A beautiful loser
Leonard Cohen performs in London in September 2013. Simone Joyner/Redferns via Getty Images
Songs are always getting stuck in my head, but this morning all the songs in my head were written by Leonard Cohen, who died this week at the age of 82.
No other songwriter so often prompts, “I wish I had written that,” while at the same time daunts, “I could never have written that.” All one can do is cover his work, if one is so bold, or play his songs in the mind over and over.
“Suzanne” has been stuck in my head since the 1960s, “Bird on a Wire” since the ’70s, “Ain’t No Cure for Love,” “First We Take Manhattan” and “Hallelujah” since the ’80s. From his later career, songs like “In My Secret Life,” “A Thousand Kisses Deep” and “Dance Me to the End of Love” return to mind again and again.
Cohen’s songs are deep and dark and rich and complicated. Transcendence and despair do duets, celebration and regret. Beauty sheds its merely pretty clothes, pain uplifts. He opens boxes of the heart most keep closed. With a single devastating line, he gives it all away.
Nearly every singer has covered a Cohen song at some point, but to hear such songs delivered with Cohen’s own sparse arrangement and half-destroyed voice has been a special gift. Look, it demands; look for beauty in the broken.
Tags: listeningpost
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Yeah, but where can I listen to his songs on listeningpost?
Hi T.A. I did some googling for you and linked to videos of each song cited. All are Cohen performances except “Ain’t No Cure for Love,” because the Jennifer Warnes version is so outstanding I had to hear it again.
Dale Hobson, NCPR
Beautiful posting. I think your writer’s retreat time is showing. Thank you for this.
AnneB
Thank you, Dale, for your pithy post honoring Leonard Cohen. I loved your LC’ian prose describing his work: “Transcendence and despair do duets, celebration and regret. Beauty sheds its merely pretty clothes, pain uplifts. He opens boxes of the heart most keep closed. With a single devastating line, he gives it all away.”
Like you, I loved his songs since the 60s and followed his journeys up and down his mountains.
This week’s rekindling of LC and his life’s musings has been a sweet balm after Trumpocolypse—like a lily pond of lotus in a swamp of muck and mud. Ring the Bells that Still Can Ring!
I listened to many of Leonard Cohen’s songs last night for a couple hours on PANDORA.
Just go to Pandora Internet Radio and put his name in the ( + Create Station ) space at the top.
Once you have done that and his music starts … they also have his (full bio) for you to read.
I love his music, may he rest in peace.
Thank you Dale Hobson,
SRV
Brilliantly and sensitively written, Dale. One poet writing about another, Thank you!