At 82, Cohen admits he is ‘ready to die’
Singer’s 14th studio album out next week
Leonard Cohen, the seminal singer whose deep, inimitable baritone has offered dark yarns exploring the intersections of sex, death and religion for more than 50 years, has never been a particularly cheery subject.
He’s always seemed much older than his years.
In 1988, he sang, “My friends are gone, and my hair is grey. I ache in the places where I used to play.” He was only in his 50s.
Now, preparing to release his 14th studio album, You Want It Darker, on Oct. 21, he sat down with The New Yorker’s David Remnick and discussed his life. But what was the most eye-opening was his openness and acceptance of his impending death.
The profile covered his life — from putting out his first record in 1967, after spending years living in London, writing poems and living on a $ 3,000 grant from the Canada Council for the Arts to his lifelong battle with depression that led him to become a monk in 1996 — but about 80 per cent into the piece, his thoughts turned to death.
Cohen has never shied away from the subject in his music. Furthermore, he is 82 years old and in poor health. When Remnick, unbeknown to him, arrived late for one of their scheduled interviews, Cohen sternly called it “a form of elder abuse.”
His reasoning, as Remnick hinted, was he doesn’t have much time left on earth — he doesn’t want to waste it waiting for a magazine writer.
Age has already robbed Cohen of a certain smoothness in his basso. It has become rough and grizzly, and somehow deeper — still adored by fans, but in a different way. That became clear while he was rehearsing old songs during his 2007 tour.
“I hadn’t played any of these songs for 15 years,” Cohen said. “My voice had changed. My range had changed. I didn’t know what to do. There was no way I could transpose the positions that I knew.”
Even now, t hough, as Remnick writes, “The depth of his voice makes Tom Waits sound like Eddie Kendricks.”
Nonetheless, Cohen continued to tour — in 2009 he played his first show in Israel since 1985 — but time kept marching on, taking his health with it. By 2013, after 46 years, the man who has been called the Bard of the Boudoir and the King of Melancholy likely played his final show on the road.
“The musicians all knew this was not only the last night of a long voyage but, for Cohen, perhaps the last voyage,” Remnick writes. “‘Everybody knows that everything has to end some time,’ (collaborator) Sharon Robinson told me. ‘So, as we left, there was the thought: This is it.’ ”
Now, Cohen is hoping to wrap up songs, poems, all the unfinished projects that fill an artist’s life. But he finds it difficult.
“I don’t know how many other things I’ll be able to get to, because at this particular stage I experience deep fatigue .... There are times when I just have to lie down. I can’t play anymore, and my back goes fast also,” he said, adding, “The big change is the proximity to death. I am a tidy kind of guy. I like to tie up the strings if I can. If I can’t, also, that’s OK. But my natural thrust is to finish things that I’ve begun.”
Death has arguably been on Cohen’s mind since he began writing poetry, if not before, but it appears to have taken hold more of late.
In July, Marianne Ihlen, his lover and muse when he lived in Greece during the 1960s, died at the age of 81. She’s the subject of So Long, Marianne, in which the beyond- his- years 33- year- old sang to his similarly aged girlfriend, “We met when we were almost young.”
Before she died, Cohen sent her a letter that was read to her on her deathbed.
“It said, ‘ Well Marianne it’s come to this time when we are really so old and our bodies are falling apart and I think I will follow you very soon. Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine.’ ”
It likely doesn’t help that Cohen’s contemporaries, the ones who planted the seeds for modern rock and folk music, are slowly diminishing in number. They include David Bowie, who died this year and who recorded a final album, Blackstar, that reflected on his approaching death.
Cohen wonders about his own unfinished songs.
“I don’t think I’ ll be able to finish those songs. Maybe, who knows? And maybe I’ ll get a second wind, I don’t know,” he told Remnick.
His thoughts on the process seem clear, direct and business like.
“I’ ve got some work to do. Take care of business,” he said. “I am ready to die. I hope it’s not too uncomfortable. That’s about it for me.”