Christina Rosenvinge on Leonard Cohen (interview)

[HelenOE]

I found this on the site for a Review of Books from Madrid. It's an interview with Christina Rosenvinge, who performed on the Spanish tribute album Acordes con Leonard Cohen (the same one that brought Javier Mas to Leonard's attention). I didn't translate the whole thing, just two paragraphs where she talks about Leonard Cohen and the following paragraph with some interesting observations on songwriting in general. I hope you find it interesting.

Let me ask you precisely about the great poets of rock and pop. Do musicians like Bob Dylan, Lou Reed or Leonard Cohen have an influence on you? Is there something in their method of composition that has served you as a reference in some moment or other?

It would be impossible for that not to happen: the three are like the ABC of composers. In the latest period it has been more Leonard Cohen than the other two. Leonard Cohen has arrived at a way of writing that’s very concise and very distilled, in which he only says the minimum that has to be said. I’ve heard him say in many interviews that he can spend months and years with a song, adding and subtracting until what remains is what has to remain. Bob Dylan, on the contrary, has played a lot with excess, and Lou Reed is more about story. As far as I’m concerned, Leonard Cohen has perfected the art of popular song in an impressive way: when he’s talking about his inner life, it seems like he’s talking about everybody’s. And in the end, popular music is about that: being understandable and applicable to all situations and all people.

Do you tend to study musicians like Cohen? To take the trouble of listening to their records noticing how they use the adverbs or what they do with, let’s say, the sustained D minor? Or does that learning rather form part of a vital process in which things happen when you sit down to play?

You study, yes, but you do it the way a musician does it. That is, you listen, read, and hear, you catch the wave and then you stretch it out and try to follow that wake. You do it instinctively. If, for example, you’re listening to Leonard Cohen’s latest songs, you start by taking articles and adjectives out of your songs. Economy is something fundamental when you write music. The curse of Spanish is that it’s a language with very long words, there are at least two or three syllables in each word, and normally the second to the last syllable is stressed, so that inherited melodies, from Anglo-Saxon influence, almost always end in words with the stress on the last syllable. The problems start when you have a wonderful melody and you have to fit in the lyric and end the phrase necessarily with a word stressed on the last syllable. You have to fight with the meter and the phonetics, which is the fundamental difference between a lyricist and a poet. The lyricist is a slave to the melody. The lyrics to a song can’t betray the melody.

In that sense, is there any other difference you can establish between poets and lyricists in popular music?

Yes. When you write lyrics you can’t use a lot of ornamentation, because the melody already has a great emotional charge all by itself. If you use a lyric that is also too flowery, the result is bombastic, corny or pretentious. The more emotional the melody is, the more simple the lyric needs to be, because a sung phrase is over-acted in a certain way. That’s the reason I’ve been inclined to half speak, half whisper, half sing, a form inspired by Lou Reed, to be able to write more ambitious texts. You can’t write a song in which you’re telling the story of Adam and Eve (or of Narcissus and Echo, like on my last record) and then sing it with a fully gushing voice. You have to do it in a narrated way more than sung, and sing it in the right moments, so that it will come like a stab out of nowhere and take people by surprise.

[MaryB]

Very informative and interesting. Thank you for this translation Helen! It's so nice not to have to read Google translations of an article

[HelenOE]

Thank you Mary! I enjoy doing these translations but it's always gratifying to hear that someone enjoys reading them as well.