AWARENESS OF DEATH WAS PART OF THE FABRIC OF THIS SUPREME LYRICIST’S ART
LEONARD Cohen meant everything to me, and to every lover of lyrical music. He was a musical spirit guide through the biggest issues of existence, singing about love, sex, family, mortality, the impossible questions of how to live a moral life in a seemingly indifferent universe. You listened to Cohen sing and you knew he was in the struggle with you.
The solace to take from his death is that death was in the fabric of his art. He never shrank from it, but faced this greatest of mysteries with equanimity, humour, courage and curiosity. “I’m ready, my Lord,” he sang on the title track of what has turned out to be his final album, You
Want It Darker, released last month.
I met Cohen a few times, and he did not disappoint. Small and dapper, he comported himself with humility, treating everyone in his path with kindness and respect.
He weighed his words with care. He came over like a cross between a sage Old Testament prophet and a wry comedian.
He rose to prominence as a poet and novelist, only turning to songwriting in his early 30s. He released his debut album, The Songs
of Leonard Cohen, in 1968 to much acclaim, although for some Cohen’s doleful voice would always be synonymous with “bedsits and razor blades”.
For his admirers, the wit in his songs always leavened the darkness of his subject matter, while the gravity, nuance and warmth of his delivery overwhelmed any reservations about its sweetness.
Perhaps because of his reputation as a wordsmith, Cohen’s musicality is often overlooked. “I never did set poetry to music,” he insisted. “That was a bum rap. I know the difference between a poem and a song.” His greatest work draws mysterious depths and soulful resonance from binding epigrammatic lyricism with flowing melodiousness, which is surely the very essence of the art of song. Age suited him, even the decay in his voice suited him, as if the depths in his work were becoming manifest. In 1992 his album The
Future included a telling couplet “I have seen the future, baby / It is murder.” He was 58 then but already regarded as ancient in pop music years.
For him, his art was an act of personal resistance, offering its own way to salvation. Asked if a song could ever really offer solutions to political problems, he said: “Hmmm. I think the song itself is a kind of solution.”
Music has lost one of the greats of our time but we will hear that voice as long as we are listening out, echoing around the tower of song, offering succour to anyone who seeks it.