Music icon Leonard Cohen dies at 82
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Leonard Cohen, rock music’s man of letters whose songs fused religious imagery with themes of redemption and sexual desire, earning him critical and popular acclaim, has died at age 82.
“It is with profound sorrow we report that legendary poet, songwriter and artist Leonard Cohen has passed away,” a statement on his Facebook page said. “We have lost one of music’s most revered and prolific visionaries.”
The statement did not provide further details on Cohen’s death, and representatives for the singer could not be reached immediately for comment. It said a memorial was planned in Los Angeles, where Cohen had lived for many years.
“R.I.P. Leonard Cohen,” singer-songwriter Carole King said on Twitter.
Singer Roseanne Cash echoed the lyrics from Cohen’s song “Anthem” when she said in a tweet: “Leonard Cohen is dead. There’s a crack in everything. No light yet.”
Cohen, a Montreal native, was already a celebrated poet and novelist when he moved to New York in 1966 at age 31 to break into the music business.
Before long, critics were comparing him to Bob Dylan for the lyrical force of his songwriting.
Although he influenced many musicians and won many honors, including induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and the Order of Canada, Cohen rarely made the pop music charts with his sometimes moody folk-rock.
But Cohen’s most famous song, “Hallelujah,” in which he invoked the biblical King David and drew parallels between physical love and a desire for spiritual connection, has been covered hundreds of times since he released it in 1984.
“Hallelujah’s” long road to mass appeal was matched by Cohen’s own painstaking approach to writing it. He spent five years penning drafts, at one point banging his head on the floor of a hotel room in frustration.
Many of Cohen’s songs became hits for other artists, including Judy Collins, who helped Cohen gain fame by recording some of his early compositions in the 1960s.
Cohen’s most ardent admirers compared his works to spiritual prophecy. He sang about religion, with references to Jesus Christ and Jewish traditions, as well as love and sex, political upheaval, regret and what he once called the search for “a kind of balance in the chaos of existence.”
His lyrics were deeply personal and at times took on an element of prayer, as in 1969’s
“Bird on the Wire” in which he sang: “I swear by this song/And by all that I have done wrong/I will make it all up to thee.”
Cohen’s other well-known songs include “Suzanne,” “So Long, Marianne,” “Famous Blue Raincoat” and “The Future,” an apocalyptic 1992 recording in which he darkly intoned: “I’ve seen the future, brother/It is murder.”
The inspiration for “So Long, Marianne” was Cohen’s longtime romantic partner and muse Marianne Ihlen, a Norwegian woman he met while living on the Greek island of Hydra in the 1960s.
A New Yorker profile of Cohen last month recounted how, after being told in July she had only a few days left to live, he emailed her: “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.”
Two days later, he learned in an email she had died after reading his note.
Cohen toured extensively from 2008 to 2013 after being unable to collect most of a $9 million judgment against his former manager and lover, Kelley Lynch, who embezzled his savings.
He released an album, “You Want It Darker,” just last month. But The New Yorker described him as ailing, quoting him as saying he was more or less “confined to barracks” in his Los Angeles residence.
Cohen’s nasal voice and deep-bass, conversational vocals were criticized by some as being monotone. British musician Paul Weller once called his melancholy style “music to slit your wrists to.”
But his work was also suffused with irony and self-deprecating humor, often touching on his relationship with fame and his reputation for romantic entanglements.
“I got this rap as a kind of ladies’ man,” Cohen told Canada’s Globe and Mail in 2007. “And as I say in one of the poems, it has caused me to laugh, when I think of all the lonely nights.”
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau described Cohen as “a most remarkable Montrealer” who had “managed to reach the highest of artistic achievement, both as an acclaimed poet and a world-renowned singer-songwriter.”
Cohen was born on September 21, 1934, in Westmount, Quebec, the son of immigrants – his mother from Lithuania, and his father from Poland. His father died when he was nine years old.
Raised in the affluent English-speaking suburb of Montreal, Cohen read Spanish poet Federico García Lorca as a teenager, learned to play guitar from a flamenco musician, and formed a country band called the Buckskin Boys.
He attended McGill University in Montreal and published his first book of poetry shortly after graduation.
Living on grant money from the Canadian government and an inheritance from his family, Cohen published in the 1960s the poetry collections The Spice-Box of Earth and Flowers for Hitler, and novels The Favorite Game and Beautiful Losers.
But disillusioned with his meager income, Cohen turned to songwriting and landed an audition in 1967 with John Hammond, the producer who had discovered Dylan. Hammond signed him to Columbia Records, which would remain Cohen’s label for five decades.
Cohen toured widely but also sought solace in meditation, far from the public eye. For part of the 1990s, Cohen lived in a Zen Buddhist monastery in the San Gabriel Mountains just outside Los Angeles, where he handled tasks as menial as cleaning toilets.
Cohen, who never married, is survived by his daughter, Lorca, and his son, Adam.
Greer Fay Cashman adds:
President Reuven Rivlin and his wife, Nechama, have added their voices to those mourning the passing of Cohen. “It won’t be the same without him,” said the president, in a recorded statement, adding that when he and his wife got up in the morning and heard the news, “we looked at each other and uttered the same thought: Dance me to the end of love.
“That was the sound track to many moments in our lives as a couple and as a family. It gave us something deeply spiritual and sensitive as did his other songs, lifting us out of the mundane aspects of our lives. How sad it is to part from the man whose voice and face accompanied us for so many years: a creative giant, with a heart that was open to everyone, who also accompanied Israel on the battlefields and the years of growth. He never thought to change his clearly Jewish name Cohen, in order to gain wider recognition.”
Rivlin added that, with a single line in his notebook, Cohen could inspire and design the world of humanity better than any speech that was ever written. “Leonard will continue to dance alongside us till the end of love.”
Someone who knew Cohen close up was Marilyn Ambach, a freelance musician, concert promoter, event planner and producer who emigrated from Belgium in 2007, and worked with Cohen on his concert in Israel in September 2009.
In July 2010, Cohen invited her to join his world tour, which he performed over a four-and-ahalf month period in 45 cities in Europe, New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the US.
In an interview on Friday morning on Israel Radio, Ambach said that throughout the tour, they celebrated Shabbat with Kiddush and challah, and that Cohen was very much into upholding Jewish tradition. Wherever they stopped, she went in search of a Jewish bakeshop to buy the challah and typically Jewish cakes and cookies. •