Profile of Leonard Cohen on Famous Like Me

Leonard Norman Cohen, CC (born September 21, 1934 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada) is a poet, novelist, and singer-songwriter. His musical career has largely overshadowed his prior work as a poet and novelist, although he has continued to publish poetry sporadically after his breakthrough in the music industry.

Musically, Cohen's early songs are based in folk music, both for melodies and instrumentation, but, beginning in the 1970s, his work shows the influence of various types of popular music and cabaret music. Since the 1980s he typically sings in a deep bass register, with synthesizers and female backing vocals.

Cohen's songs are often emotionally heavy and lyrically complex, owing more to the metaphoric word play of poetry than to the conventions of song craft. His work often explores the themes of religion, isolation, and complex interpersonal relationships.

Cohen's music has become very influential on other singer-songwriters, and more than a thousand cover versions of his work have been recorded. He is also popular in his native Canada, having been inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame and awarded the Order of Canada, the nation's highest civilian honor.

Biography

Early life

Cohen was born to a middle-class Jewish family in 1934 in Montreal, Quebec. He grew up in Westmount on Montreal island. His father worked as a tailor. They made a proud claim to descent from the priestly Kohanim: "I had a very Messianic childhood," he told Richard Goldstein in 1967, "I was told I was a descendant of Aaron, the high priest." As a teenager he learned to play the guitar and formed a country-folk group called the Buckskin Boys.

Development as a poet

In 1951, Cohen enrolled at McGill University, where he was President of the debating union and pursued a career as a poet. His first poetry book, Let Us Compare Mythologies (1956), was published while he was an undergraduate. The Spice-Box of Earth (1961) made him well-known in poetry circles, especially in his native Canada.

Cohen applied a strong work ethic to his early and keen literary ambitions. He wrote poetry and fiction through much of the 1960s, and preferred even as a young man to live in quasi-reclusive circumstances. After moving to Hydra, a Greek island, Cohen published the poetry collection Flowers for Hitler (1964), and the novels The Favourite Game (1963) and Beautiful Losers (1966). The Favourite Game is an autobiographical bildungsroman about a young man finding his identity in writing. In contrast, Beautiful Losers can be considered as an 'anti-bildungsroman' since it—in an early postmodern fashion—deconstructs the identity of the main characters by combining the sacred and the profane, religion and sexuality in a rich, lyrical language. Reflecting Cohen's Québécois roots, but perhaps unusually for someone from a Jewish background, a secondary plot in Beautiful Losers concerns Tekakwitha, the Roman Catholic Iroquois mystic. Beautiful Losers, greeted initially with shock by Canadian reviewers (who berated it for its explicit sexual content), is today considered by many critics to be among the finest literary novels of the 1960s. For a good early survey of Cohen's written work, see Leonard Cohen by Steven Scobie (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1978).

Music

In 1967, Cohen relocated to the United States to pursue a career as a folk singer-songwriter. His song "Suzanne" became a hit for Judy Collins, and after performing at a few folk festivals, Cohen was discovered by John A. Hammond, the same Columbia Records representative who discovered Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, among others.

The sound of Cohen's first album Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967) was much too downtrodden to be a commercial success but was widely acclaimed by folk music buffs and by Cohen's peers. He followed up with Songs from a Room (1969) (featuring the oft-covered "Bird on the Wire"), Songs of Love and Hate (1971), and New Skin for the Old Ceremony (1974). His recorded sound became a bit more accessible through the use of background vocalists.

Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, Cohen toured the United States, Canada and Europe. In 1973, Cohen toured Israel and performed at army bases during the Yom Kippur War. Beginning around 1974, his collaboration with pianist/arranger John Lissauer created a live sound that was almost universally praised by the critics, but never really captured on record. During his time, Cohen often toured with Jennifer Warnes as a back-up singer. Warnes would become a fixture on Cohen's future albums and would even record an album of Cohen songs in 1987, Famous Blue Raincoat.

In 1977, Cohen released an album called Death of a Ladies' Man (note the plural possessive case; one year later in 1978, Cohen released a volume of poetry with the coyly revised title, Death of a Lady's Man). The album was produced by Phil Spector, well known as the inventor of the "wall of sound" technique, in which pop music is backed with thick layers of instrumentation—an approach much different from Cohen's usually minimalistic instrumentation. The recording of the album was a complete fiasco. Spector reportedly mixed the album in secret studio sessions and Cohen said that Spector once threatened him at gunpoint. The end result was a sound critics considered gaudy and ostentatious and Cohen's songs were considered some of his weakest as well. In 1979, Cohen returned with the more traditional Recent Songs.

In 1984, Cohen released Various Positions, featuring the oft-covered "Hallelujah," but Columbia declined to release the album in the United States, where Cohen's popularity had declined in recent years. (Throughout his career, Cohen's music has sold better in Europe and Canada than in the U.S.—he once satirically expressed how touched he is at the modesty the American company has shown in promoting his records.)

In 1986 he made a guest appearance in an episode of the TV series Miami Vice.

In 1987, Jennifer Warnes' tribute album Famous Blue Raincoat helped restore Cohen's career in the U.S., and the following year he released I'm Your Man, which marked a drastic change in his music. Synthesizers ruled the album, although in a much more subdued manner than on Death of a Ladies' Man, and Cohen's lyrics included more social commentary and dark humour. The album was Cohen's most acclaimed and popular since Songs of Leonard Cohen, and "First We Take Manhattan" and the title song became two of his most popular songs. The use of the album track "Everybody Knows" in the 1990 film Pump Up The Volume helped to expose Cohen's music to a younger audience.

He followed with another acclaimed album, The Future, in 1992. The Future showed a very bitter, almost misanthropic view of life. The grim, socially detached notes found in songs like "First We Take Manhattan" became an almost explicit cry of hatred expressed in songs like "Waiting for the Miracle," "The Future" and others. Cohen always maintained a cynical, outsider-like view of the world, which was expressed here in its extreme.

In 1994, following a tour to promote The Future, Cohen retreated to the Mount Baldy Zen Center near Los Angeles, beginning what would become five years of seclusion at the center. In 1996, Cohen was ordained as a Rinzai Zen Buddhist monk and took the Dharma name Jikan, meaning silent one. He left Mount Baldy in 1999.

Recent activity

In 2001, Cohen returned to music with Ten New Songs, featuring a heavy influence from producer and co-composer Sharon Robinson. With Ten New Songs, Cohen detached himself from the dark, misanthropic themes of The Future and adopted an approach of reconciliation with the world. The album's recurring themes and cohesive musical style (something absent from Cohen's albums since "Songs from a Room") helped maintain this feeling, as if Cohen's years in seclusion made him accept this world that fell from grace with him. In October 2004, he released a follow-up named Dear Heather.

Cohen has been under new management since April 2005. He recently wrote and produced an album (Blue Alert) for former-background singer and jazz chanteuse Anjani Thomas (scheduled to first quarter of 2006). Cohen's new book of poetry and drawings (Book of Longing) will also be published in the beginning of 2006, and his new album is slated for mid-2006 with subsequent touring.

This recent activity has been necessary—Cohen states—because his financial resources, including the publishing rights to his songs, reportedly have been gutted, leading Cohen to file suit against his longtime former manager, Kelley Lynch, for gross misappropriation of funds . Cohen states that he has been deprived of over 5 million USD placed in a fund for his retirement, leaving only $150,000. Cohen is being sued in turn by other former business associates. These events have put him in the public spotlight, including a cover feature on him with the headline "Devastated!" in Canada's Maclean's magazine.

Family life

Cohen has never married. In the 1960s he lived with Marianne Jensen (now: Ihlen) and her son Axel (son of the Norwegian author Axel Jensen) at Hydra. The song "So Long, Marianne" is about her.

He fathered two children with artist Suzanne Elrod. A son, Adam, was born in 1972 and a daughter, Lorca, named after poet Federico García Lorca, was born in 1974. Adam Cohen began his own career as a singer-songwriter in the mid-1990s.

Contrary to popular belief, "Suzanne," one of his best-known songs, refers to Suzanne Vaillancourt, the wife of his friend, the Québécois sculptor Armand Vaillancourt, rather than Elrod.

Around 1990, Cohen was romantically linked, and by some accounts formally engaged, to actress Rebecca De Mornay.

Themes

Recurring themes in Cohen's work include love and sex, religion, psychological depression, and music itself. He has also engaged with certain political themes, though sometimes ambiguously so.

Love and sex are common enough themes in popular music; Cohen's background as a novelist and poet brings an uncommon sensibility to these themes. "Suzanne," probably the first Cohen song to gain broad attention, mixes a wistful type of love song with a religious meditation, themes that are also mixed in "Joan of Arc." "Famous Blue Raincoat" is from the point of view of a man whose marriage has been broken (in exactly what degree is ambiguous in the song) by his wife's infidelity with his close friend, and is written in the form of a letter to that friend, to whom he writes, "I guess that I miss you/ I guess I forgive you … Know your enemy is sleeping/ And his woman is free", while "Everybody Knows" deals with the harsh reality of AIDS: "… the naked man and woman/ Are just a shining artifact of the past." "Sisters of Mercy" evokes of genuine love (agape more than eros) found in a hotel room encounter with two Edmonton women, whereas "Chelsea Hotel #2" treats his Janis Joplin one-night stand rather unsentimentally, and the title of "Don't Go Home with Your Hard-On" speaks for itself.

Cohen comes from a Jewish background, most obviously reflected in his song "Story of Isaac" and in "Who by Fire," whose words and melody echo the Unesaneh Tokef, an 11th century liturgical poem recited on Rosh Hashanah. Broader Judeo-Christian themes are sounded throughout the album Various Positions: "Hallelujah", which has music as a secondary theme, begins by evoking the biblical king David composing a song that "pleased the Lord"; "Coming Back to you" and "If It Be Your Will" are clearly addressed to a Judeo-Christian God. In his early career as a novelist, Beautiful Losers grappled with the mysticism of the Catholic/Iroquois Tekakwitha. Cohen has also been involved with Buddhism at least since the 1970s and in 1996 he was ordained a Buddhist monk. However, he still considers himself also a Jew: "I'm not looking for a new religion. I'm quite happy with the old one, with Judaism."

Having suffered from psychological depression during much of his life (although less so as he has aged), Cohen has written much (especially in his early work) about depression and suicide. The wife of the protagonist of Beautiful Losers commits a gory suicide; "Seems So Long Ago, Nancy" is about a suicide; suicide is mentioned in the darkly comic "One of Us Cannot Be Wrong"; "Dress Rehearsal Rag" is about a last-minute decision not to kill oneself; a general atmosphere of depression pervades such songs as "Please Don't Pass Me By" and "Tonight Will Be Fine." A reviewer once remarked tongue-in-cheek that Cohen's albums should be sold with razor blades.

Besides the aforementioned "Hallelujah", music itself is also the subject of "Tower of Song", "A Singer Must Die", and "Jazz Police".

While politics often show up as a theme in his work, he does not seem to be expounding one particular political view. He clearly has a predilection for the underdog, the "beautiful loser," whether the WWII French resister of Anna Marly and Hy Zaret's The Partisan (which he covered) or the royalist of his own "The Old Revolution." Cohen's approach to war and the world's aggression developed during his first albums, coming to its zenith with New Skin for the Old Ceremony, his most "militant" album.

"First We Take Manhattan" speaks in the angry voice of someone regaining power long denied; "Democracy" is a calmer version of the same. Several Cohen songs speak of abortion, always either as something distasteful or even atrocious. "Diamonds in the Mine" bleakly declaims, "The only man of energy/ Yes the revolution's pride/ He trained a hundred women/ Just to kill an unborn child." In "The Future", he sings sarcastically "Destroy another fetus now/ We don't like children anyhow." In "Stories of the Street" Cohen speaks of "The age of lust is giving birth/ And both the parents ask/ The nurse to tell them fairy tales/ from both sides of the glass."

This may suggest a uniformly bleak and serious body of work, but in fact Cohen's songs are often verbally playful and even cheerful. Some of his songs, such as "Ballad of the Absent Mare" and "Hallelujah" are simply beautiful, and "Democracy" looks at a future as hopeful as that of "The Future" is bleak. In "Tower of Song", the famously raw-voiced Cohen sings ironically that he was "… born with the gift/ Of a golden voice"; the generally dark "Is This What You Wanted?" nonetheless contains playful lines "You were the whore and the Beast of Babylon/ I was Rin Tin Tin"; in concert, he often plays around with his lyrics (for example, "If you want a doctor/ I'll examine every inch of you" from "I'm Your Man" will become "If you want a Jewish doctor …"); he will introduce one song by using a phrase from another song or poem (for example, introducing "Leaving Green Sleeves" by paraphrasing his own "Queen Victoria": "This is a song for those who are not nourished by modern love").

Cohen has also covered such love songs as Irving Berlin's "Always" or the more obscure soul number "Be for Real" (originally sung by Marlena Shaw), presumably chosen in part for their unlikely juxtaposition to his own work.

Titles and honours

• In 1991, Cohen was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame.
• In 1996, he was ordained a Buddhist monk.
• In 2003, he was made a Companion of the Order of Canada, Canada's highest civilian honour.
• In 2004, Beautiful Losers was chosen for the inclusion in Canada Reads 2005; it was chosen and originally to be championed by singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright; tour commitments meant that Wainright had to be replaced by singer Molly Johnson

Quotations

• "Only in Canada could somebody with a voice like mine win 'Vocalist of the Year'."—first words of his speech accepting the Juno Award for Best Male Vocalist in Canada (1992)

• "I don't consider myself a pessimist at all. I think of a pessimist as someone who is waiting for it to rain. And I feel completely soaked to the skin."—from interview with The Daily Telegraph (1993)

• "Now, I don't want to give you the impression that I'm a great musicologist, but I'm a lot better than what I was described as for a long, long time; you know, people said I only knew three chords when I knew five."—from interview with BBC Radio 1FM (1994)

• "I feel that, you know, the enormous luck I've had in being able to make a living, and to never have had to have written one word that I didn't want to write, to be able to have satisfied that dictum I set for myself, which was not to work for pay, but to be paid for my work—just to be able to satisfy those standards that I set for myself has been an enormous privilege."—(same)

• "It was only when you walked away I saw you had the perfect ass. Forgive me for not falling in love with your face or your conversation."—from The Energy of Slaves (1972)

• "So the great affair is over/ but whoever would have guessed/ it would leave us all so vacant/ and so deeply unimpressed/ It's like our visit to the moon/ or to that other star/ I guess you go for nothing/ if you really want to go that far"—from "Death of a Ladies' Man" (1977)

• "Everybody knows that you love me baby/ Everybody knows that you really do/ Everybody knows that you've been faithful/ Ah give or take a night or two/ Everybody knows you've been discreet/ But there were so many people you just had to meet/ without your clothes/And everybody knows …"—from "Everybody Knows" (1988).

• "Ring the bells that still can ring/ Forget your perfect offering/ There is a crack in everything/ It's how the light gets in."—from "Anthem" (1992)

Works

Albums

• Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967)
• Songs from a Room (1969)
• Songs of Love and Hate (1971)
• Live Songs (1973)
• New Skin for the Old Ceremony (1974)
• Death of a Ladies' Man (1977)
• Recent Songs (1979)
• Various Positions (1984)
• I'm Your Man (1988)
• The Future (1992)
• Cohen Live (1994)
• Field Commander Cohen: Tour of 1979 (2001)
• Ten New Songs (2001)
• Dear Heather (2004)

Books

• Let Us Compare Mythologies (poetry) 1956
• The Spice-Box of Earth (poetry) 1961
• The Favourite Game (novel) 1963
• Flowers for Hitler (poetry) 1964
• Beautiful Losers (novel) 1966
• Parasites of Heaven (poetry) 1966
• Selected Poems 1956–1968 (poetry) 1968
• The Energy of Slaves (poetry) 1972
• Death of a Lady's Man (poetry) 1978
• Book of Mercy (poetry) 1984
• Stranger Music (selected poems and songs) 1993

Soundtracks

Cohen's music has often been used in film soundtracks.

• McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) uses three songs from his debut album, Songs of Leonard Cohen: "Stranger Song" is McCabe's theme, "Winter Lady" is Mrs. Miller's, and "Sisters of Mercy" is the theme of the prositutes who work in their establishment. He also composed some incidental music for the movie.
• Bird on a Wire (1990) uses "Bird on a Wire" sung by The Neville Brothers.
• Natural Born Killers (1994) uses "The Future," "Waiting for the Miracle," and "Anthem," all from the album The Future.
• Exotica (movie) (1994) uses "Everybody Knows" from the album I'm Your Man.
• When Night Is Falling (1995) uses "Hallelujah"
• Breaking the Waves (1996) uses "Suzanne"
• Wonder Boys (2000) uses "Waiting for the Miracle."
• Secretary (2002) uses "I'm Your Man."
• The Life of David Gale (2003) uses "The Future."
• A Home at the End of the World (2004) uses "Suzanne" from Songs of Leonard Cohen.

• Pump Up the Volume (1990) uses several Cohen songs, most notably "Everybody Knows" performed by Concrete Blonde.
• Basquiat (1996) uses "Hallelujah" performed by John Cale
• Shrek (2001) uses a slightly censored version of John Cale's recording of "Hallelujah." The soundtrack album, however, replaces this with a version by Rufus Wainwright.

Tribute albums

• I'm Your Fan, from 1991, features Cohen's songs interpreted by a variety of folk and alternative rock acts, including R.E.M., Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Pixies, The Lilac Time and Geoffrey Oryema,
• Tower of Song, released in 1995, has a more mainstream pop-rock program that includes Sting, Jann Arden, Willie Nelson and Elton John.
• At least 32 tribute albums are released worldwide, mostly in non-English languages.

Cover songs

Many of Cohen's songs have been interpreted by other artists, occasionally receiving more popular attention than Cohen's own, typically minimalistic arrangements. Some of Cohen's most covered songs include:

• "Avalanche," covered by Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds.
• "Bird on the Wire," covered (often as "Bird on a Wire") by Johnny Cash, Joe Cocker, Judy Collins, Fairport Convention, Willie Nelson, The Neville Brothers, Tim Hardin, and Our Lady Peace (at Live 8).
• "Everybody Knows," covered by Concrete Blonde, Don Henley, and the Washington Squares.
• "Famous Blue Raincoat," covered by Tori Amos, Joan Baez, Lloyd Cole, and Jennifer Warnes
• "First We Take Manhattan," covered by Joe Cocker, R.E.M., and Jennifer Warnes
• "Hallelujah," covered by Bono, Jeff Buckley, John Cale, Allison Crowe, k.d. lang, Bob Dylan, Rufus Wainwright, and Elisa. Cale's version (slightly edited) was featured in the movie Shrek, but Wainwright's replaced it on the soundtrack album, apparently because Wainwright is signed with Dreamworks SKG and Cale is not. The Shrek theme music was also based on "Hallelujah." In addition, the American TV show Scrubs used parts of Cale's "Hallelujah" (from Fragments of a Rainy Season, not from I'm Your Fan) and it is included on the Scrubs Soundtrack.
• "Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye," covered by Judy Collins, Roberta Flack, Claudine Longet, and Ian McCulloch
• "Joan of Arc," covered by Allison Crowe, Fabrizio de André, and Jennifer Warnes.
• "So Long, Marianne," covered by John Cale and Suzanne Vega.
• "Story of Isaac," covered by Roy Buchanan, Judy Collins, and Suzanne Vega
• "Suzanne," covered by Graeme Allwright, Judy Collins, Fabrizio de André, Neil Diamond, Fairport Convention, Roberta Flack, Peter Gabriel, Noel Harrison, Geoffrey Oryema, and Nina Simone. R.E.M. recorded a song called "Hope" which they admit was indebted to "Suzanne;" Cohen gets co-songwriting credit for the song.
• "Tower of Song", covered by Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds.
• "Leonard Cohen's Day Job" by the Austin Lounge Lizards is not a cover per se, but it alludes to and parodies several songs, especially "I'm Your Man" and "Joan of Arc."

As of July 31, 2005, the site www.leonardcohenfiles.com had counted a total of 1044 published cover versions of Cohen's songs.

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