Leonard Cohen Interview on "Q" - April 16th

[ejeong]

The CBC Radio show "Q" will be airing an interview of Leonard Cohen on Thursday, April 16th. There's usually an audio podcast link and a video available on You-Tube once the show airs.

http://www.cbc.ca/q/ for more info.

Should be a better interview for Jian Gomeshi (the host) than the Billy Bob interview

[st theresa]

haha I just listened to that interview--Dr. heck of a guy has some samples of Jian Ghomeshi's superb interview style on his website. So I am sure that Jian was not the problem there. Apparently Mr. Thornton has some unresolved, star issues. In fact, me thinks the gentleman doth protest too much. I am so looking forward to the interview with leonard. I loved Billy Bob's complaint about Canadian audiences--mashed potatoes with no gravy. I hope Jian asks Leonard a similar question so we can compare.

[MarieM]

Leonard Cohen's victory march: but please, no more Hallelujahs.

Canwest News ServiceApril 10, 2009

He'll tell the truth, he didn't come to fool you.

It's a rare treat to hear Canadian musical icon Leonard Cohen reflect on aging, mortality, love and financial loss. From Cohen's home in Montreal, Jian Ghomeshi, host of the CBC's Q, recently interviewed the venerable singer-poet - Cohen's only Canadian interview before his ongoing North American tour.

The one-hour interview airs Thursday, April 16, at 10 ET on CBC Radio One and will be re-broadcasted April 23, at 1700 ET on CBC Radio 2.

Below are some excerpts from their discussion:

Q: You said to the Observer newspaper that at this stage of your life you refer to as the third act. And you quoted Tennessee Williams saying `Life is a fairly well written play except for the third act.'... You were 67 when you said that, you're 74 now. Does that ring more or less true for you still?

A: Well it's well written, the beginning of the third act is... seems to be very, very well written. But the end of the third act (is) of course when the hero dies... each person considering himself the central figure of his own drama My friend, my friend Irving Layton said, he said about death, he says: It's not death that he's worried about, it's the preliminaries.''

Q: Are you worried about the preliminaries?

A:Sure, every person ought to be.

Q: But this was a brand new career for you that you were starting in your 30s. How fearful were you of starting a second career at that point?

A:Well I've been generally fearful about everything, so this just fits in with the general sense of anxiety that I always experienced in my early life... When you say I had a career as a writer or a poet, that hardly begins to describe the modesty of the enterprise in Canada at that time. You know, we often printed our books we often mimeographed our books. An edition of 200 was considered a bestseller in poems.

Q: Some people would think it's ironic to go into music to make money, given that it's not necessarily the most lucrative of professions for most artists either?

A:Yeah, I know. No, in hindsight it seems to be the height of folly. You had to resolve your economic crisis by becoming a folksinger. I don't know and I had not much of a voice either. I didn't play that great guitar either. So I don't know how these things happen in life luck has so much to do with with success and failure... I always had the notion that I had, you know, a tiny garden to cultivate. I never thought I was really one of the big guys. And so my work, the work that was in front of me was just to cultivate this tiny corner of the field that I thought I knew something about, which was something to do with self-investigation without self-indulgence. Also my own voice sounded so disagreeable to me when I listened to it that I really needed the sweetening of women's voices behind me.

Q: Let me ask you about Hallelujah for a moment because it's been an interesting year for Hallelujah. If it hadn't been a song Canadians and people around the world have been singing versions by Jeff Buckley, Rufus Wainwright, k.d. lang, it took on a whole new energy - a song that you wrote in 1984. This past Christmas it appeared, number one and number two on the U.K. bestseller charts... These were cover versions and your own version was also on the top 40 from 1984. What did you make of that?

A: Well I was happy that the song was being used of course. There were certain ironic and amusing side bars, you know, because the record that it came from which was called Various Positions - that record Sony didn't wouldn't put out. They didn't think it was good enough... It had songs like Dancing to the End of Love, Hallelujah, If it be Your Will. But it wasn't considered good enough for the American market and it wasn't put out. So there was a certain sense of a mild sense of revenge that arose in my heart. But I don't, you know, I was happy about it but it's I was just reading a review of a movie called Watchmen that uses it and the reviewer said - ``Can we please have a moratorium on Hallelujah in movies and television shows?'' And I kind of feel the same way.

© Copyright (c) Canwest News Service

http://www.canada.com/Leonard+Cohen+vic ... story.html

[Sochijava]

I heard the Billy Bob interview as well, appalling. Jian handled it well, considering. After Jian's article in The National Post about the LC interview I think there is much anticipation of the April 16th interview. I can't wait.

[confetti]

http://www.thedailyswarm.com/headlines/ ... interview/
link to the interview