I don’t have a good story about how I started listening to Leonard Cohen. He and his music snuck up on me over the course of a few years, I realize on the second anniversary of his death.
The past few years saw huge musical figures pass away. Some of those affected me more than others, depending on the roles their music played in my life. David Bowie’s death affected me deeply, for example, but Leonard Cohen’s death knocked my soul to the ground. He died on Nov. 7, 2016, but as I remember it, news of it didn’t get out until Election Day, Nov. 8.
My aunt had just died of a quick-moving cancer, and her funeral was coming up. The election result that I and a majority of people around me expected shockingly wasn’t to be. It was a terrible week. I remember playing Cohen’s songs on our bedroom speaker while I packed for the trip to New Jersey for my aunt’s funeral, mourning both my relative and this talented man I never met. I wished both could be alive, I thought while tearing up at times.
Enough of the nation’s populace had voted to elect a president who seemed destined to rip at the fabric of democracy and America but Cohen was dead. It hardly seemed fair.
I think I remember the first Cohen song I ever heard, as he was hardly a staple on 1980s radio. Sometime in the late ’80s, while listening to the wonderfully eclectic KCMU—KEXP now resides at that frequency in Seattle—I heard Cohen’s “Tower of Song” and was intrigued. On a college movie night in the early 1990s, I watched “Pump Up the Volume,” which has Christian Slater’s character starting off his pirate radio broadcasts with Cohen’s “Everybody Knows.” I immediately became obsessed with that song.
Not long after that, I saw “Bob Roberts,” a political satire the plays Cohen’s “Democracy” over the end credits. Somehow I knew that song, so maybe I’d already bought the CD single that led with that tune but also had “I’m Your Man” and “First We Take Manhattan.”
And, of course, Cohen was referenced in Nirvana’s “Pennyroyal Tea,” which raised his mystique even higher in my mind. By the mid- to late 1990s, I bought “More Best of Leonard Cohen” and loved nearly all those songs, playing them over and over and over, quoting them and wondering at the poetry involved.
And that voice. The voice Cohen had developed by the mid-1980s—the result of whisky and cigarettes, he half-joked—is the voice of his that I know best. I’ve said that if God has a voice—a deep, omnipotent voice that can inspire both fear and awe—it might sound like Leonard Cohen.
The Christmas after his death, my wife gifted me with several of his albums on CD, as I wanted to own more of his music. One of those albums is “The Essential Leonard Cohen,” a two-CD album that goes back to his earliest songs. It’s a different, folksier Cohen with a higher voice, a voice that ranges somewhere between Bob Dylan and Neil Diamond but still armed with lyrics that are at times sharp, ponderous and even wry.
Listening to those songs is like getting a glimpse into the life lived by a friend or relative before you met them. They’re from a different era, and they’re not as familiar. But they’re still good.
On the other end of Cohen’s career is the final single released just before his death: “You Want it Darker,” which was beautifully arranged by his son. The music is spare, not overdone, with background singers who vocalize in a slightly haunting way. I listen to it often and feel strangely calmed by it.
Someone recently asked me if there had been tragedies in my life in recent years. I mentioned my aunt’s death. And the unleashing of political and social chaos, with hate crimes on the rise and angry rhetoric on politicians’ lips, has bothered me. I also mentioned Cohen’s death. My feelings about it linger. Am I still sad over it? Maybe, I answered.
Wistful is a better description of my feelings, however. Cohen lived on this planet for 82 years. He had many ups and downs, but he lived well, according to most accounts. We should all be so lucky. But he was writing and singing up to the end; his last album came out just weeks before he died. It seems like, had his body been willing, his poetic mind would have kept writing good songs. I would have liked to hear them.
In the meantime, all those songs he wrote before leaving this mortal world live on. Barely a week goes by that I don’t listen to at least a few of them; I want a couple of them played at my wake whenever I take my leave of here. One of the songs is “Anthem,” which features this refrain: “There is a crack, a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.”
We need that light, and I hope it streams through the many, many cracks we see today.
I also try to remember another line from that song, which we should all take to heart: “Don’t dwell on what has passed away / Or what is yet to be.” Amen, Leonard.