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Leonard Cohen:
Inside the Tower of Song 1991
page 3
"Sisters of Mercy."
Thats the only song I wrote in one sitting. The melody I had worked on for some time. I didnt really know what the song was. I remember that my mother had liked it.
Then I was in Edmonton, which is one of our largest northern cities, and there was a snowstorm and I found myself in a vestibule with two young hitchhiking women who didnt have a place to stay. I invited them back to my little hotel room and there was a big double bed and they went to sleep in it immediately.
They were exhausted by the storm and the cold. And I sat in this stuffed chair inside the window beside the Saskatchewan RI'ver. And while they were sleeping I wrote the lyrics. And that never happened to me before. And I think it must be wonderful to be that kind of writer. It must be wonderful.
Because I just wrote the lines with a few revisions and when they awakened I sang it to them. And it has never happened to me like that before. Or since.
"Hey, Thats No Way to Say Goodbye."
The first band I sang that for was a group called the Stormy Clovers, a Canadian group out of Toronto. I wrote it in two hotels. One was the Chelsea and the other was the Penn Terminal Hotel. I remember Marianne looking at my notebook, seeing this song and asking, "Whod you write this for?"
"Chelsea Hotel No. 2."
[Pause] I came to New York and I was living at other hotels and I had heard about the Chelsea Hotel as being a place where I might meet people of my own kind. And I did. [Laughs] It was a grand, mad place. Much has been written about it.
That song was written for Janis Joplin?
It was very indiscreet of me to let that news out. I don't know when I did.
Looking back I'm sorry I did because there are some lines in it that are extremely intimate. And since I let the cat out of the bag, yes, it was written for her.
"Hallelujah."
That was a song that took me a long time to write. Dylan and I were having coffee the day after his concert in Paris a few years ago and he was doing that song in concert. And he asked me how long it took to write it. And I told him a couple of years. I lied actually. It was more than a couple of years.
Then I praised a song of his, "I and I," and asked him how long it had taken and he said, "Fifteen minutes." [Laughter]
Dylan said, around the time that "Hallelujah" came out, that your songs were almost like prayers.
I didnt hear that but I know he does take some interest in my songs. We have a mutual interest. Everybodys interested in Dylan but it's pleasant to have Dylan interested in me.
It seems that his comment is true. Songs like "Hallelujah" or "If It Be Your Will" have a sanctity to them.
"If It Be Your Will" really is a prayer. And "Hallelujah" has that feeling. A lot of them do. "Dance Me to the End of Love." "Suzanne." I love church music and synagogue music. Mosque music.
It's especially resonant in this time because so few songs that we hear have any sense of holiness.
Well, there's a line in "The Future": "When they said repent, I wonder what they meant." I understand that they forgot how to build the arch for several hundred years. Masons forgot how to do certain kinds of arches, it was lost.
So it is in our time that certain spiritual mechanisms that were very useful have been abandoned and forgot. Redemption, repentance, resurrection. All those ideas are thrown out with the bathwater. People became suspicious of religion plus all these redemptive mechanisms that are very useful.
"Famous Blue Raincoat."
That was one I thought was never finished. And I thought that Jennifer Warnes' version in a sense was better because I worked on a different version for her, and I thought it was somewhat more coherent. But I always thought that that was a song you could see the carpentry in a bit. Although there are some images in it that I am very pleased with. And the tune is real good. But I'm willing to defend it, saying it was impressionistic. It's stylistically coherent.
And I can defend it if I have to. But secretly I always felt that there was a certain incoherence that prevented it from being a great song.
I'd have to disagree.
Well, I'm glad to hear it. Please disagree with any of this.
I think the greatness of that song lies in the fact that you're alluding to a story without coming out and giving all the facts, yet the story is more powerful because of what you don't say, or can't say.
Yes. It may be. When I was at school there was a book that was very popular called Seven Types of Ambiguity. One of the things it criticized was something called "The Authors Intention." you've got to discard the authors intention. It doesnt matter what the authors intention in the piece is, or what his interpretation of the piece is, or what his evaluation or estimation of the piece is. It exists independently of his opinions about it. So maybe it is a good song, after all. I'm ready to buy your version.
This is all part of this make-believe mind that one has to present socially and professionally if you care about these matters. It's like asking somebody in a burning building if they care about architecture. [Laughs] Wheres the fire-escape? That's all I care about in terms of architecture. Can I open the window?
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"First We Take Manhattan."
I felt for sometime that the motivating energy, or the captivating energy, or the engrossing energy available to us today is the energy coming from the extremes. Thats why we have Malcolm X. And somehow It's only these extremist positions that can compel our attention. And I find in my own mind that I have to resist these extremist positions when I find myself drifting into a mystical fascism in regards to myself. [Laughs] So this song, "First We Take Manhattan," what is it? Is he serious? And who is we? And what is this constituency that hes addressing? Well, It's that constituency that shares this sense of titillation with extremist positions.
I'd rather do that with an appetite for extremism than blow up a bus full of schoolchildren.
When I first started playing guitar and writing songs, one of the first songs I ever learned was "Suzanne." And I remember thinking, "How does anyone write a song this beautiful?" And to this day, it's a miracle.
It is a miracle. I don't know where the good songs come from or else Id go there more often. I knew that I was on top of something.
I developed the picking pattern first. I was spending a lot of time on the waterfront and the harbor area of Montreal. It hadnt been reconstructed yet.
It's now called Old Montreal and a lot of the buildings have been restored. It wasn't at that time. And there was that sailors church that has the statue of the Virgin. Gilded so that the sun comes down on her. And I knew there was a song there.
Then I met Suzanne, who was the wife of Armand Villancour, a friend of mine. She was a dancer and she took me down to a place near the river.
She was one of the first people to have a loft on the St. Lawrence. I knew that it was about that church and I knew that it was about the rI'ver. I didn't know I had anything to crystallize the song. And then her name entered into the song and then it was a matter of reportage, of really just being as accurate as I could about what she did.
It took you a long time to finish?
Yes, I had many work sheets. Nothing compared to the work sheets I have now. But it took me several months.
Did she feed you tea and oranges, as in the song?
She fed me a tea called Constant Comment, which has small pieces of orange rind in it, which gave birth to the image.
I always loved the line, "And she shows you where to look among the garbage and the flowers, there are heroes in the seaweed." they're hopeful lines.
Yes. It is hopeful. I'm very grateful for those lines and for that song.
"Bird on a Wire."
It was begun in Greece because there were no wires on the island where I was living to a certain moment. There were no telephone wires. There were no telephones. There was no electricity. So at a certain point they put in these telephone poles, and you wouldnt notice them now, but when they first went up, it was about all I did -- stare out the window at these telephone wires and think how civilization had caught up with me and I wasn't going to be able to escape after all. I wasn't going to be able to lI've this 11th-century life that I thought I had found for myself. So that was the beginning.
Then, of course, I noticed that birds came to the wires and that was how that song began. "Like a drunk in a midnight choir," thats also set on the island. Where drinkers, me included, would come up the stairs. There was great tolerance among the people for that because it could be in the middle of the night. Youd see three guys with their arms around each other, stumbling up the stairs and singing these impeccable thirds. So that image came from the island: "Like a drunk in a midnight choir."
You wrote that you "finished it in Hollywood in a motel in 1969 along with everything else." What did you mean?
Everything was being finished. The sixties were being finished. Maybe thats what I meant. But I felt the sixties were finished a long time before that.
I don't think the sixties ever began. I thin the whole sixties lasted maybe fifteen or twenty minutes in somebodys mind. I saw it move very, very quickly into the marketplace. I don't think there were any sixties.
"I'm Your Man."
I sweated over that one. I really sweated over it. I can show you the notebook for that. It started off as a song called "I Cried Enough for You." It was related to a version of "Waiting for a Miracle" that I recorded.
The rhyme scheme was developed by toeing the line with that musical version that I put down. But it didnt work.
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You quoted Dylan once when you said, "I know my song well before I start singing." Do you always have the song completely finished before you begin recording?
Yeah. Sometimes theres a rude awakening. As there have been several times in the past. As with "Anthem." Several times I thought I had sung that song well and then when I heard it I realized I hadnt.
What do you think of songwriters who write in the studio?
I think they're amazing. I have tremendous admiration for that kind of courage and that kind of belief in ones own inspiration. That the gods are going to be favorable to you. That youre going to go in there with nothing but the will and the skill, and the thing is going to emerge. And great stuff has been done that way. It's not like this never works. There are masters of that style. Dylan is one of them. I think hes gone in with nothing and come up with great things. That is to say that my impression about Dylan is that hes used all the approaches: the spontaneous, the polished, the unhewn, the deliberate. He masters all those forms.
There aren't many songwriters of your generation who have been able to maintain the quality of their past work the way you have been able to.
First of all, you get tired. There aren't that many bullfighters in their forties. You do your great work as a bullfighter in your twenties and your thirties.
There is a certain age that is appropriate to this tremendous expenditure of energy and the tremendous bravery and courage that you need to go into the fray. It often is a young man's game, or as Browning said, "The first fine careless frenzy." That is what the lyric poem is based on, the song is based on. But there are some old guys who hang in there and come up with some very interesting work.
In your work you've shown that a songwriter can go beyond that early frenzy and come to a new place and do new things that havent been done.
I certainly felt the need to find that place. I always thought I was in it for the long haul, touch wood.
Does it have to do with interest, that you're still interested with the process?
It was to do with two things. One is economic urgency. I just never made enough money to say, "Oh, man, I think I'm gonna get a yacht now and scuba-dive." I never had those kinds of funds available to me to make radical decisions about what I might do in life. Besides that, I was trained in what later became known as the Montreal School of Poetry. Before there were prizes, before there were grants, before there were even girls who cared about what I did. We would meet, a loosely defined group of people. There were no prizes, as I said, no rewards other than the work itself. We would read each other poems. We were passionately involved with poems and our lives were involved with this occupation. And wed have to defend every line. Wed read poems to each other and you were attacked! With a kind of savagery that defangs rock criticism completely. There ain't anybody that I've ever read who can come up with anything like the savagery, and I might say the accuracy that we laid on each other. We had in our minds the examples of poets who continued to work their whole lives. There was never any sense of a raid on the marketplace, that you should come up with a hit and get out. That kind of sensibility simply did not take root in my mind until very recently. [Laughs] I think maybe it's a nice idea but its not going to happen when you write seven minute songs. So I always had the sense of being in this for keeps, if your health lasts you. And you're fortunate enough to have the days at your disposal so you can keep on doing this. I never had the sense that there was an end. That there was a retirement or that there was a jackpot.
You mentioned the early frenzy of youth. Do you find you need frenzy or conflict in your life to write great songs or can you create from a place of calm?
I certainly think so and Im looking forward to achieving that interior condition so that I can write from it. But I haven't yet. Ive come a long way compared to the kind of trouble I was in when I was younger. Compared to that kind of trouble, this kind of trouble sounds like peace to me. But of course one is still involved in this struggle and while youre involved in this struggle you know peace is just a momentary thing, but you cant claim it. Im a lot more comfortable with myself than I was a while ago. I'm still writing out of the conflicts and I don't know if theyll ever resolve.
Do you find the song to be a more powerful artform than others?
I love it. As a mode of employment. I don't even think about artforms. I'm very grateful to have stumbled into this line of work. It's tough but I like it.
Do you have the sense that some of your songs are lasting and timeless?
Sometimes I have a feeling that, as I'm fond of saying, a lot of my songs have lasted as long as the Volvo.
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They're sturdy.
They seem to be sturdy. This last album [The Future] I think is very very sturdy. If it has any faults its that its a little too well armored. It seems to have a kind of resilience like a little Sherman Tank, that it can go over any landscape. I dont know whether thats something you want parking in our garage, but it seems to have a kind of armored energy. I've tried to make the songs sturdy over the years.
Is it your feeling that songs will continue to evolve, that there are new places to go with them?
I think they will. It's a very good question and it summons the whole aesthetic. I thin it's not important that they change or that anybody has a strategy for changing them. Or anyone has to monkey with them experimentally. Because I think that songs primarily are for courting, for finding your mate. For deep things. For summoning love, for healing broken nights, and for the central accompaniment to lifes tasks. Which is no mean or small thing. I think its important that they address those needs rather than they look into themselves in terms of experimenting with form or with matter. But I think that they will, of course, change. I think that, although there's got to be songs about making love and losing and finding love, the fact that youre on the edge of a burning city, this definitely is going to affect the thing. But it affects it in surprising ways that you dont have to worry about. Like "Lili Marlene" came out of the war. It's a very conventional song. A very beautiful song. It touched the troops on both sides. People who had undergone the baptism of fire sang "Lili Marlene" though they thought it was the corniest song in the world. So I dont think its necessary to tinker with the form. Its just necessary to let the world speak to you.
Do you have a discipline for writing? Do you write at the same time every day?
I get up very early. I like to fill those early hours with that effort.
Most of your writing is done in the morning?
Yes. I find it clearer. The mind is very clear in those early hours.
Is that a daily thing?
Usually. I blow it and fall into disillusion and disrepair. Where the mind and the body and the writing and the relationships and everything else goes to hell. I start drinking too much or eating too much or talking too much or vacationing too much. And then I start recovering the boundaries and putting back the fences and trimming the hedges. But when the thing is working, I find early in the morning best. I get up at 4:30. My alarm is set for 4:30. Sometimes I sleep through it. But when I'm being good to myself, I get up at 4:30, get dressed, go down to a zendo not far from here. And while the others, I suppose, are moving towards enlightenment, I'm working on a song while Im sitting there. At a certain moment I can bring what Ive learned at the zendo, the capacity to concentrate, I can bring it to bear on the lines that are eluding me. Then I come back to the house after two hours, its about 6:30 now, quarter to seven. I brew an enormous pot of coffee and sit down in a very deliberate way, at the kitchen table or at the computer, and begin, first of all, to put down the lines that have come to me so that I don't forget them. And then play the song over and over again, try to find some form. Those are wonderful hours. Before the phone starts ringing, before your civilian life returns to you with all its bewildering complexities. Its a simple time in the morning. A wonderful, invigorating time.
Do you find that your mind is always working on songs, even when you're not actively working?
Yes. But I'm actively working on songs most of the time. Which is why my personal life has collapsed. Mostly I'm working on songs. •
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