Leonard Cohen: Singer extraordinaire

Nietzsche once remarked that life would be “aimless” (a confused “getting lost”) without music. There are many instances of musical performance that attest to the accuracy of this insight, and among these one must certainly count the music of Leonard Cohen. I can hardly imagine that fans of the man who “was born with the gift of a golden voice” (as he sings in The Tower of Song) would be among his musical followers without being aware that, unlike so many popular singers (including groups), his music is as unsentimental as it is deeply moving.

When I had the privilege to see a full recording of his 2008 (17 July) concert at the O2 Arena in London — beautifully filmed, into the bargain, showing many little events onstage and backstage that reflect the character of this extraordinary singer — I was reminded of several things. Foremost among these is the almost inexplicable power of music, which, of all the arts, probably has the capacity to move human beings more deeply than any of the others, with the possible exception of tragedy — which, according to Nietzsche, was born from the “spirit of music”, anyway — and, of course, cinema, which combines music with other artforms, as in this recording, which even the small screen of television cannot hide.

At the time of the concert Cohen was already 73-years-old, and although his voice has become more gravelly bass since he first appeared on the music scene four decades ago, he is still as capable as ever of captivating his audience. And with supporting singers like Sharon Robinson (a long-time creative collaborator of his) and the “sublime Webb sisters”, as he referred to them, the concert was (is, in recorded form) a feast for music lovers.

It is not only Cohen’s inimitable voice that is crucial to his musical charm — although Schopenhauer would argue that this is the true musical element — his lyrics are usually sheer poetry, and speak of keen, if often melancholic, insight into the vagaries of human life. And even if they are mostly love songs, they do not reduce love to monodimensional sentimentalism: the lyrics intertwine desire, ecstasy, tenderness, loss and pain in a manner that persuades the listener that the one who wrote these songs is no stranger to love won and lost. Consider these words from Take this Waltz (apparently inspired by Lorca):

Now in Vienna there are ten pretty women.
There’s a shoulder where death comes to cry.
There’s a lobby with nine hundred windows.
There’s a tree where the doves go to die.
There’s a piece that was torn from the morning,
And it hangs in the Gallery of Frost —
Ay, ay ay ay
Take this waltz, take this waltz,
Take this waltz with the clamp on its jaws.

The countervailing meanings conjured up by these metaphoric juxtapositions go to the heart of what poetry is. To move from the allusion to beautiful women (regardless of the incongruously limiting number) to a hint that even death itself may sometimes need consolation (an intended “measure”, no doubt, of the degree of suffering in the world), that a “place” destined for dying is not altogether absurd (as early human communities knew), and that a time of day has a distinctiveness and concreteness which can be torn and preserved, like an artwork, under suitably cryonic conditions, is to weave a spell with words that transports one beyond the logic of the everyday, and simultaneously bathes it in a transforming and redeeming light.

At this stage of the song/poem one might expect it to continue, like a painting, to elaborate in various lyrical shades and hues on some of the other interstitial cultural and experiential spaces of the famed city of Vienna, the city of Freud, Hundertwasser, Wittgenstein, Loos and Klimt, but the very next stanza intimates that this is a love song, appropriately so, given the fact that it is a waltz — and a wonderful one for dancing, into the bargain (ask me, I know …):

I want you, I want you, I want you
on a chair with a dead magazine.
In the cave at the tip of the lily,
in some hallway where love’s never been.
On a bed where the moon has been sweating,
In a cry filled with footsteps and sand –
Ay, ay ay ay
Take this waltz, take this waltz,
take its broken waist in your hand.

What is it to desire someone burdened with a “dead magazine”? In the very least, it is to state one’s wish for nothing that would distract one from the erotic intentions at hand. But poetry cannot be reduced to single meanings — its raison d’être is, after all, to push the multivocality of language to its limits (in contrast to science, which pulls in the opposite direction). Hence, the “cave at the tip of the lily”, conjures up images of the beauty of the female sexual organs (often depicted in the shape of flowers, like orchids) as well as of wild, exotic spaces for a romantic tryst, and so on, and on …

But for me the most poetic stanza of this poem/song is the last one, which poignantly captures, in many overlapping nuances, the mesmerizing quality of (feminine?) beauty (and of music and dance itself), as well as the nostalgia (etymologically: “mental pain”) that inevitably follows love lost:

And I’ll dance with you in Vienna,
I’ll be wearing a river’s disguise.
The hyacinth wild on my shoulder
my mouth on the dew of your thighs.
And I’ll bury my soul in a scrapbook,
with the photographs there and the moss.
And I’ll yield to the flood of your beauty,
my cheap violin and my cross.
And you’ll carry me down on your dancing
to the pools that you lift on your wrist —
O my love, o my love
Take this waltz, take this waltz,
it’s yours now. It’s all that there is.

One could offer interpretations of many more of his songs or poems, but here this will have to suffice. I suppose that one cannot expect that someone who has been lauded for both his musical as well as his literary achievements should be compared to run-of-the-mill singers (and comparisons are odious, anyway); suffice it to say that wailing voices repetitively trotting out “And I swear … “, or its pop equivalents, fade into insignificance next to the music of Leonard Cohen.

Lest I have given the impression that his music may be exhaustively subsumed under the heading of “love songs”, let me hasten to point out that many of his songs dwell satirically on social and political themes, including The Future, Democracy, First we take Manhattan (a “musical” revolutionary’s song) and Everybody knows. Moreover, the quality of his musical composition as well as his voice is such that it reinforces the linguistic meaning of his songs — even, miraculously, when his voice is present only in spectral form, as on the album Blue Alert, which he co-wrote with jazz singer and romantic partner Anjani Thomas, who sings the songs as if Leonard has somehow insinuated himself into the seductive timbre of her voice.

Among the many cover versions of his songs (Hallelujah being a particular favourite) by Jeff Buckley, Kate Voegele and others, I should single out one — Jennifer Warnes’s (Jenny sings Lenny) album of Cohen songs entitled Famous Blue Raincoat, which, because it is sung in a distinctive feminine voice, allows new musical meaning to emerge. Which is just as well: one could become chronically melancholic if you only listen to Leonard, whose bleak, but excruciatingly beautiful album, Ten New Songs (that bears the stamp of fellow composer and singer Sharon Robinson’s influence), could induce suicidal feelings in some aficionados.

One should not overlook the fact that his music has found its way into film as well, such as Altman’s McCabe and Mrs Miller, and the “teen revolutionary film”, Pump up the Volume, which features, appropriately, the satirical song, Everybody Knows.

As for myself, in my own life I rank the music of Leonard Cohen with that of Bob Dylan, Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, Gershwin, the Beatles, Beethoven, Bach and Mozart, just to mention some of my favourites. And even if, because I am not exempt from the very human pain induced by lost love, my eyes involuntarily fill with tears when I listen to Alexandra Leaving (a song rooted, ironically, in a Greek poem concerning abandonment by God), this is no reason to stop listening to Leonard Cohen. One should not economize on one’s awareness of human finitude and fallibility.