On Leonard Cohen

I was introduced to Leonard Cohen during a summer that, if it had been a David Mitchell novel or a Richard Curtis film, might have been termed a rite of passage. Except for me it wasn’t a rite of passage. I don’t think I’ve ever been through a rite of passage, at least not yet. Liz was our boss, was older than we were, and knew Bryan Ferry, at least two of which made her glamorous in our eyes. She introduced us to Leonard Cohen, and of course it appealed to the maudlin teenager. She had several albums, so we taped them, and listened to them in the long car journeys that we had to make to get, well, pretty much anywhere. My own favourite was the last song on Songs of Leonard Cohen, where, if you turn it up really loud, you can hear him screaming at the end. It’s a song about a woman so devastatingly beautiful that she drove men mad, to suicide, etc, etc. I learnt it by heart, and found it very consoling, in that annoyingly self-pitying way that teenagers do. For me, Cohen was the best, most poetic lyricist. He eclipsed Dylan in my eyes, because I always thought that if Dylan was short of a rhyme or two, he’d chuck in a bit of surrealist nonsense to make you bask in his greatness. Cohen, by contrast, told it like it was. Always. Sometimes this was too honest for me, particularly sexually, but his bitter dissection of relationships was never bettered in my eyes. And his flights of fancy were always real “I was with Washington at Valley Forge, shivering in the rain, I said how come men here suffer like they do, Men may suffer men may fight, even die for what is right, we’re all one road and we’re only passing through”. I don’t listen to Cohen so much now, as I need an outbreak of melody, and a bright light to shine in the darkness, but he’s still on shuffle.