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Leonard Cohen was the poet of brokenness. The noesis haunted the outset song that drew attention to him, "Suzanne": "Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water/And he spent a long time watching from his lonely wooden tower . . . /Merely he himself was broken, long before the heaven would open/Forsaken, most human, he sank beneath your wisdom similar a stone."
That brokenness was always there. Information technology proved cardinal to his music and to his body of poetry and literature (nobody else ever mastered all three disciplines as well as Cohen), and it marked "Hallelujah," his most famous vision of transcendence: "It'due south not a cry that y'all hear at nighttime/Information technology'south non somebody who'due south seen the light/It'due south a common cold and it's a broken hallelujah." It followed Cohen into a Zen monastery, where years of contemplation and prayer were sometimes as agonizing as the horror that had driven him there. It fifty-fifty appeared amid the final lines of the final song on his final record, released weeks before he died: "It's over at present, the h2o and the wine/We were broken then, merely at present nosotros're borderline."
But Cohen – who died on November 7th at age 82 – never submitted to the darkness. In a 1992 song, "Canticle," he sang, "There is a crack in everything/That'south how the light gets in." "Low has often been the general background of my daily life," Cohen told me. "My feeling is that whatever I did was in spite of that, not because of it. It wasn't the low that was the engine of my piece of work. . . . That was just the sea I swam in."
The piece of work wasn't ever dour. Cohen had a wry sense of humor that made its way into conversation and into the way he sometimes juxtaposed his tombstone voice with arch music. In "Tower of Song," he sang, "I was built-in similar this, I had no choice/I was born with the gift of a golden phonation."
But the combination of his voice and his songs' dark themes kept some at a altitude. Label head Walter Yetnikoff, explaining why he wouldn't release 1984's Various Positions (the album with "Hallelujah") in America, reportedly said, "Leonard, nosotros know you're bang-up, but we don't know if yous're whatever expert." Others did, though. For nearly l years, artists who followed Cohen – Patti Smith and Kurt Cobain among them – institute a brave nerve and sympathetic listen. (In "Pennyroyal Tea," Cobain sang, "Requite me a Leonard Cohen afterworld/Then I can sigh eternally.") "At that place are very, very few people who occupy the footing that Leonard Cohen walks on," Bono said. "This is our Shelley, this is our Byron."
Many more sang his music – specially "Hallelujah," the song Columbia once wouldn't release. It took Cohen v years to write, and he pared down dozens of verses to four. The song might have languished in obscurity, had not John Cale recorded it for a 1991 Cohen tribute album. That recording plant its way to Jeff Buckley, who reworked the song into the incandescent version that would be used, over and over, in movies, TV shows, nine/11 tributes. There are more than 300 versions, including a famous i by Rufus Wainwright (who fathered one of Cohen's grandchildren) – so many that even Cohen complained about its ubiquity. "I call up it's a good song," he said in 2009. "Only I think too many people sing it."
"Hallelujah" was a liturgy of rejoicing that was also honest about God's deceits, and information technology had emerged at the virtually broken bespeak in Leonard Cohen's career. "I wanted to stand with those who clearly run across G-d's holy broken world for what it is, and yet observe the courage or the heart to praise it," he once wrote. "You don't e'er go what y'all want. You're not always up for the challenge. But in this example – information technology was given to me."
The challenge, though, got much worse earlier the light got in.
Leonard Cohen was years older than the folk and stone & roll artists whose ranks he eventually joined, even if they got there first. He was born September 21st, 1934, in Westmount, Quebec, an English language-speaking city on the island of Montreal, into a middle-course Jewish family. His female parent, Masha, was the daughter of an author and Talmudic scholar. It was the family of his male parent, Nathan, though, who had been intrinsic in Montreal's Jewish history. Leonard'south grandfather had established organizations that aided Russian Jews. Nathan himself wasn't a religious figure in the urban center's Jewish customs. He'd served in the Canadian ground forces during World State of war I, simply afterward his health declined, and he ran a high-end wear business concern (Leonard, equally biographer Sylvie Simmons wrote in I'm Your Man, "was raised in a firm of suits").
Both Masha's temperament and Nathan's death – when Leonard was nine – had a not bad effect on Cohen. "My mother was a refugee and witnessed the destruction of her own milieu in Russia," he told me in 2001. "I think she was justifiably melancholy most something, in the sense of a Chekhovian character. Information technology was both comic and self-aware. But I would not draw her as morbidly melancholy, every bit I was. . . . The expiry of my father was significant, and the expiry of my domestic dog were the two, I would say, major events of my babyhood and my adolescence."
Montreal's Catholic sensibility would inform Cohen's works equally affectingly equally his Jewish groundwork. "The effigy of Jesus always touched me, and however does," he told me in 2001. "Love your enemy. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth. These views were not foreign to the Jewish education I'd had, but I felt they were a radical refinement of sure principles."
Long before mystery junctions between spirit and flesh made their fashion into Cohen's songs, he had already established himself as an unorthodox and powerful poet and author. His mother had encouraged him in those ways. His early on influences included metaphysical poets – Andrew Marvell, John Donne, W.B. Yeats – and W.H. Auden, who mixed cultural and religious themes. Nobody affected him so much equally surrealist Castilian poet Federico GarcÃa Lorca, who collected Spain'south folk songs, turning them into poetry, before he was executed by Castilian nationalist forces in 1936. Cohen also heard socialist folk songs from a director at summer army camp. "The lyrics of these songs," he said, "touched me: 'To you, beloved comrade, nosotros make this solemn vow/The fight volition go on. . . /We pledge our bodies down/The fight will proceed.' A very passionate and heroic position." Around the same fourth dimension, Cohen started a country band called the Buckskin Boys.
When he was 17, Cohen entered McGill University as an English major. Aspirations to mythology and possibility – along with an ambition for women – came early on and forcibly. Looking back on his early writing, Cohen believed that Montreal's lack of any recognized centrality to the world of art, literature and ideas may accept turned out to be a benefaction for him and his Canadian compatriots. "It was completely open-concluded," he said. "The atmosphere of our meetings and gatherings in Montreal cafes and private houses was that this was the most important thing that was going on in Canada – that we were the legislators of mankind, that we had a redemptive function in some way. . . . But yous couldn't even stand up on the campus and say you were a poet and expect to become a date. There was no prestige attached to the matter."
That began to alter for Cohen in 1956, when he published his first book, Let The states Compare Mythologies. "Those were the poems I wrote between the ages of 15 and xx," Cohen told me in 1988. "They were as skillful equally anything I ever did." Cohen's next book, The Spice-Box of World, increased his audition beyond Montreal, and won him critical acclamation as an important new poet; his debut novel, The Favourite Game, followed in 1963. Cohen had moved to London in 1959, then to the Greek island of Hydra the next year, where he paid $1,500 for a three-story business firm.
On Hydra, he lived with the first of his legendary romances, Marianne Ihlen, from Oslo. Years after, Ihlen told an interviewer that Cohen showed "enormous compassion for me and my child. I felt it throughout my trunk." The relationship with Ihlen began an classic of sorts for Cohen: He would be drawn by an ideal of romantic meaning and passion, but in close quarters information technology could prove difficult – even in a setting as outlying as Hydra. Things turned tempestuous. David Remnick of The New Yorker noted that Ihlen could go enraged when she drank, and that neither she nor Cohen proved faithful. "All the girls were panting for him," Ihlen after said. "I would dare go as far as to say that I was on the verge of killing myself due to it."
Cohen worked on a second novel, Cute Losers, while living on Hydra. It just about cost him his mind. In 2001, he told me, "I recall I was slightly demented and frenzied during the whole creation of the thing. I knew that it was a living work. I wrote information technology outside in the Greek lord's day, on a piddling folding table in the back of my house. I knew that something was unfolding, and in that location was a joyous activity behind information technology – only, as I say, slightly crazed, which freed the writing tremendously. I was smoking grass and taking acid from fourth dimension to time.
"At a sure point, I went into the room and I got upwards on a chair and started writing effectually the wall in gold paint: 'I change I am the same, I change I am the same, I change I am the same, I change I am the aforementioned. . . .' That'southward the but matter I ever wrote on acrid, and it appears in the volume." Eventually, he collapsed from burnout and had to be hospitalized. Marianne tended to him. "I would like to say that it fabricated me saintly," he said.
Beautiful Losers was published in 1966. Information technology is a genuinely daring, groundbreaking and startlingly sexual work almost a human'south search for identity, memory, purpose and transcendence amongst a boundless weave of romantic, religious and historical betrayals – and the book's unexpected and bewildering cease can genuinely lift the top of your caput off. Merely every bit Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" opened up new territories in American literature in 1956, Beautiful Losers opened up new perspectives nearly form and time in modern fiction. Cohen had the imagination and facility to achieve the sort of literary repute bestowed on authors like Thomas Pynchon and Henry Miller. Only he had something entirely different in mind.
Cohen returned to Montreal from Hydra in 1966 to find Beautiful Losers reaping attention. Some reviews compared him to James Joyce, for the book'south stream-of-consciousness style, though Cohen took it far beyond, into phantasmagoria. I paper deemed it "verbal masturbation." The Toronto Daily Star called information technology "the most revolting book ever written in Canada" but also the "Canadian book of the year." Yet information technology was plain that the story he had almost demolished himself for might push his fate simply not his fortunes. Despite his success, he couldn't pay his hire. "I'd published two novels and two or iii books of poems," he told me in 2001. "I didn't look to make a living out of the poetry, only I thought that I could make ane writing novels. But there were but maybe 3,000 copies of Beautiful Losers worldwide."
Cohen, though, began to sense a new possibility for himself. "Living in Hellenic republic nigh of the time, I had been completely unaware of the whole renaissance in music that was taking place in the early and centre 1960s. Still, I was playing a lot of guitar and I idea, 'It's all right being a author – I always desire to be a author – merely I think I'd like to get to Nashville and brand some country-western records. . . . I decided, 'That's going to build me up.' I had some songs sketched out."
On his way, Cohen stopped off in New York and found his work had preceded him. He met songwriters similar Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs, and at Max'due south Kansas City he ran into Lou Reed, who would subsequently conscript him into the Stone and Curl Hall of Fame. "All these guys knew what I had written," he told me. "Romantic figures, these troubadours. They were me; that'southward what I was, drifting around the globe, speaking from the heart and occupying a sure mythological life. I felt very close to them."
In 1966, Judy Collins recorded "Suzanne," and the tune enjoyed widespread fame. Collins besides recorded "Apparel Rehearsal Rag," an early example of what some saw equally Cohen's morbid streak. "Talk near dark," Collins subsequently told Sylvie Simmons. "A song most suicide. I attempted suicide myself at fourteen, before I found folk music, then of course I loved information technology." Collins prevailed on Cohen to begin performing alive in 1967; he was scared and reluctant, merely the crowd took to him, and he played a number of successful festival dates that year.
Around that same fourth dimension, Columbia Records producer and A&R person John Hammond (who had signed and/or produced artists such as Count Basie, Billie Holiday, Bob Dylan and Aretha Franklin, amid others) visited Cohen'due south single-room residence at the Chelsea Hotel to hear the author's material. He signed Cohen to Columbia, which released his debut, Songs of Leonard Cohen, in 1968. The record clearly established a reputation for Cohen as somebody who spoke for those who feel lost and are in search of any saving grace, whether information technology be religion or sexual activity. A young man tenant of Cohen's at the Chelsea Hotel – legendary archivist Harry Everett Smith, who compiled the hugely influential Anthology of American Folk Music – ran into Cohen one day at the hotel and said, "Leonard, I know a lot of people are congratulating you on the lyrics, but I desire yous to know, the tunes are really good." Talking to me in 2001, Cohen smiled at the memory. "It'south truthful," he says, "nobody was mentioning the tunes; it was all about the lyrics and my 'seriousness.'"
That seriousness was no human action. Cohen found himself increasingly forlorn in New York. Marianne and her son had followed him to the city, just the relationship betwixt her and Cohen was coming toward its end. "People talk about loneliness," Cohen told me, "just I really passed days without speaking to anybody. Sometimes weeks where the merely contact I would accept was with the adult female I bought cigarettes from, and a day could be redeemed by her grinning. . . . Information technology was a difficult menstruum, and it didn't stop being difficult for a long time. . . . I understood that a lot of other people must be in this predicament, because I have these biblical metaphors circumvoluted around in my mind. I began to develop this thought that some catastrophe was taking place. I couldn't see why I couldn't make contact."
Cohen and Marianne Ihlen separated during this fourth dimension. In 1969, he met 19-year-old Suzanne Elrod, kick off a rocky relationship that lasted almost a decade. Elrod would get Cohen's common-law wife and the mother to his son, Adam, and his girl, Lorca. Simply Cohen sometimes resented how Elrod forced bonds on him ("She outwitted me at every turn," he once said).
Cohen recorded his adjacent few albums in Nashville with producer Bob Johnston, who also worked with Johnny Cash, Marty Robbins, the Byrds, Simon and Garfunkel, and Dylan. Cohen'due south tunes and vocals oft had a narrow range during these years that fit his dour image. But with 1974's New Pare for the Former Ceremony, produced by John Lissauer, Cohen's darkness took on greater vibrancy and mellifluence; it was his best anthology to that date, and his saddest, and included the portrait of an see with Janis Joplin: "I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel/You were talking so brave and and then sweet/Giving me head on the unmade bed/While the limousines await in the street. . . /I remember you lot well in the Chelsea Hotel/You were famous, your centre was a fable."
In 1977, Cohen collaborated with producer Phil Spector on Death of a Ladies' Man. It is the merely wreck in Cohen'south torso of work, though the disaster owed more to Spector, whose megalomania had already turned paranoid. "He would enter into a kind of Wagnerian mood when he was in the studio," Cohen told me, "and was quite mad at the time. Merely I too had some kind of trust in his method – I respected his piece of work and then much. I hoped that somehow at some phase in the production it would've coalesced into something that I institute more highly-seasoned. It didn't." Spector was fond of guns and sometimes locked people into the studio. At one bespeak, he absconded with the masters of Cohen'south album. "I was kind of stuck with what we got," Cohen said in 2001. "I suppose I could have vetoed the whole project. I'yard not fifty-fifty certain about that. But that would've been the merely weapon I'd had in the state of affairs."
I met Leonard Cohen for the first time in 1979, at a Mexican restaurant in Hollywood called El Compadre. Rolling Rock's Paul Nelson had called and asked me to write a preview of Cohen's new album. I hesitated. This was out of the bluish, no chance to prepare, and I plant Cohen's work daunting. "Go," Nelson said. "You'll love him. He's a complete admirer." When I arrived at El Compadre, a Mexicali band was serenading. Cohen sabbatum in a red leather booth; elegant, dark-haired women on either side of him, fixed past his charm. It was like the encompass of Death of a Ladies' Man.
We talked for a couple of hours, and as Nelson had prepared me, Cohen was the best-mannered person – interview subject or not – I'd always encountered. We talked a little most the debacle with Spector. He admitted he didn't look his new tape, Contempo Songs, to provide any long-overdue breakthrough (his first anthology, Songs of Leonard Cohen, was his bestseller until 1988). He didn't have an American characterization at the moment. "My music is considered kind of eccentric in America," he said. "Record companies don't promote me with the same fervor they would someone with Superlative twenty potential."
The conversation went well, and we talked some more, including i or two trans-Atlantic telephone interviews, while Cohen was in Europe. During one post-midnight discussion, I asked him nigh "The Guests," which opens Contempo Songs. Information technology reminded me of a Chekhovian tale, or James Joyce's "The Dead," which implied a sense of warmth or community, just the more than the guests gathered, the more than isolated they seemed from ane another, and information technology eventually turns into a meditation on death that embraces humanity across the gathering.
Cohen – who drank a fine bottle of something as we talked – aware me: "Its sensibility is sponsored past the poems of Rumi and Attar, who are Farsi poets of the 12th and 13th centuries. I estimate it's a religious song, just well-nigh our strangerhood on the Earth and how it'south resolved. 'One by one, the guests arrive/Guests are coming through/The openhearted many/The brokenhearted few.'" From in that location, Cohen launched into a line-by-line exegesis of the song. The guests, he suggested, inquire, "Where is God? Where is truth? Where is life?"
Many songwriters would never bare such groundwork idea: It's too much commitment to their own meanings, or an admission that they might be uncertain of those meanings. Cohen knew every inch of what any of his songs signified – he explained others that night, meticulously – and if some of his phrases or images seemed cryptic, he was not. Every bit we kept talking, I heard the clink of a bottleneck on a glass. Cohen chuckled. "Drunk," he said. "Drunk again."
Columbia Records released Recent Songs a brusk time later, and maybe regretted it. The anthology'south solemn themes didn't connect with a wide audition. The same went for Various Positions, in 1984. This time, Columbia didn't bother with a release in the U.S. Years later, receiving a Grammy Award for Lifetime Achievement, Cohen said of the music industry, "In fact, I was always touched past the modesty of their interest as to my work." In our 1979 chat, he'd said, "When I await back and examine my work, it's no mystery to me that it hasn't made a big splash however. But I never thought, 'I will create this kind of art song.' Everything I wrote, I wrote for everybody."
For Cohen's next album, I'm Your Homo (1988), he turned to electronic instrumentation – sometimes menacing, sometimes glimmering – on tracks like the haunting "Tower of Song," and virtually memorably on the opening track, "First Nosotros Take Manhattan." It was danceable, just it was besides menacing, a sinister and tense depiction of social plummet and a terrorist's revenge.
At his Carnegie Hall appearance in July 1988, it was as if the song were a telephone call to battle. I met with Cohen at his hotel, just off Central Park. It was a sweltering afternoon, simply Cohen was in a chalk-striped double-breasted suit. We talked for hours. He addressed the foreboding in his new music – scarier, more outward-directed than anything he'd done earlier, but also full of nighttime humor. He talked of an apocalyptic scenario that had befallen humanity – a plague, a flop, the refuse of our political systems – even if humanity had not however realized it. At one point he stood up, slipped off his pants and folded them neatly over the back of another chair. Information technology was a sensible affair to practise. It was such a hot day; why wrinkle the slacks to a prissy adapt? Cohen kept on his jacket and necktie, his socks, shoes and bluish-and-white-lined boxer shorts as he sat back downwardly.
At that place was a knock. "Excuse me," said Cohen. He rose and pulled his slacks back on, opened the door and signed for a cold soda he'd ordered for me. He handed me the potable, took his slacks off and folded them again. He flashed a warm smile. I realized I had but been given an example of how one behaves with poise, even while contemplating the terminate of days.
Though much of what Cohen had to say that day was portentous, I failed to understand that he wasn't speaking simply from an interesting philosophical or political perspective. On his next drove, 1992'southward The Future (extra Rebecca De Mornay, who was his girlfriend then, has a co-producer credit), it seemed that sense of sociopolitical foreboding and apprehension might be prophetic, that his new songs were also revealing – maybe more than clearly than ever earlier – a distress that lay deep inside his ain mind, heart and history.
I'm Your Homo and The Future were some other pair of masterpieces – this time, though, they got attending. The songs were played at clubs and used in movies, and their combination of tones and images fit the times. They were the biggest hits of the artist's career. At age 58, Leonard Cohen seemed – improbably – on acme of the world. Then he walked away from everything in his life.
As it turned out, Cohen had in 1994 taken up residence at a Zen monastery on Mount Baldy, an hour northeast of Los Angeles. The site was previously a Boy Watch camp, 6,500 anxiety upward the mountain, run past Cohen'south longtime Zen primary, Kyozan Joshu Sasaki Roshi. Cohen studied periodically with him for 40 years, and saw him as a friend, sage and kind of father. During the recording of Various Positions, Cohen took the Zen master to a session in New York. "This was a time when all the news virtually me was bad and depressing," he said, "razor blades and all that stuff. The next morning, I said to him, 'What did you call back, Roshi?' He said, 'Leonard, you should sing more sad.' Everybody was telling me quite the contrary. Simply he saw that I hadn't gone where I could go, with my voice, with my trip. It was like the deepest, and at the same time the almost businesslike, communication. He saw that my voice could go low, that I could become deep into the material consciously – that I could explore things."
Then, just as unassumingly equally he took leave of his life, Cohen likewise took leave of the monastery, and returned to his family and friends. In the fall of 2001, he released an album, Ten New Songs. In contrast to the often-acerbic themes that dominated I'm Your Man and The Future, Cohen's new LP was about the sad-eyed credence and total-hearted love that come after the fires of suffering and the advent of historic period. It was non about a fearsome futurity only rather about a tolerant nowadays. Deep in the folds of the album there were hints nearly the mysteries that had surrounded Cohen in the 1990s: Why did he leave the world behind when the world finally seemed ready for him?
"There was no sense of dissatisfaction with my career," he told me 1 afternoon in 2001. Nosotros were sitting in his recording studio, built above the garage behind his modest firm in Los Angeles' Mid-Wilshire district. "On the contrary," he continued, "if anything, it was, well, this is what it'due south like to succeed. But the predicament, the daily predicament, was such that there wasn't much nourishment from that kind of retrospection.
"By the time I finished my bout in 1993, I was in some status of anguish that deepened and deepened. Prozac didn't work. Paxil didn't piece of work. Zoloft didn't piece of work. Wellbutrin didn't piece of work. In fact, the only comic element in the whole thing was when I was taking Prozac, I came to believe that I had overcome my [sexual] desires. I didn't know that information technology has that side effect. I thought it was a spiritual achievement."
The daily regimen of life at the Zen center was sometimes preoccupation enough. "Retrieve of a Male child Scout campsite," Cohen said. "There are a lot of small cabins, a mess hall and some kind of recreation hall that had been converted into a Zen meditation hall. Just maintenance took the whole twenty-four hour period just to keep the affair going. Pipes would burst in the winter. You lot get up at 2:30 or 3 in the forenoon, depending on your duties. I concluded up as 1 of Roshi's personal assistants, and I was cooking for him." After a year, Cohen was ordained every bit a Buddhist monk. "None of this represented the solution to a crisis of faith," Cohen told me. "I looked at it as a sit-in of solidarity with the community. I was never looking for a new religion. I was perfectly satisfied with my onetime religion."
Other times, the Zen life wasn't enough. "I was sitting in the meditation hall one afternoon," said Cohen, "and I thought, 'This sucks. This whole scene sucks.' And I moved from that into cataloging the various negative feelings I had for the mother of my children. I found myself descending into a bonfire of hatred, you know – that bitch, what she'd done to me, what she left me with, how she wrecked the whole fucking scene. I was in at that place, I was in my robes, and the furthest affair from my mind was spiritual advancement. The furthest. I mean, I was consumed with rage."
That day, Cohen'southward rage gave way to a moment of unexpected grace, a kind of temporary epiphany. "At that place was sunlight on the floor of the cabin, where nosotros were waiting to become come across Roshi," he said. "There were leaves outside and the shadow of these leaves was on the floor. The wind moved, something moved, and I disappeared into this motility. . . . The whole scene blew upwardly. A dog started barking, and I was barking. And everything that arose was the content of my being. Everything that moved was me. . . . In certain blessed moments, nosotros experience ourselves as the reality that is manifesting equally everything. There'southward no 'I am one with the universe,' which is the cheapest mystical slogan." Cohen paused. "There is that moment," he continued, "and it decides that life is worth living. I was barking with the dog, but there actually was no dog."
But dread yet arose, and it could obliterate the cocky. Afterwards several years at the camp, Cohen had decided information technology was fourth dimension to leave. He was driving to the aerodrome, and, he said, "the bottom dropped out. This floor that was supposed to be at that place wasn't there. It was dreadful. I pulled my automobile over to the side of the route. I reached back and I got my shaving kit, and I took out all the medication and threw it out the window and I said, 'Fuck this. If I'g going to get down, I want to go down clear-eyed.' And so, I went back to the army camp and I did those next few weeks, which were pure hell, and during that time, I picked up a volume by an Indian writer by the proper noun of Balsekar."
Ramesh Balsekar was a Hindu mentor who lived in Mumbai and wrote about a concept called "non-dualism," adult in Hindu and Buddhist traditions. In 1999, Cohen departed Mount Baldy and headed to Mumbai. He spent a year studying with Balsekar. "The model I finally understood," he recalled, "suggested that in that location actually is no fixed cocky. The conventional therapeutic wisdom today encourages the sufferer to become in touch with his inner feelings – as if there were an inner self, a true self, the existent self that we have glimmerings of in dreams and insights. . . . There is no real inner self to control your loyalty and the tyranny of your investigation. What happened to me was not that I got whatever answers, but that the questions dissolved. As 1 of Balsekar's students said, 'I believe in cause and outcome, merely I don't know which is which.'"
Slowly, the depression eased. "Past imperceptible degrees, something happened, and it lifted," Cohen connected. "Information technology lifted, and it hasn't come dorsum for ii and a half years. That's my existent story. I don't feel like saying, 'I've been saved,' throwing my crutches up in the air. But I have been. Since that depression has lifted – and I don't know whether it's permanent or temporary – I nonetheless accept the same appetite to write." 10 New Songs was perhaps the loveliest and well-nigh gracious album Cohen had made. "The Future came out of suffering," he said. "This came out of celebration."
The evening had come. It was time to current of air upwards. Cohen told me, "I similar what Tennessee Williams said. He said, 'Life is a fairly well-written play except for the third act. Information technology'due south a badly written third act.' I feel I'm at the beginning of the 3rd act. By the stop of the third act, which nobody tin can predict, it can be pretty hairy. I merely know that life is worth living."
Cohen's tertiary act proved more than eventful than he – or anyone – could have anticipated. It perhaps even included a fourth act. Cohen followed Ten New Songs with Honey Heather (2004), and in 2006 he co-wrote and produced Blue Alert, by Anjani Thomas, a backup singer and touring keyboardist in Cohen's band. The 2 were as well romantic partners during this period, though Cohen spoke of the relationship with a characteristic uncertainty, describing them as "impossibly solitudinous people . . . I like to wake upward alone, and she likes to exist alone." In 2006, Cohen likewise put out Book of Longing – a collection of 167 previously unpublished poems and drawings, by and large written at the Zen monastery.
In 2004, a new devastation hit. His girl, Lorca, was tipped off that his longtime managing director Kelley Lynch ("not simply his manager but a close friend, nigh part of the family," Sylvie Simmons wrote) had been stealing from the singer. Lynch had misappropriated more than than $5 meg from Cohen's bank accounts, retirement funds and charitable trust funds. Information technology had begun as early as 1996. Cohen had granted Lynch ability of attorney over his finances, and she had persuaded him to sell many of his publishing rights.
Cohen fired Lynch and tried to come to terms with her. Lynch'due south lawyers insisted, wrote Simmons, that she "had been given the say-so to exercise what she did." Cohen had to sue Lynch, or else he would've been accountable for the debts she'd incurred for him. She ignored the suit, including orders of discovery. She attacked Cohen online and wrote long, disparaging e-mails to him, his family unit, the IRS and even the Buddhist community. (They settled that arrange, and Lynch was ordered to pay Cohen more than than $5 million.)
With local sheriffs' assist, Cohen reclaimed notebooks and correspondence with Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Allen Ginsberg. In March 2012, Lynch was arrested for violating a permanent protective order that forbade her from contacting Cohen. "It makes me feel very witting nigh my environment," he told the courtroom. "Every time I run into a car deadening downwards, I go worried." Lynch was found guilty on all charges and sentenced to 18 months in prison. Cohen never recovered virtually of the money that Lynch had embezzled. Essentially, he institute himself back in the position he had known in 1966, when he accepted that Beautiful Losers wouldn't sustain him financially.
And so, in the summertime of 2008, at age 73, Leonard Cohen launched an astounding concert tour that would last, off and on, for 5 years. He played songs from all phases of his career backed by a meticulously rehearsed band; he played for three hours, and sometimes longer, well-nigh nights; he skipped on- and offstage. Reviewers routinely said the shows were amidst the best they'd always seen.
"I never thought I'd tour again," he told Rolling Stone in 2012, "although I did take dreams. Sometimes my dreams would entail me being upwardly onstage and non remembering the words or the chords. It had a nightmarish quality, which did not invite me to pursue the enterprise." And however his bandmates noted how much he came alive, dark after night. "There's a certain fatigue I guess you could locate," Cohen said most the hundreds of shows, "but when the response is warm and tangible, one is invigorated rather than depleted."
Touring, it turned out, was just the start of Cohen's remarkable comeback. He recorded a new album in 2012, Old Songs. He followed it with Pop Issues in 2014, and then, just weeks before his death, Yous Desire Information technology Darker. These records took the ambience of Ten New Songs and Dearest Heather and deepened it into R&B-derived electronic furrows of beat and dazzler.
During the final twelvemonth or so of his life, Cohen moved into the second floor of Lorca's home in suburban Los Angeles. He had been contesting cancer for some time. Other wellness problems, including multiple fractures of the spine, kept him from traveling. Even so, he saw his kids and grandkids often. Adam served as producer on Yous Want It Darker, turning Leonard'south home into a makeshift studio. Seated in a medical chair and using medical marijuana to numb his pain, his father merely had to sing. "Now, at the end of his career," Adam told Rolling Stone weeks before his male parent'south decease, "perhaps at the terminate of his life, he'due south at the summit of his powers."
In July, Cohen learned that Marianne Ihlen was dying of cancer in Kingdom of norway. They had remained friendly – which Cohen had managed with almost of his former lovers. Information technology'southward hard to say whether romantic honey e'er truly fulfilled him. It often seemed inseparable from his quest for God or relief. "I had a stiff sexual drive that overpowered every other consideration," he said in 2001. "My appetite for intimacy, and not but physical intimacy, was so intense that I was simply interested in the essence of things. . . . Information technology was unavoidably intense, the hunt, the gratification. It wasn't specially enjoyable. It was merely an appetite. . . . And consequently, misunderstandings and suffering from both parties arose. When that attribute dissolved, the friendship became clearer. I tend not to lose people in my life."
Cohen wrote to his lover: "Well Marianne, it's come to this fourth dimension when we are really and then sometime and our bodies are falling autonomously and I recollect I volition follow you lot very soon. Know that I am and so close behind you that if yous stretch out your manus, I recall you tin achieve mine. And you know that I've always loved y'all for your dazzler and your wisdom, but I don't need to say anything more than about that because you know all about that. But now, I just desire to wish you a very practiced journey. Cheerio old friend. Endless honey, see yous down the road." Remnick reports that Cohen before long heard dorsum from a friend of Marianne's in Norway: "She lifted her paw, when you said you were correct behind, close enough to reach her. Information technology gave her deep peace of mind that you knew her status."
Cohen was right: He wasn't far behind. Co-ordinate to The New York Times, he was working on a new book of poetry and ii more musical projects: string arrangements of his songs and a set of R&B-inspired tunes. Then: "Leonard Cohen died during his sleep post-obit a fall in the middle of the nighttime on November. 7," the singer's manager, Robert B. Kory, said in a argument. "The death was sudden, unexpected and peaceful."
Cohen simply got improve at the cease, creating a trilogy of albums nearly mortality, apprehension and poise. They were full of entreaty and peril, and were driven by a sepulchral voice (owned by "only me and Johnny Cash," he'd said with a laugh) that sounded like truth across question. He ever aspired to better angels, only he besides admitted to – in fact, took a certain relief and pride in – an honest assessment of his less merciful side. On the belatedly albums, he wasn't but proclaiming prayers merely too saw a duty for penance, in himself and all around him, in the broken hearts and spirits of a broken globe.
"This sounds like the about hackneyed 19th-century platitude," Cohen once told me, "simply in the midst of my ain tiny personal troubles, I turned to the affair I knew how to exercise and I made songs out of it, and in the making of those songs, much of the pain was dissolved. That is one of the things that art does, is that it heals. A man who makes those choices in his own life is frequently more beautiful than his works. Any artist who remains true to himself becomes a piece of work of art himself, considering that is one of the virtually difficult things to do. If someone does accept that vocation, and diligently applies himself to the exigencies that arise, he volition lose a swell bargain but he will have created his own graphic symbol."
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