A Rough Cut is Still a Gem
What Amy Winehouse, Mac Miller, and Chris Cornell can teach us about unfinished work
As in life, so in death — and not many people approach their death with the grace and dignity of Leonard Cohen. In an interview with the Washington Post preceding his death, Cohen said: “The big change is the proximity to death. I am a tidy kind of guy. I like to tie up the strings if I can. If I can’t, also, that’s okay. But my natural thrust is to finish things that I’ve begun.” Cohen suffered from leukemia; compression fractures of the spine required him to record music in an orthopedic medical chair. His death in 2016 did not come as any surprise to him. For all the great suffering that his disease caused him, it gave him a rare opportunity for a man certain to become a legacy act: the chance to plan his legacy.
He chose an inimitable producer in his son, Adam. He chose songs that did not find a home on the album, You Want It Darker, which would be released shortly before his death. He crafted an exit strategy, with the recognition that his next album, Thanks for the Dance, would be released posthumously. Even as he was running out of time, Cohen sought to evolve creatively and to build upon his prior work. In describing their sessions together, Adam said that “the conversations were about instrumentation and what feelings he wanted the completed work to evoke — sadly, the fact that I…
