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All Observer extracts compiled by Marie Mazur. All extracts from Leonard Cohen In His Own Words with authorization by Jim Devlin.


Frank Black

I got sucked into my first Leonard Cohen album in a cheap seaside hotel in Spain. I was in the middle of a long tour and I was there on my own. It was one of those hot, depressed weeks; my windows were closed a lot and the shades were drawn. I had just bought the tape of I’m Your Man in a truck stop and I lay there for days on end, listening to it over and over again. I couldn’t believe the discovery I’d made.

The Observer (London, England), October 14, 2001

(c) 2001 by Guardian Newspapers Limited


Alain de Botton

When I listen to Leonard Cohen, I am instantly transported back to my first year of university at Cambridge. I was hopelessly in love with a sad-looking girl down the corridor. She was called Claire, but really she was Marianne from “So Long, Marianne”. I’d hum the lyrics on my way to the library and feel that someone out there understood and had been through it, as well.

The Observer (London, England), October 14, 2001

(c) 2001 by Guardian Newspapers Limited


John Cale

After I saw him perform at the Beacon I asked if I could have the lyrics to “Hallelujah”. When I got home one night there were fax paper rolls everywhere because Leonard had insisted on supplying all 15 verses. Nobody recognises my version but I always save that song until the end of the set. He and I were chasing after the same woman in London for a time. I called him one morning and she answered – and that was that. It didn’t matter that Cindy was my wife.

The Observer (London, England), October 14, 2001

(c) 2001 by Guardian Newspapers Limited


Allen Ginsberg

He gets better as lyric poet as he gets older, sure sign of youthfull mind. (1994)

Jim Devlin: Leonard Cohen In His Own Words, Omnibus Press, 1998.


Don Henley

Leonard has that wonderful ability to make us smile as we are staring into the abyss. I think he is probably the best lyricist in the world today.

The Observer (London, England), October 14, 2001

(c) 2001 by Guardian Newspapers Limited


Elton John

Mr. Cohen may be a genius and, equally infuriatingly, a wonderful person. However, I implore anyone who has heard The Future album to desist from telling me how exceptionally brilliant it is. After all, we mere mortals have records to sell, too.

The Observer (London, England), October 14, 2001

(c) 2001 by Guardian Newspapers Limited


Kris Kristofferson

In 1970 he appeared on stage in a raincoat and pyjamas at a concert on the Isle of Wight and took 20 minutes to tune up. “They’ll kill him,” I thought. Then he did the damndest thing you ever saw: he charmed the beast. A lone sorrowful voice did what some of the best rockers in the world had tried to do for three days and failed.

The Observer (London, England), October 14, 2001

(c) 2001 by Guardian Newspapers Limited


John Peel

I like Leonard Cohen when he’s all stark and grim. He proves that popular music doesn’t have to be up tempo. I’ve got fond memories of driving round Europe listening to Cohen on the eight track with Sheila, my wife, when we first got together. The glumness of “Bird on the Wire” was just right for those damp days driving through the Black Forest.

The Observer (London, England), October 14, 2001

(c) 2001 by Guardian Newspapers Limited


Jim Sclavunos

He can render some of life’s seediest and most humiliating moments transcendental. He’s a dirty man and he’s perhaps best listened to in dirty surroundings. Smoking crack on a tour bus listening to New Skin For The Old Ceremony, I thought, “Well, yes, I’ve got to get me some new skin for my old ceremony, too.”

The Observer (London, England), October 14, 2001

(c) 2001 by Guardian Newspapers Limited


Arthur Smith

Leonard Cohen is one of the best comedians around. People think his music is just for slitting your wrists to, but it is actually full of dark, mordant wit. I like vintage Cohen like “Famous Blue Raincoat” where he flirts wittily with all that doom and despair.

The Observer (London, England), October 14, 2001

(c) 2001 by Guardian Newspapers Limited


Kathryn Williams

I love the song “Chelsea Hotel” and I love the fact that he pretended to be Kris Kristofferson to get off with Janis Joplin. He’s just got a fantastic sense of humour. People think he’s depressing, but I think he’s a comic genius.

The Observer (London, England), October 14, 2001

(c) 2001 by Guardian Newspapers Limited

Rob wrote:Here is an article by Tom Waits writing about his 20 all time favourite albums, at no. 9 is "I'm your man".

I'm Your Man by Leonard Cohen (Columbia) 1988
Euro, klezmer, chansons, apocalyptic, revelations, with that mellifluous voice. A shipwrecked Aznovar, washed up on shore. Important songs, meditative, authoritative, and Leonard is a poet, an Extra Large one.

Full article here....

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/omm/stor ... 72,00.html

Rob

I briefly liked Leonard Cohen, though once I read Camus and Lorca I started to realize that he had taken a lot of lines from those books, which was disappointing to me.

Leonard Cohen once wrote a song called "Don't go home with your hard on", and as far as I can make out, he never did.

"Leonard Cohen stands like an evergreen in a forest of hollow trunks"

Pity Joanie didn't borrow a few lines herself at times!

And no the Joanie is not a slip of the keyboard - just a warm greeting for a warm quote from the warm woman........

My name is Judith Fitzgerald and I'm an aLCoholic, most likely because the maestro of the magnificent just happens to be the greatest
singer-songwriter of our time (for all time).

Under "Lifer" in _The Hurts' Encyclopaedia_, you'll find Leonard Cohen's name emblazoned in gold. The guy with the hurt-on the size of all creation is — not to put too fine a point on it — a walking compilation of Greatest Hurts.

An incomparable artist supremely capable of living privately in full public view and equally adept at reinventing not only himself but also his relationship with the world around him, Leonard Cohen is to contemporary music and literature what Shakespeare was to Elizabethan arts and letters. His staggering command of several genres places his lifework alongside that of the traditional giants (while his ability to successfully marry art and popular culture without diminishing either bespeaks a facility that comes along once every millennium or so).

Leonard Cohen's gem-packed _oeuvre_ speaks for itself, eloquently. The scholar of the street's elegant turns of phrase and high-keening lonesome brokesome delivery simply serve to underscore the fact his seamlessly sophisticated (yet eloquently transparent) simplicity has single-heartedly revolutionised the shape, colour, and texture of popular music with now-classic compositions the calibre of "Bird On The Wire," "There Ain't No Cure For Love," "Suzanne," "First We Take Manhattan," "Light As The Breeze," and "A Thousand Kisses Deep" (to identify but a stellar few of the visionary's diamonds of the body and mind combined).

Contrary to what many would have us believe _vis-à-vis_ Leonard Cohen's "lyrical references to razor blades, ovens, and furnaces" as well as his supposedly self-centred brand of "bourgeois blues," everybody knows the virtuoso visionary of the vernacular's singular ability to transform popular compositions into authentic and restorative contemporary illuminations is, in itself, something like a miracle of secular transubstantiation in our utterly post-human world.

Long revered for his willingness to wear his wounds on his sleeve, Leonard Cohen's ruinous tunefulness has always lifted _les âmes perdues_ to jouissant heights, most likely because the _sine qua non_ of blasted baritones has always issued straight from the numinous and luminous depths. Think "Suzanne," "Bird On The Wire," "Last Year's Man," "Hallelujah," "Who By Fire," "Avalanche," "Joan Of Arc," "Tower Of Song," "Coming Back To You," or virtually any of the tunes penned since the first of several certified masterpieces, 1984's _Various Positions_, was released 16 years after the artist's now-classic breakthrough début, _Songs Of Leonard Cohen_, forever altered the popular-music soundscape for the better 27 December 1967.

He is fierce and beautiful, elegant and enigmatic; but, above all else, he is Canada's legendary Leonard Cohen, world-class wordsmith, iconoclastic tunesmith, Zen master _Jikan_ and, without a doubt, the greatest poet this country has had the pleasure to produce and support. Look no further than the fact Cohen ranked third (after Glenn Gould and Marshall McLuhan) in _The Globe and Mail_'s "Most Influential Canadians in the Arts" millennium poll (2000). Of that extraordinary distinction, the trickster-troubadour says, "It's nice, these kinds of polls are always nice. It's nice to be recognised and acknowledged as having made a contribution and I deeply appreciate the gesture. It's very touching and rather humbling."

When it comes to Leonard Cohen, it almost echoes without saying that, in the vicinity of the vision where the sky's no limit, it is imperative the outbound relation to the inner station's precincts of the humbled heart be made transparent, accessible, and clear. In this respect, the musical, lyrical, arrangemental, instrumentatory, and production values made manifest on the genius's five sonic masterpieces (or what I term "Cinquo de Leo") prove the subject's unrivalled set of astonishing recorded compositions — commencing with 1984's _Various Positions_ and concluding with _Dear Heather_ (2004) — are indeed worthy of the Nobel Prize for literature (not to mention the irrefutable first fact the breath-catching brilliance of both his fiction and poetry simply serves to settle the matter).

Leonard Cohen's singular gift for merging the secular with the sacred is best evidenced in his trademark ability to transform audiences into congregations and popular songs into transcendentally miraculous vehicles of express transport. (Thank G-d.)

One of the central figures redefining the very essence of our contemporary musical and poetic sensibility, Leonard Cohen yokes radical humanism with prophetic ruminations and gaudeous proclamations of lust inextricably intertwingled with supple and sensuous utterances of divine longing. Most assuredly at his best illuminating the post-industrial dispossessed, Canada's tireless worker in words has now proven himself to be the greatest there ever was (or ever shall be). Hallelujah!