“They were waiting for me when I thought that I just can’t go on.”
Leonard Cohen: A Belated Eulogy
It’s been a difficult month in a difficult year, and when it was announced, in this difficult month’s most difficult week, that Leonard Cohen had died, it felt like just another one of a thousand cuts. So it’s taken me three weeks to know how to respond. But yesterday, I stood in my kitchen and put on ‘Songs of Leonard Cohen’, and I knew.
This, then, is my belated and intensely subjective way of saying goodbye.
My first experience of a Leonard Cohen song was as a child — I won’t pretend to have any idea how old I was, except that I’m fairly sure I was somewhere between the ages of six and ten — listening to the radio that had been left playing in my father’s room. When ‘Hallelujah’ came on, I was bewitched. The Jeff Buckley version would have been out by then, but I’m sure it was the Leonard Cohen version I heard. The voice, the simplicity of the arrangement — they’ve stayed with me. But when I asked my dad about it, usually my oracle when it came to music (and many other things), he didn’t seem to be familiar with the song I was describing.
My parents weren’t, particularly, Cohen fans. I’m sure they’d protest and say that they like him, and maybe they do, but I don’t have any childhood memories of them playing or talking about his music beyond an off-hand joke of my mother’s about slitting one’s wrists in the bath while listening to it, and the fact that ‘Suzanne’ was one of the songs she knew how to play on the guitar.
So, unlike most of my early music collection, which was borrowed from or bought for me by one of my parents (usually my dad), I bought ‘Songs of Leonard Cohen’ for myself. I’m fairly sure I thought it was a ‘best of’ compilation, based on the title. Possibly I was surprised that ‘Hallelujah’ wasn’t on there, though this would have been years after I first heard it on the radio. Again, I’m not sure of the exact age I was when I bought it, but ‘Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye’ is a song I associate with my first heartbreak (of many), by a boy with blond curls, when I was fifteen (I never saw his “head upon the pillow like a sleepy golden storm”, but I imagined it. And his way of saying goodbye certainly isn’t one I’d recommend).
Later I would go on to buy ‘I’m Your Man’ and ‘New Skin for the Old Ceremony’, the latter after hearing ‘Lover Lover Lover’ on a compilation album and then promptly losing the disc. At seventeen I had a friend who was more of a Cohen fan than I was, and we sang ‘Hallelujah’ together while sitting in a bus station (the sort of place you sit, when you’re seventeen and don’t have the money to go anywhere else), voices straining for the lowest notes, and discussed the significance of the lyrics in ‘Everybody Knows’, but I suppose it was still dirty, tragic romance that I was attracted to, because it was always ‘Ain’t No Cure For Love’ and ‘I’m Your Man’ and ‘Is This What You Wanted?’ and, in particular, ‘Lover Lover Lover’ that I would listen to, over and over.
Around the same time, I would have heard Rufus Wainwright’s cover of ‘Chelsea Hotel no. 2’ (I had a box set of Want One & Two, on which it’s a bonus track. This was a gift from my dad, and a much-loved one). “We are ugly but we have the music” is a line practically guaranteed to speak to a teenage girl, particularly one who also loves Janis Joplin.
All this was a little while before Alexandra Burke’s version of ‘Hallelujah’ became the Christmas number one, but a long time after the song had appeared on the ‘Shrek’ soundtrack. Being overexposed wasn’t enough to put me off the song, but it made it feel a lot less cool to like, which was the sort of thing I vaguely cared about back then, and for whatever combination of reasons, my ardor towards Cohen cooled while I was at university. Then, not long after I graduated, he released his first album in six years.
When ‘Old Ideas’ came out in the beginning of 2012, it had been a while since I’d listened to him, but I bought it straight away and listened to it obsessively, on a loop, the way I do with certain albums. It was probably the first album I’d bought since ‘Bad As Me’ the previous year, and it was a joke of mine, but one grounded in truth, that I only followed new music when the artist had been active since before I was born.
Meanwhile, ‘Songs of Leonard Cohen’ had fallen out of my rotation. The CD may be around somewhere, but I no longer actually own a CD player (the DVD player or one of the game consoles will do in a pinch). But about half of it is on a neon pink 5th generation iPod nano (it’s lasted about seven years so far — not bad going for an Apple product), which houses a lot of my music collection that would otherwise have been lost over the years.
These days I mostly listen to music on Spotify when I’m at home, and on the move, either to podcasts or to the few songs that are on my iPhone. But I still use the iPod nano from time to time, and yesterday I scrolled through the artists until I got to Leonard Cohen, and there it was, his first album, and one of mine.
I don’t have the whole thing on there, because at some point, to save space, I ruthlessly deleted any song which didn’t have a high enough play count, but it still has ‘Sisters of Mercy’, which I listened to. It was perfect. “Oh, the Sisters of Mercy,” he sang, his voice still young and strong and clear, “they are not departed or gone. They were waiting for me when I thought that I just can’t go on.”
“We weren’t lovers like that, and besides, it would still be all right”. This lyric has always struck me, the type of love it speaks of: not sexual but sensual, not possessive but generous.
It’s not the dark, cynical Cohen that many think of, nor the anthemic Cohen of ‘Hallelujah’. It’s humanistic, warm, comforting, but still tinged with sadness and loss. It was the kind of song I needed desperately to listen to, at the end of a long and grueling month.
His early songs, the ones I listened to when I was young, were not departed or gone. They were waiting for me, for this moment, when I needed them the most.
A final word: weeks before Cohen’s death, I listened to this excellent episode of Malcolm Gladwell’s excellent podcast: ‘Hallelujah’. I highly recommend it. In it, Gladwell also talks about Elvis Costello, another of my all-time favourite songwriters (and, let’s hope, one who will be with us for a good while longer).
