Leonard Cohen: The golden voice that never grew old
Ten years after his death, Leonard Cohen’s unmistakable voice, Jewish humour and extraordinary late-career renaissance continue to captivate new generations
The first time I heard Leonard Cohen was in 2003, and I was on a bus in Australia. My friend insisted I check out a newly acquired Greatest Hits compilation on his portable CD player; any bump in the road could spell disaster for the listening experience. Kids today don’t know how lucky they are. I managed a handful of songs before giving up, concluding that, like pickled herring, Cohen wasn’t for me.
A decade or so later, my father had his Cohen epiphany at around the age of 60. It feels fitting with hindsight since the Canadian troubadour was the patron saint of late developers. He released his debut album at the age of 33, recorded Hallelujah at 50 and embarked on his first arena shows in his 70s in an attempt to recoup losses brought about by a thieving manager. On the Live in London recording from 2008, he explains that he has not been in our nation’s capital for about 15 years, concluding, “I was 60 years old, just a kid with a crazy dream.”
It was that live album that converted my dad, a man so open-minded about music that he would routinely work at the kitchen table on a Sunday afternoon during my childhood, listening to the top 40 from beginning to end. As if to prove the point, when Radiohead’s OK Computer was named the best album ever made by some publication or other, the Daily Mail were up in arms that this was a relatively unknown band compared to The Beatles. His response was to go out and buy the thing, stating, “How can you complain without listening to it?”
For years he told me to check out Live in London, but I was unable to move past memories of that experience down under. Then, in November 2016, when Donald Trump was elected for the first time, I knew I needed something on the stereo with a thick veneer of sadness. Live in London delivered, but what I had not expected was that, like Radiohead, The Smiths and Pet Shop Boys, the despair was wrapped up in humour. Not for nothing did Cohen once say, “My songs are always Jewish; they can’t be anything else but Jewish.”
As with all good humour, timing is everything. It emerged that, while I had been enjoying Live in London for the first time, the artist in question had been dead in Los Angeles. I had finally decided to give the man’s work another go as a result of the Trump election, while he never actually lived to see it, exiting the stage prior to the news filtering through, but not before releasing a final, prophetic masterpiece. You Want It Darker came out 17 days before Cohen’s death, his fourteenth album and undeniably one of his very best. The astonishing title track opens the record, and the chorus is unambiguous: “Hineni, hineni, I’m ready, my Lord.” That same song has echoes of the Kaddish in the words, “Magnified, sanctified be thy holy name.” Like everything else in his life, Cohen addressed death directly and, like magic, transformed it into art.
His greatness as an artist is, in part, an inherent sense of bathos that stretches from the early folk songs that left me cold in Australia to synth-inflected late-career peaks like Tower of Song. He wrote about love, death and a search for meaning in the universe but was still preoccupied with sex long after his friends were gone and his hair was grey. He was equal parts human and artist, not otherworldly like David Bowie, another iconic musician who died in 2016. The man may have spent years seeking enlightenment in a monastery, but he also wrote Don’t Go Home With Your Hard-On. He contained multitudes.
It was the tenth anniversary of Cohen’s passing on the weekend, and he still feels like a genuinely singular musician. Nobody else’s work could be confused with his, his “golden voice” unmistakable to the end. When asked if his work was becoming “more Jewish” with age, he once replied, “It’s like saying somebody is a little bit pregnant or a little bit dead. I write out of my own tradition. My heart was circumcised in the Jewish tradition.”
If he had only written Hallelujah and not poetry, novels and countless other musical masterpieces, his legacy would be assured. In Tower of Song, Cohen imagines Hank Williams “a hundred floors above” him, but, in reality, they occupy the same plane. As one of our tribe, he favoured self-deprecation, but the name Leonard Cohen will resonate in another decade and for as long as there is music.