It’s been a rough year. Good things happened too (technology’s accelerator pedal keeps getting pushed further all the time), but the draining election, Syria, terrorists, the meltdown of journalism, and the roaring white noise of all that together has been rough.
And a lot of good music went silent. Prince, David Bowie, Neville Marriner, Shirley Jones, and a bunch more. And, of course Leonard Cohen.
I knew of him as a poet before I knew him as a singer/songwriter. I don’t know how many Americans can say that; he was Canadian and has what I think is a distinctly Canadian voice. Somehow back about my high school years I came to possess The Spice Box of Earth, or perhaps it possessed me. I loved those poems, all of them, the ones that sang to me, the ones that confused me. I suppose I thought they were cool, avant garde, certainly cooler than my oil patch Texas existence. They followed me into the Army, and directed me to folk music houses and coffee shops and New Age science fiction. You could taste the Montreal art scene, the Canadian Paris, in his work. I remember searching for Flowers for Hitler. How did I even know such a book existed, in those pre-Internet midwest desert days?
I didn’t know him as a songwriter until “Suzanne”, of course. When I spoke of being directed to folk music houses, that song and Judy Collins’ crystal-clear voice is what I remember. Then he went silent, at least to my deaf ears, until Stranger Music. I thought he’d gone back to poetry. Silly boy, looking at distinctions that never existed. His songs were poems, his poems were songs. The music was always there.
In the 90’s, as the Internet took off, his work started popping up more and more. I remember finding his music largely in covers and in ripped singles- that’s how I encountered “Bird on the Wire”. Leonard wasn’t the best singer; to be completely honest, he sang like Rex Harrison sang- he spoke his songs to the music. But what songs!
The net changes everything, and certainly music, in a certain particular way. Google knows this better than anybody; its search algorithms find and bring to the front the web pages many others link to- the hubs, the centers of little universes of discourse. Leonard Cohen’s poems and music was such a hub- nothing little about it, though.
The other thing I find fascinating about his work is that it was never quite finished. He seemed to play with songs forever; they say “Hallelujah” has dozens of verses. Dorian Lynskey, writing in The Guardian, said it well: “What gave his work its uncommon gravitas wasn’t that he knew the answers, but that he never stopped looking.”
I said earlier that the music went silent. That’s silly. We’re already immortal. We can see Lincoln in a photograph, see Gable or Monroe on the screen, or listen to Leonard whispering truths to us now just as when he was with us. As for the answers… he’d have told us we need to find our own. All he did was point the way.