Leonard Cohen, 20 Years Later

“First we take Manhattan” is both the provocative opening cut on Leonard Cohen’s 10th album, I'm Your Man (Columbia), and a musical guerrilla’s declaration of intent. Not since 1967, when “Suzanne,” Cohen’s poignant, loving portrait, cracked the charts in a version by folksinger Judy Collins, has the brooding Canadian poet and songwriter been so likely to make good on this threat.

Midway through Cohen’s six-month-long promotional tour, I'm Your Man already has sold an impressive 600,000 units outside the United States, and the single, “Ain’t No Cure for Love,” is beginning to attract national airplay since its release here.

To support this record — his most coherent effort since the 1969 “Songs From a Room” — Cohen and his eight-piece touring band will take Manhattan in two New York appearances, Tuesday at The Ritz and Wednesday at Carnegie Hall.

For more than 20 years, Leonard Cohen has examined desire, singing of the simultaneous liberation and constraint of love and passing comment on the politics and social settings that shape human connections. He’s phrased this scrutiny in semi-religious images of holiness and consecration, lightening the grave tones with self-mocking humor.

“I’m a veteran of life,” he chuckled in a recent phone interview from a tour break in Reykjavik, referring both to his music and its current vogue. “I don’t claim great understanding, but I do have experience.”

The wisdom that underscores the 53-year-old Cohen’s work may sound melodramatic when heard in the songs of his self-conscious, young imitators, but confessional despair is once again popular with songwriters, from American folksinger Suzanne Vega to British rocker Martin Stephenson. Their audiences, together with Cohen’s stepped-up promotional efforts, may project him back into the limelight.

Cohen first came to prominence in the first half of the ‘60s, when he divided his time between novels and poetry. He wrote personal narratives, such as “Beautiful Losers” and “The Favorite Game,” chronicling his coming of age as a Jewish man in Montreal, as well as several lyric volumes. The first, “The Spice-Box of Earth,” created an immediate, international stir.

By the mid-‘60s he had turned to music, drafting dark settings for his rhythmic, often erotic, love poems. Over the next decade, he released several critically acclaimed albums, but his best-known songs, including “Bird on a Wire,” reached their largest audience in cover versions by Joe Cocker, Diana Ross and Neil Diamond.

By the mid-‘70s the folk boomlet had dried to a trickle, its stars crossing over to pop or disappearing into obscurity. Leonard Cohen’s gravel-voiced desperation and rainy-night romanticism found their outlet in a small, loyal following.

“Cult status,” he laughed. “That’s being very charitable.”

“His last concert in Vienna was packed,” Austrian concert promoter and agent Milica Djokic said. “The hall has about 3,000 seats. In Austria, that makes him a superstar.”

Despite his European popularity, Cohen’s appearances in the United States have been more modest. The last time he performed in New York, it was just a single date, not part of a tour. And his work hasn’t always received a great deal of support.

“I never went away,” Cohen asserted from his Reykjavic hotel room, pointing to the 10 albums and 10 books that have kept him touring and working steadily since 1967. “The American audiences might not have always known about me, but I’ve always had critical attention. At times, that’s been embarassing [for Columbia Records brass], as they’ve been very naughty about promotion. In America, very few people knew that I was still making albums.

Cohen attributes the record company’s sluggish efforts to dollars and cents. “It’s really a very simple business equation. They didn’t expect me to be a popular artist.”

Cohen’s heightened visibility in the United States can be attributed in part to Jennifer Warnes’ successful 1986 all-Cohen album, the highly-praised “Famous Blue Raincoat” (Cypress), which featured Cohen in a duet on “Joan of Arc.” But he’s also become more accessible lyrically, turning from the dense symbolism of earlier songs to more straight-forward lines in “I’m Your Man.”

From the title cut, in which a lover begs to be taken back and lists all he’ll give in return (“If you want a boxer, I will step into the ring for you/And if you want a doctor, I’ll examine every inch of you”), through the assertion of “I Can’t Forget” (“I loved you all my life, and that’s how I want to end it”), to the dedication of “Ain’t No Cure For Love” (“I know this love is real/It don’t matter how it all went wrong/That don’t change the way I feel”), Cohen focuses on life’s fundamentals. Love is at the center; it survives the deceits listed in “Everybody Knows” and the desertions in “Tower of Song.”

For the album’s centerpiece, “Take This Waltz,” a Leonard Cohen re-translation from the Federico Garcia Lorca poem, “Little Viennese Waltz,” Cohen enlists longtime backing vocalist Jennifer Warnes and violinist Raffi Hakopian to fashion an uplifting dance from gypsy-flavored strains and sweet-sad minor chords. A brilliant song that throbs through familiar themes, “Take This Waltz” documents Cohen’s ceaseless hunger for love.

When Leonard Cohen began examining passion in the 1960s, he embraced the excesses of that era of experimentation, throwing open his arms to experience and verbalizing the variety of desire. In the ‘80s, as he explores the shape of intimacy and sensuality in the current atmosphere of restraint, Cohen’s knowledgeable love songs prove he’s still our man.

Back to Articles Index