Yesterday we lost another of the most prolific songwriters and storytellers in music in Leonard Cohen, whose haunting songs became better known than Leonard. He will be missed but his difficult life path and his beautiful contributions to music history will never be forgotten.
Leonard Cohen - So Long Marianne
(Double click for full screen)
Yesterday, November 10, the following message appeared on the Leonard Cohen website.
Leonard Cohen
It
is with profound sorrow we report that legendary poet, songwriter and artist,
Leonard Cohen has passed away.
We have lost
one of music’s most revered and prolific visionaries.
A memorial
will take place in Los Angeles
**
C’est avec une profonde tristesse que nous vous annonçons
que le poète, auteur-compositeur et artiste légendaire, Leonard Cohen est
décédé.
Le monde de la musique a perdu un de ses visionnaires les
plus prolifiques et vénérés.
Une cérémonie aura lieu à Los Angeles dans les prochains
jours. La famille souhaite vivre
le deuil en toute intimité.
The following tribute to Cohen by The New York Times says it all.
Leonard Cohen, Epic and Enigmatic Songwriter, Is Dead at 82
Leonard Cohen, the Canadian poet and novelist who
abandoned a promising literary career to become one of the foremost songwriters
of the contemporary era, has died, according to an announcement Thursday night
on his Facebook page. He was 82.
Mr. Cohen’s
record label, Sony Music, confirmed the death. No details were available on the
cause. Adam Cohen, his son and producer, said: “My father passed away
peacefully at his home in Los Angeles
Over a musical
career that spanned nearly five decades, Mr. Cohen wrote songs that addressed —
in spare language that could be both oblique and telling — themes of love and
faith, despair and exaltation, solitude and connection, war and politics. More
than 2,000 recordings of his songs have been made, initially by the folk-pop
singers who were his first champions, like Judy Collins and Tim Hardin, and later
by performers from across the spectrum of popular music, among them U2, Aretha
Franklin, R.E.M., Jeff Buckley, Trisha Yearwood and Elton John.
Mr. Cohen’s
best-known song may well be “Hallelujah,”
a majestic, meditative ballad infused with both religiosity and earthiness. It
was written for a 1984 album that his record company rejected as insufficiently
commercial and popularized a decade later by Jeff Buckley. Since then some 200
artists, from Bob Dylan to Justin Timberlake, have sung or recorded it. A book
has been written about it, and it has been featured on the soundtracks of
movies and television shows and sung at the Olympics and other public events.
At the 2016 Emmy Awards, Tori Kelly sang “Hallelujah” for the annual “In
Memoriam” segment recognizing recent deaths.
Leonard Cohen -
Hallelujah
(Double click for full screen)
Mr. Cohen was an unlikely and reluctant pop star, if in fact he ever was
one. He was 33 when his first record was released in 1967. He sang in an
increasingly gravelly baritone. He played simple chords on acoustic guitar or a
cheap keyboard. And he maintained a private, sometime ascetic image at odds
with the Dionysian excesses associated with rock ’n’ roll.
At some points, he was anything but prolific. He struggled for years to
write some of his most celebrated songs, and he recorded just 14 studio albums
in his career. Only the first qualified as a gold record in the United States
Early in his career,
enigmatic songs like “Suzanne” and “Bird on a Wire,” quickly covered by
better-known performers, gave him visibility. “Suzanne” begins and ends as a
portrait of a mysterious, fragile woman “wearing rags and feathers from
Salvation Army counters,” but pauses in the middle verse to offer a melancholy
view of the spiritual:
And Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon
the water,
And he spent a long time watching from his lonely wooden tower,
And when he knew for certain only drowning men could see him,
He said “All men will be sailors then until the sea shall free them.”
But he himself was broken, long before the sky would open,
Forsaken, almost human, he sank beneath your wisdom like a stone.
And he spent a long time watching from his lonely wooden tower,
And when he knew for certain only drowning men could see him,
He said “All men will be sailors then until the sea shall free them.”
But he himself was broken, long before the sky would open,
Forsaken, almost human, he sank beneath your wisdom like a stone.
In 2008, Mr. Cohen was inducted into the
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which described him as “one of the few artists in
the realm of popular music who can truly be called poets” and praised him for
having “raised the songwriting bar.” In 2010, the National Academy of Recording
Arts and Sciences, the Grammys’ group, gave him a lifetime achievement award,
praising him for “a timeless legacy that has positively affected multiple
generations.”
Wearing a bolo tie and his trademark
fedora, Mr. Cohen dryly made light in his acceptance speech of the fact that
none of his records had ever been honored at the Grammys. “As we make our way
toward the finish line that some of us have already crossed, I never thought
I’d get a Grammy Award,” he said. “In fact, I was always touched by the modesty
of their interest.”
Leonard Norman Cohen was born in Montreal on Sept. 21, 1934, and grew up in the prosperous
suburb of Westmount Canada
from Poland
In 1951, Mr. Cohen was admitted to McGill University , Canada
A period of drift followed Mr. Cohen’s
graduation from college. He enrolled in law school at McGill, then dropped out
and moved to New York City , where he studied
literature at Columbia University for a year before returning to Montreal London , he ended up living in
a house on the Greek island
of Hydra
“Beautiful Losers,” about a love triangle
all of whose members are devotees of a 17th-century Mohawk Indian Roman
Catholic saint, gained a cult following, which it retains, and eventually sold
more than three million copies worldwide. But Mr. Cohen’s initial lack of
commercial success was discouraging, and he turned to songwriting in hopes of
expanding the audience for his poetry.
“I found it was very difficult to pay my
grocery bill,” Mr. Cohen said in 1971, looking back at his situation just a few
years earlier. “I’ve got beautiful reviews for all my books, and I’m very well
thought of in the tiny circles that know me, but I’m really starving.”
Within months, Mr. Cohen had placed two
songs, “Suzanne” and “Dress Rehearsal Rag,” on Judy Collins’s album “In My
Life,” which also included the Lennon-McCartney title song and compositions by
Bob Dylan, Randy Newman and Donovan. But he was extremely reluctant to take the
next step and sing his songs himself.
“Leonard was naturally reserved and afraid
to sing in public,” Ms. Collins wrote in her autobiography, “Sweet Judy Blue
Eyes: My Life in Music” (2011). She recalled him telling her: “I can’t sing. I
wouldn’t know what to do out there. I am not a performer.” He was “terrified,”
she wrote, the first time she brought him onstage to sing with her, in the
spring of 1967.
Leonard Cohen - Suzanne
(Double click for full screen)
Later that year, after being signed to
Columbia Records by John Hammond, the celebrated talent scout who also signed
Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, Mr. Cohen released his first album. Its simple
title, “Songs of Leonard Cohen,” and its cover, a portrait of the artist gazing
solemnly into the camera, matched the music, which was spare and unembellished,
in stark contrast to the psychedelic style that then prevailed.
The record began with “Suzanne,” which was
already being performed by folk singers everywhere thanks to the popularity of
Ms. Collins’s version. It also included three other songs of great impact that
would become staples of Mr. Cohen’s live shows, and that numerous other artists
would record over the years: “Sisters of Mercy,” “So Long Marianne” and “Hey,
That’s No Way to Say Goodbye.”
His second album, “Songs From a Room,”
released early in 1969, cemented his growing reputation as a songwriter. “The
Story of Isaac,” a retelling of the biblical tale of Abraham and Isaac, became
an anthem of opposition to the war in Vietnam
In 1971, Mr. Cohen released “Songs of Love
and Hate,” which contained the cryptic and frequently covered “Famous Blue
Raincoat,” but after that his production began to tail off and his live
performances became less frequent. He released three more albums during the
1970s but, amid bouts of depression, only two in the 1980s and one in the
1990s.
The quality of his songs remained high,
however: In addition to “Hallelujah,” future standards like “Dance Me to the
End of Love,” “First We Take Manhattan,” “Everybody Knows” and “Tower of Song
Mr. Cohen, raised Jewish and observant
throughout his life, became interested in Zen Buddhism in the late 1970s and
often visited the Mount Baldy monastery, east of Los Angeles
During the remainder of the decade, there
was much speculation that Mr. Cohen, rather than merely taking a sabbatical,
had stopped writing songs and would never record again. But in 2001, he
released “Ten New Songs,” whose title suggests it was written while he was in
the monastery. It was followed in 2004 by “Dear Heather,” an unusually upbeat
album.
In 2005, Mr. Cohen sued his former
manager, Kelley Lynch, accusing her of defrauding him of millions of dollars
that he had set aside as a retirement fund, leaving him with only $150,000 and
a huge tax bill and forcing him to take out a new mortgage on his home to cover
his legal costs. The next year, after Ms. Lynch countersued, a judge awarded
Mr. Cohen $9.5 million, but he was unable to collect any of the money.
The legal battles may have soured Mr.
Cohen’s mood, but they did not seem to damage his creativity. In 2006, he
published a new collection of poems, “Book of Longing,” which the composer
Philip Glass set to music and then took on tour, with Mr. Cohen’s recorded
voice reciting the words and Mr. Glass’s ensemble performing the music.
In 2008, Mr. Cohen hit the road for the
first time in 15 years for a grueling world tour, which would continue, with a
few short breaks, through 2010. He was driven, he acknowledged, at least in
part by financial necessity.
“It was a long, ongoing problem of a
disastrous and relentless indifference to my financial situation,” he told The
New York Times in 2009. “I didn’t even know where the bank was.”
Combined with a pair of CDs and
accompanying DVDs recorded in concert, “Live in London
Over that three-year period, Mr. Cohen
performed nearly 250 shows, many of them lasting more than three hours. He
seemed remarkably fit and limber, skipping across the stage, doing deep-knee
bends and occasionally dropping to his knees to sing.
The shows were not without incident:
During a show in Valencia , Spain
That pattern of extensive touring and
recording continued into the decade. In 2014, for instance, Mr. Cohen released
a CD of mostly new material, “Popular Problems,” as well as a three-CD, one-DVD
set called “Live in Dublin
Mr. Cohen never married, though he had
numerous liaisons and several long-term relationships, some of which he wrote
about. His survivors include two children, Adam and Lorca, from his
relationship with Suzanne Elrod, a photographer and artist who shot the cover
of his 1973 album, “Live Songs,” and is pictured on the cover of his critically
derided album “Death of a Ladies’ Man” (1977); and three grandchildren.
To the end, Mr. Cohen took a sardonic view
of both his craft and the human condition. In “Tower of Song
Now you can say that I’ve grown bitter, but
of this you may be sure
The rich have got their channels in the bedrooms of the poor
And there’s a mighty judgment coming, but I may be wrong
You see, you hear these funny voices in the tower of song.
The rich have got their channels in the bedrooms of the poor
And there’s a mighty judgment coming, but I may be wrong
You see, you hear these funny voices in the tower of song.
“The changeless is what he’s been about
since the beginning,” the writer Pico Iyer argued in the liner notes for the
anthology “The Essential Leonard Cohen.” “Some of the other great pilgrims of
song pass through philosophies and selves as if through the stations of the
cross. With Cohen, one feels he knew who he was and where he was going from the
beginning, and only digs deeper, deeper, deeper.”
.
