group called the Washington Squares once said there seems to be a split in popular music today that women are tending to play folk while men are sticking with rock. Do you think a gender gap is appearing in music?
Cohen: I think the market determines that; the market is so powerful. Sometimes there's a lot of women singers; sometimes there's a lot of men singers.
It's true there's a lot of women singers who are using acoustic background. We don't seem to have male singers like Susan Vega and Tracy Chapman. Women didn't get into the heavier type of music so they kind of made a place for themselves, a very good place. But I don't think that much can be determined from this short period of observation.
Aurora: You've always used the imagery and diction of religion in your work. One critic said that this is because religion is the only truly comprehensive language dealing with all possible human concerns and experience. Would you agree with that?
Cohen: I wouldn't disagree. My mind just doesn't work that way, but that seems as good a definition as any. You know, the relation between man and the divine represents a hunger that humans have. So there's always going to be some kind of effort to make sense of the whole affair, and religion seems to have been, until quite recently, the technology with which we tried to comprehend the whole affair.
Aurora: So, it won't wither away.
Cohen: The experiments to make it wither seem to have failed. The last great one was in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe where the effort was orchestrated by the state. It didn't seem to work. Religion represents a fundamental human appetite.
Aurora: Do you regard all the various genres that you've worked in poetry, songs, and novels as constituting one universe?
Cohen: I always put it this way: I think of my work as one long song. There is somehow an invisible guitar behind the prose and poetry.
Aurora: One of the prominent images in your work has been that of the cowboy. Is the cowboy still an important figure in your imagination?
Cohen: Oh, for every kid, a cowboy is important. I've always loved country music. I lived in Nashville for a couple of years. Even in the dark periods of the seventies and the early eighties, I listened to a lot of country music because I felt that that's where the emotion was, that's where the lyric was, and that's where real problems were being addressed.
Country singers tend to be a little older. The audience tends to be a lot more loyal. So the singers and the writers can reveal themselves over a long period of time. You know that Johnny Cash is not going to be singing about anything frivolous, and you know that George Jones is not going to be presenting himself with any kind of bravado; you know that he is going to be telling the truth about himself in his song. When you have pop groups coming and going with tremendous rapidity, you can't get the feel of the artist.
Aurora: Would you recommend to up and coming poets that they try the road you've taken, to try singing songs?
Cohen: I don't know whether I'd dare to give advice to a poet. But I do think that if somebody is interested in training for songwriter or poet or writer, a study of folk music, of which country and western is just an aspect, is not a bad idea. I remember what Irving Layton said about the essential characteristics of a young poet: arrogance and inexperience.
Aurora: Do you have any thoughts about that strange
relationship between pop music and its critics?
Cohen: There are some very good critics. Then there are some, as Norman Mailer says, who wait at the end of a dark alley like a thug with a club in his hand. The important thing from the writer's point of view is to develop a thick skin. Of course, one would prefer to be praised than to be criticized, but you have to develop a thick skin to the praise as well as to the criticism.
Aurora: One of the poets you've often mentioned is Garcia Lorca.
Cohen: Yes, he was the first poet who really touched me. I remember coming upon a book of his when I was fifteen or sixteen, and the universe he revealed and the lands he inhabited seemed very familiar.
I think that's what you look for when you read poetry; you look for someone to illuminate a landscape that you thought you alone walked on. Lorca did that for me. Of course I don't read him in Spanish, but still, the language, the precision, the daring, the boldness of his imagery, and the open-hearted approach to his own predicament couldn't help but touch me at that time.
Aurora: Last year you discussed with Adrienne Clarkson, on her TV program, the publication of a new selection of your writing.
Cohen: Yeah, I withdrew it.
Aurora: You withdrew it? Why?
Cohen: It's hard to say why. I've always worked on instincts. I had originally planned to put out a very small book of selected poems, of poems that I thought stood out. The people I discussed the book with - Adrienne was one of them - felt that a larger book containing poems that I would have rejected but, as she put it, "people loved over the years" should be included. Finally I came up with a very big book not a bad book, a representative book. But at a certain point, as the manuscript was going back and forth, the corrections made, and the choices narrowed, I felt that it was too inclusive and weak.
Aurora: Did you feel that the selections represented a mythology of yourself?
Cohen: Yes, I think you do end up represented by your selection. Maybe I was reluctant to take that leap. I didn't feel it was an accurate presentation of whatever self I happened to be cherishing at the moment.
Aurora: Notwithstanding your declaration that you are not a novelist or a spokesman for a new sensibility but a songwriter, those of us who admired your first two novels want to ask if you're ever tempted to write fiction again?
Cohen: I'd like to. Songwriting is very compelling, and one of the reasons it's so compelling is that there is, first of all, a financial pay-off and I have many dependantsand second, it does get you out of the room. I am kind of tired of travelling, and I think that would probably be the major determination in designing a prose work. I think about it a lot.
Aurora: You have often commented on the aspect of labour in creative work. You say you get up in the morning, brew coffee, sit at a desk, and direct your art. How unusual is it for you to write very quickly and save yourself hours of anguish and hard work?
Cohen: I wish I knew how to do that. There are roughly two schools of writers: the Flaubert school and the Thomas Wolfe school. Flaubert laboured over paragraphs for weeks, and Wolfe used to write thirty thousand words a night. I wish I were in the latter category.
Bob Dylan wrote great songs in half an hour. I remember once in Paris he praised a song of mine called "Hallelujah," which he was doing in concert at the time. He asked me how long I had to taken to write it. I was ashamed to tell him how long, so I said one year. Actually it was longer than that. Then one of his songs came up, and I asked him how long it took him to write it. He said fifteen minutes. I believed him. So there is really not much you can say about it. You either find yourself in one tribe or the other. I'd prefer to be in the swift tribe, but I am in the slow tribe.
Aurora: What I find to be the most moving part of your work is that you've tended to dramatize certain weaknesses and incapacities, and clearly you're not an incapable person, but you do experience this disturbing kind of impotence in the contemporary world.
Cohen: I think that everybody feels the pressure, and there's really not much to say about it. I seem to live a kind of schizophrenic life which I somehow chose very deliberately which is, you know, the life in the room and then the life on the road. On the road, you're singing for hundreds of thousands of people and leading a thoroughly social existence. In the room, you're by yourself, and you're struggling with the material. I don't seem to have been able to do it any other way.
Aurora: Are you on tour now?
Cohen: No. I'm recording my next album. My son is visiting with me. He is seventeen, and he's produced four or five songs, completed demos that are very impressive. He keeps me very much in touch with the dance music, the contemporary music.
Aurora: At your concerts you reciprocate the audience's applause by thanking them for their attention to your songs. You've said that you've been sustained by people responding to your work even though the market place doesn't always celebrate it. How has your sense of audience helped you keep the work going?
Cohen: It's been very important to me. I've never examined closely how important it is, but the few letters I've gotten over the years, especially when there wasn't much hospitality to my music in the market place or in the record industry, those letters were deeply encouraging. I'm very grateful to those individuals people in mental hospitals, priests, policemen, people from all walks of life who wrote me over the years and told me that the work meant something to them.
You may wish to read the chapter on Cohen in Marco Adria's book: Music of Our Times: Eight Canadian Singer-Songwriters (Toronto: Lorimer, 1990). To order call, 1-800-565-1975.
Sony Music - Leonard Cohen Website
At age 79, Leonard Cohen is still touring, has released 11 new albums since this interview, and is still actively publishing his poetry. At the 2013 JUNO Awards he was a double award winner with Songwriter of the Year and Artist of the Year.
Other prestigious awards include:
2012 Glenn Gould Award
2010 Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award
2010 Inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame
2008 Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
2008 Grand Officer of the National Order of Quebec
A complete list of awards and discography can be found at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Cohen
Acclaimed writer/journalist Sylvie Simmons has interviewed more than 100 figures from Cohen's life and work, including his main muses; the women in his life -- from Suzanne and Marianne to Rebecca de Mornay and Anjani Thomas; artists such as Rufus Wainwright, Nick Cave, David Crosby, Judy Collins, and Philip Glass; his record producers; his closest friends, from childhood to adulthood; and many of the spiritual figures who have influenced his life.
Sylvie Simmons biography on Leonard Cohen
Related Links
Leonard Cohen website: http://www.leonardcohen.com/ca/home
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: http://rockhall.com/inductees/leonard-cohen/bio/
Citation Format
Cohen, Leonard. (1990). Marco Adria. Aurora Online: