Photo by Takahiro Kyono via Wikimedia Commons
Leonard Cohen
Leonard Cohen
Originally written and published in November 2016, this tribute has been revisited in light of our current moment. Canadian native Leonard Cohen toured around the world until he was 79. Among his final shows, Cohen performed a stunning concert at the near-capacity Milwaukee Theatre (now Miller Theatre) on March 15, 2013. He was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2008, and his songs have been covered by hundreds of performers. He would have turned 90 on September 21.
Just before Donald Trump became our reality-TV-star president-elect, singer-songwriter-poet Leonard Cohen died on November 7, 2016, leaving an incomparable legacy.
Cohen’s songs charted timeless courses for survival, redemption and connection. And he pulled no punches. He released You Want It Darker, his 14th studio album, weeks before his death at 82. To the end, he deftly interwove themes of darkness and light that were political and personal, erotic and sacred. More than entertaining his listeners, Cohen intimately engaged them. He spoke about brokenness, and the universal experience of being broken-hearted. He called on fellow travelers to take heart, make change, laugh, pray, dance, and act with courage, dignity, love, and kindness.
Many Cohen lyrics speak to unsettling realities of today. Here are salient nuggets from a dozen songs.
1. Pursuing democratic goals requires vigilance. Cohen’s prescient “Democracy” (1992) recounts the governmental system’s challenges and shortcomings. “It’s coming to America first, the cradle of the best and the worst...from the brave, the bold, the battered heart of Chevrolet … It’s coming from the sorrow in the streets, from the holy places where the races meet … Democracy is coming to the USA.”
Cohen, who lived in Los Angeles for many years, told Paul Zollo in Songwriters on Songwriting in 1992: “It’s not an ironic song. It’s a song of deep intimacy and affirmation of the experiment of democracy in this country…This is really where the races confront one another, where the classes, where the genders, where even the sexual orientations confront one another.”
How to navigate all this complexity? The song admonishes: “The heart has got to open in a fundamental way.” Cohen sends godspeed for America’s precarious journey: “Sail on, sail on, O mighty ship of state! To the shores of need, past the reefs of greed, through the squalls of hate...”
2. Face desolation with grit and grace. In “Steer Your Way” (2016), released on You Want It Darker, Cohen’s sings: “Steer your way past the ruins of the altar and the mall…/Steer your way past the pain that is far more real than you/That’s smashed the Cosmic Model/That blinded every view.”
He calls for unflinching self-review and humility: “Steer your way past the Truth that you believed in yesterday/…And say the Mea Culpa which you gradually forgot/Year by year, month by month, day by day/Thought by thought.”
As Cohen prepared to bid farewell, he surveyed the natural world and a coarsened culture with trademark irony: “They whisper still, the struggling stones/The blunted mountains weep/As he died to make men holy/Let us die to make things cheap.”
3. Yes, the system is rigged—now what? Decades before Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and others railed against oligarchs and plutocrats controlling America, Cohen wrote “Everybody Knows” (1988) with Sharon Robinson, his longtime collaborator. It’s a caustic litany: “Everybody knows that the dice are loaded/Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed/Everybody knows the war is over/Everybody knows the good guys lost/Everybody knows the fight was fixed/The poor stay poor, the rich get rich/That’s how it goes/Everybody knows.”
Both bleak and droll, it can be heard as a fatalistic accounting of corruption--or an urgent plea to clean things up.
4. Hold on to an inner compass. “In My Secret Life” (2001, with Sharon Robinson) celebrates quiet subversiveness. “I do what I have to do/to get by/But I know what is wrong/And I know what is right/And I’d die for the truth/in my secret life.”
The song recounts the strain of facing ever-present horrors: “Looked through the paper/Makes you want to cry/nobody cares if the people/live or die/And the dealer wants you thinking/That it’s either black or white/Thank God it’s not that simple/in my secret life.”
5. Take care of body and spirit. “Come Healing” (2012, with Patrick Leonard), a fervent prayer, begins: “O, gather up the brokenness/And bring it to me now/The fragrance of those promises/You never dared to vow.”
Cohen always addressed the inner life. He explored multiple spiritual practices, including Buddhism, while remaining connected to his Judaism. His approach was mystical: “Behold the gates of mercy/In arbitrary space/And none of us deserving/The cruelty or the grace/O solitude of longing/Where love has been confined/Come healing of the body/Come healing of the mind/O see the darkness yielding/That tore the light apart/Come healing of the reason/Come healing of the heart.”
6. Tough times call for clear sight and empathy. “The Future (1992) is prophetically stark: “Give me back the Berlin Wall/Give me Stalin and St. Paul/Give me Christ/or give me Hiroshima…I’ve seen the future, baby: it is murder.”
Cohen explained to Rolling Stone in 2009 that “The Future” and “Democracy” were on his concert set list, “because their apocalyptic vision seems truer now than when they were recorded. People really thought I needed help back then,” Cohen told the reporter, laughing.
The song warns: “Things are going to slide, slide in all directions/…the blizzard of the world/has crossed the threshold/And it has overturned/the order of the soul.” Then Cohen offers a path forward: “I’ve seen the nations rise and fall/I’ve heard their stories, heard them all/But love’s the only engine of survival.”
7. Embrace imperfection. “Anthem” (1992) starts as a solemn serenity prayer, “The birds, they sang/At the break of day/Start again/ I heard them say/Don’t dwell on what/Has passed away/Or what is yet to be.”
Then Cohen urges listeners to take action, working with whatever is available: “Ring the bell that still can ring/Forget your perfect offering/There is a crack, a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in.”
The singer defiantly prepares for resistance: “I can’t run no more/With that lawless crowd/While the killers in high places/Say their prayers out loud/But they’ve summoned, they’ve summoned up/A thundercloud/And they’re going to hear from me.”
8. Invoke a guiding light. “If It Be Your Will” (1984) takes an incantatory tone. “From this broken hill/All your praises they shall ring/If it be your will/To let me sing.”
It’s a plea for global as well as personal salvation, which seems ever more urgent as we face our planet’s climate crisis: “If there is a choice/Let the rivers fill/Let the hills rejoice/Let your mercy spill/On all these burning hearts in Hell/If it be your will/To make us well.” Cohen told several interviewers that this was his favorite song.
9. Comfort others and do what you can to sleep well. Cohen told Rolling Stone about a song he was working on in 2009, in the midst of the Great Recession: “I thought that ‘Lullaby’ was just what everyone needs to get to sleep in these troubled times,” he said.
Released in 2012, it’s beautifully simple: “Sleep baby, sleep/The day’s on the run/The wind in the trees/Is talking in tongues…If your heart is torn/I don’t wonder why/If the night is long/Here’s my lullaby.” Cohen reassures listeners with an everyday fact: “There’s a morning to come.”
10. Live passionately. “Dance Me to the End of Love” (1992) honors deep affection and the protection it can provide. “Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin/Dance me through the panic ‘til I’m gathered safely in/Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove/And dance me to the end of love.” Even as passion gets spent, it shields: “Dance me through the curtains that our kisses have outworn/Raise a tent of shelter now, though every thread is torn.”
Cohen told an interviewer that the “burning violin” image “came from just hearing or reading or knowing that in the death camps, beside the crematoria, in certain of the death camps, a string quartet was pressed into performance while this horror was going on.” He added, “It’s not important that anybody knows the genesis of it, because if the language comes from that passionate resource, it will be able to embrace all passionate activity.” Milwaukeeans frequently witness this rousing song performed in concert by Robin Pluer or Holly Haebig.
11. Celebrate paradox and cultivate patience. “Hallelujah” (1984), Cohen’s exultant and erotic anthem, has been covered some 300 times. He drafted 80 verses over five years before its release. He sometimes sang alternate lyrics in concert, such as: “There’s a blaze of light/In every word/It doesn't matter which you heard/The holy or the broken Hallelujah.”
It took 15 years for “Hallelujah” to become a massive hit. Cohen said in 2009 on the CBC radio show “Q” that after the song was released on Various Positions in Canada and Europe in 1984, Sony decided not to release the album in the U.S.: “The only person who seemed to recognize the song was [Bob] Dylan. He was doing it in concert,” Cohen said.
More than a decade later, “Hallelujah” recordings by John Cale and Jeff Buckley began building an audience. Rufus Wainwright’s version in the 2001 film Shrekbrought it into the mainstream. Alan Light devoted an entire book to chronicling the song’s evolution: The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, and the Unlikely Ascent of "Hallelujah."
12. Take action, however you can. In “You Got Me Singing” (2014, with Patrick Leonard), Cohen’s deep-throated delivery—accompanied by angelic vocals and lilting violin strains_onveys hopeful resilience. The song is flowing, light stepped. Cohen gives a winking nod to his signature song, three decades after its release: “You got me singing/Even though the news is bad/You got me singing/The only song I ever had …You got me singing/Even though it all looks grim/You got me singing/The Hallelujah hymn.”
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Cohen embraces both history and the future: “You got me thinking like those people of the past/…Even though the world is gone/I’d like to carry on.” The joyful rhythms help deliver a regenerative message: No matter what is happening, we can show up in this moment, and the next, and try to respond in thoughtful ways that carry on.
Originally published by AlterNet on November 18, 2016.
