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By PAUL ZOLLO
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 e are sitting cross-legged on the second floor of Leonard Cohen's home in Los Angeles. On his bookshelf are many books that he's written himself, including two novels and several volumes of poetry. An unearthly rain is exploding outside as he scans countless notebooks of song, endless revisions that span decades and which fill thousands of pages within hundreds of notebooks. For every verse that he keeps, there are untold dozens that he discards. When I mention that a lesser writer would have been happy with simply two of the six verses that he wrote for the stunning "Democracy" from his album, The Future, he answers, "I've got about sixty."
His tower of song isn't really that tall, only two floors that I can see anyway, but to him It's both a fortress of solitude and a factory, a place where he says, "I summon every version of myself that I can to join this workforce, this team, this legion." It's here that he gives songs the kind of respect bottles of fine wine receive, the knowledge that years -- decades even -- are needed for them to ripen to full maturity. Quoting from the Talmud he says, "There's good wine in every generation," referring to the new songwriters who crop up every few years. But his own work has extended across generations and decades, packing as much brilliance into 1992's The Future as he instilled into his first album in 1967. "I always knew I was in this for the long haul," he says, "but somewhere along the line the work just got harder."
Like Dylan, Simon, and few others, Leonard Cohen has expanded the vocabulary of the popular song into the domain of poetry. And like both Simon and Dylan, Cohen will work and rework his songs until he achieves a kind of impossible perfection. He didn't need Dylan's influence, however, to inspire his poetic approach to songwriting. He'd already written much poetry and two highly acclaimed novels by the time Dylan emerged, leading the poet Allen Ginsberg to comment, "Dylan blew everybodys mind, except Leonard's."
In the beginning, Cohen was both a member of a Canadian country group called the Buckskins and a member of what is now known as the Montreal School of Poetry. When he wasn't playing folk songs on his guitar, he was lyrically chanting his poetry. It was only a matter of time until the words and the music came together and Leonard became a songwriter.
Songwriting was for him then, as it remains today, a labor of love. Few thoughts of making it a career entered his thoughts for many years. "We used to play music for fun. Much more than now. Now nobody picks up a guitar unless they're paid for it. Now every kid who picks up a guitar is invited to dream."
The first song he ever wrote was aptly called "Chant," a poem he loosely set to music: "Hold me heartlight, soft light hold me, moonlight in your mouth..." When John Hammond, the same guy who discovered Dylan, Springsteen, and Billie Holiday, heard some of Leonard's early songs, he told him, "You've got it," and signed him to Columbia records.
His first album, The Songs of Leonard Cohen, was an extraordinary debut for any songwriter and recording artist. Like later debuts by artists such as John Prine and Rickie Lee Jones, the level of writing on his first record achieved a resounding maturity and musical grace seldom found on a first album. In songs such as "Suzanne" and "Sisters of Mercy," Cohen moved beyond the realm of the popular song to reach into places previously untouched with words and music.
His following albums continued to resound with beautiful, intimate poetry while stretching the boundaries of songwriting, in such classic songs as "Chelsea Hotel No. 2," "Joan of Arc," and "Famous Blue Raincoat." So moved was Kris Kristofferson by the simple valor of Cohen's "Bird on the Wire" that he requested It's opening to be inscribed on his tombstone: "Like a bird on a wire, like a drunk in a midnight choir, I have tried in my way to be free." Bob Dylan made the accurate comment that Cohen's songs had become almost like prayers. It's true: a certain sanctity connects all of Cohen's work, a timeless devotional beauty that runs entirely opposite to almost everything that is modern.
He was born on September 21, 1934 in Montreal. His father died when he was nine. At seventeen he went to McGill University where he formed the Buckskin Boys and wrote his first book of poetry, Let Us Compare Mythologies. His second volume, published in 1961 and entitled The Spice Box of Earth, was acclaimed around the world. But as It's always been with his careers, the extreme acclaim that his work receI'ved never equalled extreme amounts of money. "I couldn't make a living," he said.
For seven years he lI'ved on the island of Hydra in Greece with Marianne Kenson and her son Axel. While there he wrote another book of poems, Flowers for Hitler, and two novels, The Favorite Game and Beautiful Losers.
Again the praise was vast and forthcoming but the financial rewards were scarce. The Boston Globe wrote "James Joyce is not dead. He is living in Montreal under the name of Cohen." But he was frustrated by the inequality between the praise and the income, and rejected the novelist's life to move to American and become a songwriter.
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Contradicting the old adage that the devil is in the details, Cohen has shown many times that the divine can be discovered there. As he once said to Jennifer Warnes, "Your most particular answer will be your most universal one." It is the unique specificity of his songs that enable one not only to envision them but to enter them. The miraculous "Suzanne" for example, is a song towards which many songwriters have aspired, and it is Cohen's descriptI've use of details, along with one of his most haunting melodies, that distinguishes this astonishing song.
When I mentioned to him that to this day it seems miraculous to me that someone could have written it, he agreed, not egotistically but with a kind of hushed reverence. "It is miraculous," he said softly.
In conversation he is often Whitmanesque, speaking in evocative and inspired lists of specific human activity similar to the touching human details found in all of his songs. For example, when asked if he felt that many meaningful songs were still being written, he beautifully expounded on the meaning of meaningful songs:
"There are always meaningful songs for somebody. People are doing their courting, people are finding their wives, people are making babies, people are washing their dishes, people are getting through the day, with songs that we may find insignificant. But their significance is affirmed by others. There's always someone affirming the significance of a song by taking a woman into his arms or by getting through the night. Thats what dignifies the song. Songs don't dignify human activity. Human activity dignifies the song."
Bluerailroad: Are you always working on songs or do you write only for specific projects?
Cohen: No, I'm writing all the time. And as the songs begin to coalesce, I'm not doing anything else but writing. I wish I were one of those people who wrote songs quickly. But I'm not. So it takes me a great deal of time to find out what the song is. So I am working most of the time.
When you say, "what the song is," do you mean that in terms of meaning, where the meaning is leading you?
Yes. I find that easy versions of the song arrive first. Although they might be able to stand as songs, they cant stand as songs that I can sing. So to find a song that I can sing, to engage my interest, to penetrate my boredom with myself and my disinterest in my own opinions, to penetrate those barriers, the song has to speak to me with a certain urgency. To be able to find that song that I can be interested in takes many versions and it takes a lot of uncovering.
Do you mean that youre trying to reach something that is outside of your immediate realm of thought?
My immediate realm of thought is bureaucratic and like a traffic jam. My ordinary state of mind is very much like the waiting room at the DMV. Or, as I put it in a quatrain, "The voices in my head, they don't care what I do, they just want to argue the matter through and through."
So to penetrate this chattering and this meaningless debate that is occupying most of my attention, I have to come up with something that really speaks to my deepest interest. Otherwise I just nod off in one way or another. So to find that song, that urgent song, takes a lot of versions and a lot of work and a lot of sweat.
But why shouldn't my work be hard? Almost everybody's work is hard. One is distracted by this notion that there is such a thing as inspiration, that it comes fast and easy. And some people are graced by that style. I'm not. So I have to work as hard as any stiff, to come up with the payload.
So you're not a writer for whom ideas simply appear?
I haven't had an idea in a long long time. And I'm not sure I ever had one.
Now my friend Irving Layton, the great Canadian writer, said, "Leonard's mind is unpolluted by a single idea." And he meant it as a kind of compliment. Hes a close friend and he knows me, and It's true. I don't have ideas. I don't really speculate on things. I get opinions but I'm not really attached to them. Most of them are tiresome. I have to trot them out in conversations from time to time just to cooperate in the social adventure. But I have a kind of amnesia and my ideas just kind of float above this profound disinterest in myself and other people. So to find something that really touches and addresses my attention, I have to do a lot of hard, manual work.
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What does that work consist of?
Just versions. I will drag you upstairs after the vacuuming stops and I will show you version after version after version of some of the tunes on this new album.
You do have whole notebooks of songs?
Whole notebooks. I'm very happy to be able to speak this way to fellow craftsmen. Some people may find it encouraging to see how slow and dismal and painstaking is the process.
For instance, a song like "Closing Time" began as a song in 3/4 time with a really strong, nostalgic, melancholy country feel. Entirely different words. It began:
The parking lot is empty;
They switch off the Budweiser sign.
It's dark from here to San Jobete,
It's dark all down the line.
They ought to hand the night a ticket
For speeding, It's a crime.
I had so much to tell you,
Yeah, but now It's closing time.
And I recorded the song and I sang it. And I choked over it. Even though another singer could have done it perfectly well. It's a perfectly reasonable song. And a good one, I might say. A respectable song. But I choked over it.
There wasn't anything that really addressed my attention. The finishing of it was agreeable because It's always an agreeable feeling. But when I tried to sing it I realized it came from my boredom and not from my attention. It came from my desire to finish the song and not from the urgency to locate a construction that would engross me.
So I went to work again. Then I filled another notebook from beginning to end with the lyric, or the attempts at the lyric, which eventually made it onto the album. So most of [my songs] have a dismal history, like the one I've just accounted.
Generally do you finish the melody and then work on the lyrics for a long time?
They're born together, they struggle together, and they influence one another. When the lyric begins to be revised, of course, the line cant carry it with It's new nuance or It's new meaning. And generally the musical line has to change, which involves changing the next musical line, which involves changing the next lyrical line, so the process is mutual and painstaking and slow.
Do you generally begin a song with a lyrical idea?
It begins with an appetite to discover my self-respect. To redeem the day. So the day does not go down in debt. It begins with that kind of appetite.
Do you work on guitar?
It usually was guitar but now I have been working with keyboards.
Does the instrument affect the song you are writing?
They have certainly affected my songs. I only have one chop. All guitar players have chops. Especially professional ones. But I have only one chop. It's a chop that very few guitarists can emulate, hence I have a certain kind of backhanded respect from guitar players because they know that I have a chop that they cant master. And that chop was the basis of a lot of my good songs.
But on the keyboard, because you can set up patterns and rhythms, I can mock up songs in a way that I couldn't do with my guitar. There were these rhythms that I heard but I couldn't really duplicate with my own instrument. So It's changed the writing quite a bit.
Writing in that way could be either more freeing or more restrictive. You have a rhythm that is set but you are free from playing the guitar.
Well, freedom and restriction are just luxurious terms to one who is locked in a dungeon in the tower of song. These are just... ideas. I don't have the sense of restriction or freedom. I just have the sense of work. I have the sense of hard labor.
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Is this hard labor ever enjoyable for you?
It has a certain nourishment. The mental physique is muscular. That gives you a certain stride as you walk along the dismal landscape of your inner thoughts. You have a certain kind of tone to your activity. But most of the time it doesnt help. It's just hard work.
But I think unemployment is the great affliction of man. Even people with jobs are unemployed. In fact, most people with jobs are unemployed. I can say, happily and gratefully, that I am fully employed. Maybe all hard work means is fully employed. We have a sense here that It's smart not to work. The hustle, the con, these have been elevated to a very high position in our morality. And probably if I could mount a con or a hustle in terms of my own work I would probably embrace the same philosophy. But I am a working stiff. It takes me months and months of full employment to break the code of the song. To find out if there can be a song there.
When youre working to break that code, is it a process of actI'vely thinking about what the song should say?
Anything that I can bring to it. Thought, meditation, drinking, disillusion, insomnia, vacations...
Because once the song enters the mill, It's worked on by everything that I can summon. And I need everything. I try everything. I try to ignore it, try to repress it, try to get high, try to get intoxicated, try to get sober, all the versions of myself that I can summon are summoned to participate in this project, this work force.
I try everything. Ill do anything. By any means possible.
In your experience, do any of these things work better than others?
Nothing works. Nothing works. After a while, if you stick with a song long enough it will yield. But long enough is way beyond any reasonable estimation of what you think long enough may be. In fact, long enough is way beyond. It's abandoning, It's abandoning that idea of what you think long enough may be.
Because if you think It's a week, thats not long enough. If you think It's a month, It's not long enough. If you think It's a year, It's not long enough. If you think It's a decade, It's not long enough.
Some songs take a decade to write. "Anthem" took a decade to write. And I've recorded it three times. More. I had a version prepared for my last album with strings and voices and overdubs. The whole thing completely finished. I listened to it, there was something wrong with the lyric, there was something wrong with the tune, there was something wrong with the tempo. there was a lie somewhere in there, there was a disclosure that I was refusing to make.
There was a solemnity that I hadn't achieved. There was something wrong with the damn thing. All I knew is that I couldn't sing it. You could hear it in the vocal, that the guy was putting you on.
Is "Anthem" in any way an answer to Dylans song "Everything is Broken"?
I had a line in "Democracy" that referred specifically to that Dylan song "Everything is Broken," which was "The singer says it's broken and the painter says it's gray..." But, no, "Anthem" was written a long time before that Dylan song. I'd say '82 but it was actually earlier than that that that song began to form.
Including the part about the crack in everything?
That's old, that's very old. That has been the background of much of my work. I had those lines in the works for along time. I've been recycling them in many songs. I must not be able to nail it.
You said earlier that you had no ideas, but that certainly is an idea.
Yeah. When I say that I don't have any ideas, it doesnt come to me in the form of an idea. It comes in the form of an image. I didn't start with a philosophical position that human activity is not perfectable. And that all human activity is flawed. And it is by intimacy with the flaw that we discern our real humanity and our real connection with divine inspiration. I didnt come up with it that way. I saw something broken. It's a different form of cognition.
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Do images usually come to you in that way?
Well, things come so damn slow. Things come and they come and it's a tollgate, and they're particularly asking for something that you cant manage.
They say, "We got the goods here. What do you got to pay?" Well, I've got my intelligence, I've got a mind. "No, we don't want that." I've got my whole training as a poet. "No, we don't want that." I've got some licks, I've got some skills with my fingers on the guitar. "No, we don't want that either." Well, I've got a broken heart. "No, we don't want that." I've got a pretty girlfriend. "No, we don't want that." I've got sexual desire. "No, we don't want that. I've got a whole lot of things and the tollgate keeper says, "Thats not going to get it. We want you in a condition that you are not accustomed to. And that you yourself cannot name. We want you in a condition of receptivity that you cannot produce by yourself." How are you going to come up with that?
What's the answer?
[Laughs] I don't know. But, you know, I've been lucky over the years. I've been willing to pay the price.
How much does it cost?
[Pause] It's hard to name. It's hard to name because it keeps changing.
Is it a sense that you are reaching outside of yourself to write these songs?
If I knew where the good songs came from, I'd go there more often. It's a mysterious condition. It's much like the life of a Catholic nun. You're married to a mystery.
Do you consider the tower of song to be a place of exile or of retreat?
I think you can use it as a retreat but it doesn't work. It's best thought of as a factory. It's some combination between a factory and a bordello. But it's just the tower of song.
You've spoken about the hard labor that goes into your songs, and part of that must be due to the fact that your verses are so rich, and that you write long songs with many verses. I think other songwriters might have come up with two of the verses in "Democracy" and stopped.
I've got about sixty. There are about three or four parallel songs in the material that I've got. I saw that the song could develop in about three or four different ways and there actually exist about three or four versions of "Democracy." The one I chose seemed to be the one that I could sing at that moment. I addressed almost everything that was going on in America.
This was when the Berlin Wall came down and everyone was saying democracy is coming to the east. And I was like that gloomy fellow who always turns up at a party to ruin the orgy or something. And I said, "I don't think It's going to happen that way. I don't think this is such a good idea. I think a lot of suffering will be the consequence of this wall coming down." But then I asked myself, "Where is democracy really coming?" And it was the U.S. A. But I had verses:
It aint coming to us European style:
Concentration camp behind a smile.
It aint coming from the east,
With It's temporary feast,
As Count Dracula comes
Strolling down the aisle...
So while everyone was rejoicing, I thought it wasn't going to be like that, euphoric, the honeymoon.
So it was these world events that occasioned the song. And also the love of America. Because I think the irony of American is transcendent in the song.
It's not an ironic song. It's a song of deep intimacy and affirmation of the experiment of democracy in this country. That this is really where the experiment is unfolding. This is really where the races confront one another, where the classes, where the genders, where even the sexual orientations confront one another. This is the real laboratory of democracy. So I wanted to have that feeling in the song too. But I treated the relationship between the blacks and the Jews. For instance, I had:
First we killed the Lord and then we stole the blues.
This gutter people always in the news,
But who really gets to laugh behind the black mans back
When he makes his little crack about the Jews?
Who really gets to profit and who really gets to pay?
Who really rides the slavery ship right into Charleston Bay?
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.
Verses like that.
(continued ...)
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