Leonard Cohen 101
If there’s a defining image of Leonard Cohen’s career, it’s the cover of his 1968 debut Songs Of Leonard Cohen. He cuts a dashing figure, with his suit and middle-class businessman’s haircut. Already well into his 30s, Cohen was thoroughly out of step with contemporary rock music, but to his credit, he didn’t pretend to be a hippie. Instead, his natural-born outsider status instantly made him a cult figure among similarly disaffected and alienated listeners. Over the course of nearly 45 years as a recording artist—right up through his wonderful new album Old Ideas—Cohen has never commanded the kind of broad popular appeal enjoyed by peers like Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and Paul Simon. But the level of commitment among his small band of followers is at least as intense. To outsiders, Cohen’s reputation for po-faced miserablism—which earned him the ironic nickname “Laughing Len”—can make his songs seem deceptively turgid, joyless, even shlocky in their seemingly overbearing seriousness. But if you’re on Cohen’s singular wavelength, his penetrating examinations of the human condition also brim with wit, lust, wisdom, and timeless melody.
The photo on the front of Songs Of Leonard Cohen speaks to Cohen’s reputation as the most literary of pop-rock songwriters—it looks more like a back-cover sleeve from a book of poetry than an album cover. Cohen was a published poet and author in his native Canada before he became a singer-songwriter. When it was published in 1966, his most famous book, Beautiful Losers, was described by critic Robert Fulford as “the most revolting book ever written in Canada.” Given that Fulford is the paternal fuddy-duddy of Canadian criticism (he was similarly appalled with David Cronenberg’s Shivers), his writhing disgust rang as backhanded praise. Cohen’s second book is now considered a high-water mark of Canadian literature, as essential to the national canon as Margaret Atwood and Mordecai Richler. Beautiful Losers anticipates many of the elements that would come to dominate Cohen’s songs: heartache, love triangles, unreliable narrators, religion, and magic. But his prose, which marries the lyricism of James Joyce with the elegant smuttiness of Henry Miller while still seeming wholly original, is its own unique mode. Cohen’s novels aren’t merely an adjunct to his songwriting; they’re key to forming a cohesive portrait of his artistry.
Cohen’s talent as a writer wouldn’t be recognized outside of his country until the release of Songs Of Leonard Cohen, which stands with the best of Dylan, Young, and Joni Mitchell in the annals of great and influential singer-songwriter records. Like the early Dylan, Cohen performed with the sparest of instrumentation, highlighting only his own guitar and limited (yet hypnotic and expressive) vocals with only occasional assistance from strings and a rhythm section. But because Cohen was older, he approached his subject matter from a somewhat more sophisticated and measured point-of-view. Songs like the instant classic “Suzanne”—which, like many Cohen favorites, was popularized by another singer, Judy Collins—pile layers of pain and pleasure on top of each other, conveying a powerful melancholy while never committing to any one meaning. Because of Cohen’s morose, decidedly pop-unfriendly delivery, songs like “Winter Lady” and “The Stranger Song” often were praised more for their carefully crafted lyrics than their melodies. While the lyrics are littered with memorable lines—“He was just some Joseph looking for a manger,” from “The Stranger Song,” comes immediately to mind—what makes these songs so enduring is the music, which evokes that “sitting-in-a-dark-room-alone” feeling better than any of the countless albums that have followed in its wake.
Songs was a modest hit in the U.S., but it was a sensation in Europe, staying on the charts for the next year and a half. (Cohen later played the Isle Of Wight festival—basically the British equivalent of Woodstock—in 1970.) Coupled with the album’s critical popularity, Songs proved to be a tough act to follow. For many, 1969’s Songs From A Room, didn’t quite measure up. Employing Blonde On Blonde producer Bob Johnston and, like Dylan, recording in Nashville, Cohen stuck a toe in country music—a nod to his hero Hank Williams—and expanded his sonic palette, utilizing local musicians like Charlie Daniels and Dylan and Johnny Cash sideman Ron Cornelius, who later became Cohen’s live bandleader. But in spite of initial criticisms of the album, Room is nearly as good as Songs, boasting the future standard “Bird On The Wire” and many other songs that belong on an all-time Cohen mixtape, including the devastating “Story Of Isaac,” “The Old Revolution” and “Lady Midnight.”
Cohen’s third record, 1971’s Songs Of Love And Hate, saw him breaking away from straight-ahead folk and into the hopelessly brooding territory that defines much of his best work. Like Songs Of Leonard Cohen and Songs From A Room, even the record’s title is unadorned, describing its central preoccupations. Love And Hate opens with the excellent “Avalanche”—which Nick Cave, Cohen’s heir apparent, would cover as the opener to his first solo record, 1984’s From Her To Eternity—a song about curdled romance sung from the point of view of a heartbroken hunchback, and works through a song cycle detailing suicide (“Dress Rehearsal Rag”), fading beauty (“Diamonds In The Mine”), infidelity (“Famous Blue Raincoat”), and other downer subjects. It would all seem awfully depressing if Cohen’s temper, and the sparse instrumentation, didn’t make it so sublime.
This air of melancholy reaches its maudlin crescendo on 1977’s Death Of A Ladies’ Man, which has the double distinction of being both the weirdest record Leonard Cohen ever recorded and the weirdest record Phil Spector ever produced. Ladies’ Man was kind of the Cohen equivalent of Dylan going electric, and plenty of fans didn’t cotton to his full-on move away from acoustic folk and into Spector’s Wall Of Sound arrangements. From the cheesy horns of album opener “True Love Leaves No Traces” through “Memories” (an anthem to pining adolescent awkwardness that anticipates Wheatus’ “Teenage Dirtbag”) to the plodding, nearly 10-minute title track that closes the album, Ladies’ Man sounds like Cohen howling through Spector’s layers of production. But there’s real pain here. Cohen seems lost in time, convincingly faking his way through doo-wop, bubblegum pop, and even a funk number called “Don’t Go Home With Your Hard-On” that features Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg on backing vocals.
By the time of 1988’s I’m Your Man, Cohen’s musical identity was well established—he was the poet with the guitar, the guy from the ’60s who had made records more or less in the same vein for 20 years. (Death Of A Ladies’ Man being more the exception than the rule.) That all changed with I’m Your Man, which radically remade Cohen’s music to ostensibly fit in better with current electro-pop trends. Of course, an artist as perverse as Cohen is incapable of ever fitting in completely, and the synthesizers and clattering drum machines sound like subversions of the period’s Top 40 music. In the context of “First We Take Manhattan”—an alternately hilarious and skin-crawling first-person narrative about a fascist lunatic—the trendy touches sound like a parody of Reagan-era superficiality. The production of I’m Your Man and subsequent Cohen albums is still controversial among Cohen devotees, many of whom swear by his earlier, folkier period. But even those put off by the keyboards can’t deny the songwriting of “Everybody Knows,” the self-referential “Tower Of Song,” and the sly title track, which playfully addresses the heavy-breathing lover-man side of Cohen’s persona.
Intermediate work
Cohen took his first real steps away from the stark musical backdrops of his early albums with 1974’s New Skin For The Old Ceremony. The album features extensive musical backing in the form of keyboards, trombones, banjos, and mandolins, among other instruments. Probably not coincidentally, New Skin was also Cohen’s first album to flop in the normally strong U.K. market. Time, however, has been kind to New Skin, with many fans ranking it among the best of his second-tier albums. The album’s best-known song, “Chelsea Hotel #2,” includes a line about an unnamed woman “giving me head on the unmade bed, while the limousines wait in the street.” Cohen strongly hinted in subsequent performances of the song that the woman was Janis Joplin, an admission he later came to regret. As strong as the image is, the mental picture of Joplin servicing Cohen doesn’t totally ruin what’s otherwise a quite beautiful love song.