A 'Hallelujah' for Cohen
Movie celebrates the literary voice of an influential composer
7/28/2006
Leonard Cohen is seen here with director Lian Lunson and U2 frontman Bono.
"Well I heard there was a secret chord/that David played, and it pleased the Lord/But you don't really care for music, do ya?"
It's been such a long time I've been running these lyrics through the reel-to-reel tape machine in my head - the very one that keeps me up most nights, ruthlessly - and still, they fascinate, compel, illuminate my thoughts. No finer lyric has ever been written about the power of music, I suspect, and yet, break it down, and what does it say? It's like trying to grab smoke. Best of luck to you.
Leonard Cohen wrote "Hallelujah" a long time ago, and recorded it much later - 1984, to be exact. It's a prayer, really, not so much a song. A psalm, full of regret and longing, downbeat and depressing in the most surface sense - "It's not a cry that you hear at night/It's not somebody who's seen the light/It's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah," after all - but strangely redeeming, as if painting a portrait of "the baffled king composing hallelujah" is enough, all that could be hoped for.
"There is just such a richness of language and such an abundance of magic in Leonard's music, and in his personality, too," Lian Lunson, director of "Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man," said in a recent interview. (The documentary opens in Buffalo today. See review on Page 13.) "He fully captures the imagination of the listener and of anyone who reads his writing with an open mind."
All true. Cohen, of course, was a writer of poetry volumes and novels for more than a decade before he picked up the guitar he'd abandoned since his teen years and started getting serious about writing songs, ultimately releasing his debut album, "The Songs of Leonard Cohen," in 1967. He was 33 years old. At the time, this was considered the age for singers of popular song to retire and get out of the way for the new batch, not commence a career.
But then, ascribing age and time period to Cohen seems both arbitrary and foolish. He is, in so many ways, the anti-rock star, a wholehearted intellectual and romantic, a man the Boston Globe compared to James Joyce long before he ever strapped on a guitar and braved the floodlights.
His music initially resounded with the folk movement, but he had little in common with the likes of Joan Baez or Judy Collins, though the latter recorded many of his songs in versions much more popular than Cohen's own. Yet Cohen, among the cognoscente, was as much a voice from on high as was Bob Dylan. If you were a music-obsessed seeker in 1967, odds are you were listening to Dylan's "Blonde on Blonde," Miles Davis' "Nefertiti" and Cohen's debut, talking about them endlessly, letting them encourage in you an expansive world view.
"There's no question that getting into Cohen was a rite of passage for so many people, and for all of the people who ended up in the film," said Lunson, who can now call Cohen a friend, after spending plentiful hours with him while he reconstructed his life - with a mix of poetry and humor - before her lens. Yes, it's gotta be the case that, if you want to write powerful songs full of images that avoid cliche and ring with some sonorous similarity to "the truth," then you must spend as much time with Cohen as you do with Dylan.
Cohen, always clean-cut, elegant and suited, whether he was busy turning down Canada's highest literary honor, the Governor-General's Award, or hanging out with Janis Joplin in his then-residence of choice, New York City's Chelsea Hotel, had an uncanny ability to remain above the rock 'n' roll fray, but his mark upon the medium is as deep and clear as the mark of Cain. He didn't sell too many records, but his reputation grew listener by listener - "Everyone who comes to Leonard's music comes to it as if he's speaking just to them, which is really remarkable and probably unique," said Lunson - and he released a string of albums in the '70s that never failed to stir the imagination.
We must, naturally, discuss the voice. In our world - one where televised talent contests find panels of judges critiquing sycophantic pop hopefuls on their ability to sing in tune, and nearly every pop record you hear displays singers running their voices through pitch-correction devices - Cohen is more an anomaly than ever. His voice, initially a flat, nasal twang, and later, a rich and authoritative baritone, is extremely limited in range. He speaks rather than singing in the traditional sense, as often as not. He is the anti-pop belter, personified. Why, then, do his songs possess such heart-rending melodic aspects?
Surely, it's because Cohen is indeed a masterful musician, one who turned what conventional pop-related thought considers a liability into an asset. Are there better singers than Leonard Cohen? Clearly. Can these great technicians touch you deeper than Cohen's minimalist rasp does? Not if a musical heart still beats in your chest.
Between his albums, Cohen always took a break - not to revel in jet-set excess, but to write, both poems and prose. Come the mid-'80s, as alternative musicians began revealing their great debt to Cohen's work, he appeared as rock's great uncle, but his records - particularly the apocalyptic prose-poetry of "The Future" - were raw-nerved, incisively creative, damning of popular culture in their ability to mine much deeper veins.
Of course, Cohen, in the '90s, was on a deeper quest than any the pop life offered. He entered Mount Baldy Zen Center in California as a student, and emerged several years later as a full-on Buddhist monk. He brought a whole batch of new songs, poems and writings back down the mountain with him, and who, after hearing "Ten New Songs" in 2001, could resist comparing them to the tablets of Moses? "Waiting for the Miracle" alone proved that Cohen was touched, though he'd only ever consider himself an interpreter, neither messenger nor creator.
See "Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man," and find reassuring the fact that you've shared the same space and time with a mind, a heart, a pen and a sense of humor as mighty as Cohen's. The "Hallelujah" may be "cold and broken," but it still rings true.
e-mail: jmiers@buffnews.com
