I'm Your Man (52 page)

In October 2001,
Ten New Songs,
Leonard's new album, was released. The photo on the front sleeve, which Leonard took on his computer's built-in camera, pictured Leonard and Sharon, side by side. “The album,” Leonard said, “could be described as a duet.” She had expected, and sometimes urged, him to replace her vocals and remove the synthesizers on which she composed her melodies, “but as the sound unfolded,” said Leonard, “I began to insist that she keep her voice on there and that we use these synthesizer sounds, because the songs seemed to insist that the original treatments were appropriate. Also I like the way Sharon sings.”
8

Leonard's voice on the album—so different from the voice on
Field Commander Cohen
—is a soft, dry baritone that unfurls like smoke over the translucent, skeletal, yet soulful-sounding digital keyboard tracks. The instruments make no attempt to disguise that they are not “real,” giving a lo-fi charm not normally associated with synthesizers. The intimacy in Leonard's voice reflects how he recorded his vocal parts, murmuring quietly while his neighbors slept, and there's a meditative quality to how the songs seem to flow gracefully and solemnly in and out of one another. Leonard's own description of the album was “serene.”

The lyrics are about wounded dawns and light, America and Babylon, about praying to God and just getting on with it. The words of “Love Itself”—which Leonard dedicated to his friend, the writer and critic Leon Wieseltier—are an account of Roshi's
teisho
on love, while “By the Rivers Dark” (“
By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept
”) is loosely based on Psalm 137, which laments the destruction of the temple and exile of the Jews. The dreamlike “Alexandra Leaving,” which Leonard had been writing since 1985, was inspired by a poem by Constantine P. Cavafy, “The God Forsakes Antony.” The dazzling “A Thousand Kisses Deep” has multiple layers of meaning, among them holding, letting go, creating and surrendering to the Creator. This song too had been through numerous incarnations, melodically and lyrically. Rebecca De Mornay remembers hearing various versions of it in the early nineties; in 1995 Leonard told the
New York Times
that he wanted it to feel like “an old folk song.”
9
Its companion piece “Boogie Street” is, at first glance, about Leonard accepting who he is and what he has to do, even if he does not know why, and leaving the monastic life for the music business. It opens with a prayer and a kiss before moving on to the unreality of real life, the impermanence of romantic love and the permanence of desire. “Boogie Street,” said Leonard, “is that place that we all live, whether you're in a monastery or down in the city.”
10
It is also a real place, in Singapore. Leonard had been there once.

“During the day it's a place of bazaars and shops and booths with a lot of bootleg records. Since I didn't see any on display, I asked one of the vendors if he had any Leonard Cohen records. He went back to where he kept his inventory and came out with an entire box of my catalog—much more thorough than most of the stores that I'd been to, and a dollar apiece. Very reasonably priced, I thought. At night, Boogie Street transformed into this alarming and beautiful sexual marketplace, where there were male and female prostitutes, transvestites, extremely attractive people offering to satisfy all the fantasies of their numerous customers.”

An all-service paradise, then.

“As my old teacher used to say, ‘We can visit paradise but we can't live there because there are no restaurants or toilets in paradise.' There are moments, as I say in that song, when
‘
You kiss my lips, and then it's done, I'm back on Boogie Street
'
—
in the midst of an embrace with your beloved you melt into the kiss, you dissolve in the intimacy, [it's like] you take a drink of cold water when you're thirsty; without that refreshment you would probably die of boredom in a week or two. But you can't live there. Immediately, you're plunged back into the traffic jam.”

Leonard dedicated the album to Roshi.

The critics, bar a very few dissenters, were full of praise. They welcomed Leonard back, told him how much his voice, his profundity and his sly humor had been missed—even if the new album did not have all the cool, playful one-liners of
I'm Your Man
—and that
Ten New Songs
was worth the long wait. He was asked in interviews if he planned to tour behind it. Leonard demurred, saying he doubted he could still fill seats. It was a typically Cohenesque answer, modest and self-deprecating. Perhaps there was an element of insecurity after so much time had passed since his last tour, but what it really came down to was that he did not want to tour. There was clearly an audience for him in Europe, where
Ten New Songs
was a hit—Top 30 in the UK, No. 1 in Poland and Norway and gold in seven other countries. In America, reverting to Leonard's pre–
I'm Your Man
pattern, it sold poorly, failing to make the Top 100. In Canada, though, it went platinum and brought him four more Juno awards: Best Album, Best Artist, Best Songwriter and Best Video (this last one for the smooth soul single “In My Secret Life”).

Leonard's fellow countrymen now seemed unable to stop with the honors and homages. The Canadian consulate commissioned a tribute concert to Leonard in New York as part of its Canada Day celebrations, hiring Hal Willner to put it together. Willner was renowned for the concept ensemble projects he produced—Nino Rota, Thelonious Monk, Kurt Weill. The last time Willner had seen Leonard was pre-monastery, on the
Future
tour. Willner had gone to the New York show with Allen Ginsberg and remembers, “You could tell there was something going on; the vibe wasn't as much fun as on the
I'm Your Man
tour. I went back with Allen to say hello, and Leonard had ducked out even then.”

Willner called Kelley Lynch to make sure that Leonard had no objection to the Brooklyn concert. He was fine with it, she said, as long as he did not have to do anything, so Willner got going. Among the first people he called was Julie Christensen, looking for a contact for an artist he wanted to ask to perform. Julie told him, “If you're doing Leonard stuff, you should have Perla and me come sing backup.” He thought it an interesting idea and called Perla Batalla, who told him that the date conflicted with another gig. “Then I got off the phone with Hal and I just started to cry,” Perla remembers. “I can't
not
be involved.” She called back and told Willner she would cancel the other show on the condition that she could sing “Bird on the Wire” and duet with Julie on “Anthem.” Hal said, “ ‘Anthem' is not in the show.” He changed his mind later when Leonard, over a coffee with Perla and Hal, agreed that it might make a good addition to the set list. This would be Leonard's only involvement.

More than half the singers Willner invited to perform were women. There were Laurie Anderson, Linda Thompson, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, Kate's daughter Martha Wainwright, Perla, Julie and Rennie Sparks, of the duo the Handsome Family. “It just seemed to make sense,” Willner says. “We weren't trying to imitate him, and Leonard loved women—a true, true love. They're great songs for women to sing, the way he has of taking emotion into words.” Nick Cave, one of the five male singers on the bill (along with Kate McGarrigle's son Rufus Wainwright; Linda Thompson's son Teddy Thompson; Marc Anthony Thompson, no relation; and Brett Sparks, the other half of the Handsome Family), found it “really moving to hear a lot of women singing Leonard's songs. They made wonderful sense of his stuff—I think more effectively in a lot of ways than the male singers. What I hadn't always realized was that these were extraordinary songs on any level and that, although I love his voice—which is incredibly affecting and has a tone that's totally unique, something like Miles Davis's trumpet—it doesn't need Leonard's voice to carry these songs. They're just really good songs—and there's a lot of them. I'd always had a particular love for the early stuff, particularly
Songs of Love and Hate
because it's punk rock, raw as can be. But he just got deeper, more humane.”

Willner decided who would sing what. “I put a show together, like a script, a play, so it's more about the cast with this material we all love than a ‘tribute show.' And you don't want everyone coming out and doing their favorite song and moving on. That way you don't get a real balance of the material. I wanted to have some of the more obscure things, like ‘Tacoma Trailer' and ‘Don't Go Home with Your Hard-On,' from
Death of a Ladies' Man.
” Willner had a particular fondness for the latter.

In February 2003, Phil Spector was arrested for the murder of Lana Clarkson, an actress and nightclub hostess he met at the House of Blues and had taken back to his mansion. Shortly after the arrest, two detectives from the homicide bureau paid Leonard a visit. They had been poring through old press clippings of stories about the eccentric producer and his guns—and there were many, involving famous names like John Lennon, Stevie Wonder, Michelle Phillips and the Ramones, as well as Leonard. “Apparently the detectives had come across some old interviews I did in 1978 or 1979 in which I spoke of the difficulties of recording
Death of a Ladies' Man:
the brandishing of guns, armed bodyguards, drunkenness and Phil's famous megalomania.” Leonard told the detectives, “Even though Phil put his arm around my shoulder and pressed an automatic into my neck, except for the real possibility of an accident I never at any moment thought that Phil meant to do me harm. I never felt seriously threatened.” It was “basically just a good rock 'n' roll story,” he told them, that had become exaggerated over the years.

They asked him when he had last seen Spector. “Over twenty years ago,” he said. “They were very surprised. They said they were under the impression we were close friends. I said no. Hearing this, they thanked me for their time, finished their coffees and left. It was clear that I was not to be considered a valuable witness. I was never approached again by anyone concerned with the case, [and] needless to say, I did not testify before a grand jury.”
11

O
n June 28, 2003, Hal Willner's
Came So Far for Beauty: An Evening of Songs by Leonard Cohen Under the Stars
took place in Prospect Park in Brooklyn. The stage was draped with a large maple-leaf flag and a female representative of the Canadian consulate came out during the intermission and lauded Leonard as “the sexiest man alive.” The concert was a success and quickly led to offers for Willner to stage it overseas. Since it had been more than a decade since Leonard last played a concert—a situation he showed no inclination to change—this tribute concert not only helped satisfy the demand from fans to see his music performed live, it also helped to keep his songs as Willner said, “out there.”

Leonard's record label was also doing its part in this enterprise. Two different, career-encompassing, double-album retrospectives were released in 2002 and 2003:
The Essential Leonard Cohen
and
An Introduction to Leonard Cohen
(the latter in the UK as part of the “
MOJO
Presents” series). There was a new, fortieth-anniversary edition of
The Favorite Game
as well, to tie in with the premiere of Bernar Hébert's film. As for Leonard, he was working on his first collection of poems since 1984, titled
Book of Longing
. Much of the material—artwork as well as poetry—he was sorting through and editing had been created when he lived in the monastery. In the Swedish documentary shot on Mount Baldy, Leonard, describing himself as “a writer who failed his promise,” points to a pile of notebooks and adds, “I may redeem myself.”
12

In October 2003 Leonard was made a companion of the Order of Canada—one of the two highest civilian honors his country could bestow. Leonard sent his thanks and got back to work—not on his book but, remarkably, a new album.

D
ear Heather,
Leonard's eleventh studio album, was released in October 2004, two weeks after Leonard's seventieth birthday and three years after
Ten New Songs.
In Leonard Cohen terms, this was surprisingly fast; his fans and his record label had become used to four-, five-, even nine-year gaps between album releases. Since Leonard had come down from the mountain he had been working nonstop, but this was nothing new; Leonard was always working. He simply chose not to release the majority of the material he had worked on. This apparent new urgency appeared to have nothing to do with the sense of mortality he had talked about more than ten years before. If anything, at seventy Leonard appeared to be in better condition, mentally, physically and emotionally, than he had been at sixty. Thoughts of being “old” did not seem to trouble him. In fact he played on the word in the original title for the album, which had been
Old Ideas.
It was a reference to his intention to bring together various odds and ends on this album: songs he'd written in tribute to the work of other poets, recordings of him reciting his own work, little musical sketches and half-finished ideas. Some of these ideas were old—“The Faith,” for example, a song based on an old Quebec folk ballad that he had recorded with Henry Lewy in 1979–80 and shelved; “Tennessee Waltz,” a live recording from 1985 of the weepy country standard, for which Leonard took the liberty of writing an even darker, sadder closing verse—but the majority dated from August 2003, when he began recording the album. Leonard was persuaded to substitute
Old Ideas
with
Dear Heather
only when it was pointed out that his fans might mistake it for yet another retrospective album.