A Fortnight In The Tower Of Song: Leonard Cohen And The Creative Life

Photo © 2009 by John Petric

Given that some of his touring musicians have been with him since the early ’80s, the solo breaks make sense as a gesture of appreciation from a man who understands this very well might be his last trip around the block. Or does it have more to do with the lowest common denominator of currying audience favor? What did the endless litany of clean melodic riffing have to do with Cohen’s music? Where has there ever been space for such excess in his economy of prose?

I doubt I was alone in, first and foremost, reveling in the man on stage. Cohen was in top sartorial form, sporting his usual array of high-end Italian couture through the night’s marathon 27-song performance. And any questions of vitality and command in the elder Cohen were dismissed through the unwavering gritty baritone he developed around the end of the ’80s, his galloping off the stage on encores, the alternately penitential or devotional kneeling and bowing throughout the material. He exuded warmth and a wry self-awareness that was met with the adulation and devotion that he must expect, if not demand.

But this likable air and the composed mannerisms deflect our attention drawing further and further away from the music itself. Perhaps Cohen’s lyrical craft has grown at the expense of his musical intuition. What if creative exhaustion is something you can’t detect past a fine three-piece suit and a dapper gait? Why would a man who tried, in his way to be free, chain his phrasing to formulaic R&B motifs and encourage a constant blanket of back-up harmony from his three “angels” that in no way connects with the meaning and beauty he once told us he would die for? What if we’re left to deal with not only the diminishing returns of a gifted egocentrist who idealizes the world around his desires, but also with the simple financial demands of an artist ever-near retirement who was taken advantage of by a duplicitous manager?

There is undoubtedly truth in the embarrassment of his collaboration with an indicted sociopath—the recently convicted Phil Spector—but there are notes of self-containment, a mature-but-no-less-substantial ego unwilling to deal with petty embarrassment, that I feel are beneath what he has accomplished. Cohen repudiates the ribaldry of their album, and in so doing he seems incapable of shrugging off the jokes that we don’t author, the strange happenings that we sometimes encourage at the expense of our dignity. While there is little to say on the behalf of the utterly misguided disco of “Don’t Go Home With Your Hard-On”, for one, Cohen coolly preserves his manicured image to this day.

These reservations are, of course, somewhat exaggerated. My gratitude for “Avalanche” alone might afford the benefit of the doubt. Leonard Cohen has left us albums of a man developing a language through song, a wellspring of being that songwriters and dreamers for generations to come will admire and aspire to. Perhaps personal motivations, inspirations, and compromises that are not apparent to me now will become so in the years down the line.

Armed as we all are with a limitless potential toward beauty and profanity, I’ve no choice but to continue sitting down with my guitar and keep searching out that crack in everything. I’ve heard that’s how the light gets in.

For a representative late-career song that Cohen owns in a very unique manner in his own age, check out this video for “I’m Your Man,” with the beginnings of a partial reading of “A Thousand Kisses Deep.”

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