Written in anticipation of the Leonard Cohen November 13, 2009 San Jose concert by Gary Singh and published in Metroactive (described as San Jose’s alternative weekly paper), Tower of Song is an up to date compendium of core data about the singer-songwriter and shrewd yet heartfelt analysis of his work. Representative excerpts follow:
Leonard Cohen, 75, sings soundtracks for hopeless lovers—but with a sly, snarky bite behind the angst
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Cohen’s 50-year-long oeuvre of novels, poetry and music exploring the interrelations between sex, religion, loneliness, longing and loss has inspired artists and lovers the world over—some even joke that every woman in France owns one of his albums—but, except for one forgettable appearance on Miami Vice, he never managed to penetrate the American pop-culture milieu.
He’s far too Eurocentric, paradoxical, mysterious, well-dressed and funny. So it was no surprise when most of the audience at the Hall of Fame ceremony didn’t even realize that Cohen was finishing the acceptance speech with his own lyrics: “Now I bid you farewell, I don’t know when I’ll be back/ They’re moving us tomorrow to that Tower down the track/ But you’ll be hearing from me, baby, long after I’m gone/ I’ll be speaking to you sweetly from my window in the Tower of Song.”
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Above all else, Cohen, who wound up in the monastery, near Los Angeles, from 1995 to 1999, is a man attempting to resolve his own inner conflicts through his songs and poems, especially if the endeavor involves a little meanness and black humor.
For decades, critics have pilloried him with soubriquets like, “the godfather of gloom,” the “poet of pessimism” or the “architect of angst.” Many of Cohen’s songs serve as soundtracks for failed relationships, romantic disaster, heroes of solitude or, at the least, the merging of the sacred and the profane.
Whenever anyone goes through a tumultuous breakup or bottoming-out and needs something on the turntable to dovetail with their own sorrows, there always seems to be a Cohen lyric or 50 that perfectly describes the situation, no matter who or what is involved.
… But these scenarios are sadly unfortunate, because, to the contrary, Cohen is actually quite a hysterically funny writer. In a 2001 article for GQ, John Leland celebrated Cohen as a “badass of dark verse,” fully acknowledging the humor of it all.
This is important, as no matter how wretched Cohen’s words may be on the surface, one always seems to hear a snarky self-deprecating laugh buried somewhere within. Even when he inhabits the bottom of the misery barrel, you always get the feeling he’s secretly winking at you between the lines, every single one of which exhibits multiple layers of meaning. In that regard, he’s a natural.
While the piece might benefit from a dash of organizational rigor, a consequence, no doubt, of the author’s ambitious effort to cover an extensive range of biographical facts, career achievements, and artistic assessment in one essay, this article is well worth reading in its entirety, whether or not one plans to attend the San Jose performance. It can be found at Tower of Song.
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