The Lyrics of
LEONARD
COHEN
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Introduction
Leonard Cohen claimed that as a young man he had turned from writing poetry to writing songs as a way of making money. Looking back on this career move he wryly acknowledged the foolishness of such a plan. Nevertheless, he did eventually become wealthy in the music business before being cheated out of his retirement fund by a dishonest manager. Even this catastrophe had benign consequences, obliging him to start touring again in his seventies to great acclaim and triggering a long and triumphant final chapter in a distinguished career.
All of this was prefigured some 40 years earlier in the circumstances surrounding his famous song ‘Suzanne’ which started life as a 1966 poem, ‘Suzanne Takes You Down’ and became a 1967 song to be included on his first album and released as a single. In time, it would become one of his most covered songs. He claimed the song had been stolen from him (‘Someone smarter than me got me to sign the publishing over to them’) but concluded that this was perhaps fitting since its subject, Suzanne Verdal, had been another man’s wife. In fact she was the partner of a Québécois artist Armand Vaillancourt at the time Cohen enjoyed his platonic trysts with her in ‘her place by the (St. Lawrence) River’.
Cohen was born in 1934 to a middle-class Jewish family in Montréal. His parents were Marsha (née Klonitsky) and Nathan Cohen, the proprietor of a clothing store. Leonard’s progress through local elementary and high schools was engaged but unremarkable. Musically he had been much influenced by his mother’s singing of Russian melodies around the house. He learned to play acoustic guitar, first flamenco style then classical, although the amateur band he organised while at school was a country-folk outfit called The Buckskin Boys. At McGill University he was president of the debating society but a post-graduate course at Columbia University left him unsatisfied, so he left New York and returned to Montréal in 1957.
Cohen soon moved from Montréal to London and then to the Greek island of Hydra, writing poetry and prose in a cheap house he bought there. He had enjoyed some international success with his poems and with two novels, The Favorite Game and the sexually explicit Beautiful Losers. In Hydra his muse was Marianne Ihlen, a Norwegian he had met on the island and her influence would permeate both his literary output and his emergent song writing. Of the ten songs on his first album, Songs Of Leonard Cohen (1967), the one most obviously influenced by her was ‘So Long, Marianne’, a romantically philosophical farewell which he wrote when they parted. In fact he was devastated by the break-up and so perhaps ‘Hey, That’s No Way To Say Goodbye’ from the same album better captured his mood. Marianne also sparked the image of ‘Bird On The Wire’, first a poem and later a song to appear his second album, Songs From A Room (1969). She had casually likened birds perching on a newly-installed telephone wire in Hydra as resembling notes on a musical staff. Leonard Cohen, it was clear, always needed muses. ‘Sisters Of Mercy’, from the first album, was the result of Cohen offering two young women backpackers refuge in his hotel room during an Edmonton snowstorm. They slept in his bed while he spent the night in an armchair and wrote the song which he played for them when they woke next morning. Over the years there would be many inspirational lovers some of whom became collaborators.
When Cohen finally left Hydra he was determined to try to make a living as a songwriter. Back in North America the ex-Buckskin Boy first headed straight for Nashville, Tennessee, the home of country music. He has since said that he simply thought that Nashville was where the songwriters lived. In any case was soon tempted away from it by cosmopolitan New York. He became loosely attached to Andy Warhol’s Factory milieu but in the end, it was folk singer Judy Collins’ recording of ‘Suzanne’ that kick-started his career in music. Cohen started to perform at folk festivals and eventually Columbia’s John H. Hammond gave him a record deal. In 1970 Cohen began a relationship with artist Suzanne Elrod with whom he would have two children, a son Adam and a daughter Lorca.
After the first two Columbia albums had put him on the map as a seductively thoughtful folk-ish performer, the third, Songs Of Love and Hate (1971) seemed tinged with more abrasive emotions. ‘Avalanche’ was a compellingly spare but opaque song featuring Cohen’s distinctive Spanish guitar playing, but the
