The Soulful Coolness of Leonard Cohen

— “We’re so lucky to be alive at the same time Leonard Cohen is.”–Lou Reed —

Not everyone can appreciate Leonard Cohen’s performance style, but few would question his chops as a songwriter, plainly evidenced in immortal, frequently covered tunes like Bird on a Wire, Suzanne, and that Holy Exemplar for pop singers everywhere: Hallelujah (wait, Leonard Cohen wrote that? You bet your muse he did).

To my mind, Leonard is the definition of Soulful Cool.

Exhibit A: An accomplished poet and novelist, Leonard didn’t step foot into popular music till age 33, with the 1967 release Songs of Leonard Cohen. By then he’d already lived another life as a writer, with multiple volumes of poetry—and two novels—to his credit. The written word was Leonard’s amore priori. The beauty of his songs owes to this fact (coupled with his remarkable way with melody).

And Leonard was the real thing as a novelist, as is quickly evident to readers of his 1963 debut, The Favorite Game. The book bristles with little beauties like this one:

Seven to eleven is a huge chunk of life, full of dulling and forgetting. It is fabled that we slowly lose the gift of speech with animals, that birds no longer visit our windowsills to converse. As our eyes grow accustomed to sight they armor themselves against wonder. Flowers once the size of pine trees, return to clay pots. Even terror diminishes. The giants and giantesses of the nursery shrink to crabby teachers and human fathers.

“I couldn’t make a living,” says Leonard these days, explaining why he left the writing life for music.

I admire the resiliency, adaptability—or call it existential good faith—it must require to surrender one’s idea of oneself and one’s career (sans despair) after years of hard work. And I admire the resourcefulness and creativity with which Leonard applied his great gifts in a different field (he never abandoned poetry at all, as his incomparable lyrics everywhere attest).

In an interview back in 1968, Leonard was humble about his transitional nature:

Everybody I meet wipes me out. Here are all these people plugging away at their roles. Being producers and policemen and bishops. It knocks me out …I don’t even think of myself a writer, singer, or whatever. The occupation of being a man is so much more. In spite of all the philosophical encouragement about hanging loose and all that Sunday school stuff, I admit I’m confused. I can’t begin to locate my head.

But two years earlier, in his second novel Beautiful Losers, he’d written the following lines. To me they seem a perfect bit of Cohen self-description:

It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is a caress of the hill… Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to laws of gravity and chance.

Exhibit B: Leonard does his own thing—take it or leave it. He’s been frequently compared to Bob Dylan, in that both singers are not exactly what their industry refers to as “natural talents.” (Cohen and Dylan also happened to share a first producer in the maverick John Hammond of Columbia Records). But Leonard’s thing, because it’s so completely and self-revealingly his own, becomes at its best irresistibly stylish and graceful and, yes, breathtakingly beautiful. Just listen to his flat, effortless, endlessly alluring croon on the song Famous Blue Raincoat. Goodness, me!

Exhibit C: Back in the nineties, Leonard fled fame, wealth, and success to live for five years at a Zen monastery in the mountains. Enough said.

Exhibit D: Leonard has been on a world tour for the last year and a half. By the time it’s over, he will have played around two hundred shows, pretty much without a break. The man turned 75 years old last month.

Leonard, you’re beautiful. Thank you, Leonard.

(Listen to a terrific interview with Leonard on NPR’s Fresh Air. Or watch/listen to any number of archival features about Leonard, aka: “Canada’s Melancholy Bard,” on the Canadian Broadcasting Centre website.)

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