I'm Your Man (55 page)

A
s a person of Jewish ancestry,” Leonard said in an interview with the Buddhist magazine
Tricycle,
“I find it deeply satisfying that the description of God's creative activity as it appears in the Kabbalah is remarkably parallel to that of my teacher Joshu Sasaki Roshi, contemporary Japanese Zen master.”
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Leonard and Anjani had begun to regularly attend a synagogue in Los Angeles led by Rabbi Mordecai Finley.

Finley, a martial artist, former military man and professor of liturgy, Jewish mysticism and spirituality at the Academy for Jewish Religion in California, founded the Ohr Torah congregation in 1993. Leonard and Anjani first encountered Finley at the wedding of Joni Mitchell's producer Larry Klein. “The rabbi gave an inspiring, extemporaneous speech about love and how to stay together as a married couple,” says Anjani. “I looked at Leonard and said, ‘I want to hear more from him.' ” There was a moment's hesitation, then Leonard said, “I'm going to go with you.' ” Finley remembers that he had talked about marriage “as an opportunity to be of service to another human being, an opportunity for the deepest human transformation, because you're so deep in the presence of another human being. Which takes work, it takes mindfulness, it takes commitment, it takes discipline. It probably resonated with Leonard's understanding of spirituality. A while later he just started showing up at the synagogue.” He would often see Leonard sitting there, his back straight, his eyes cast down, as if in seated meditation in Roshi's monastery, but with Anjani by his side. It seemed to the rabbi that Leonard was taking in the mood and the energy as much as the meaning of the words.

In his first conversation with Leonard, the rabbi had asked him, “You're a Buddhist priest, how does that square with Judaism?” It was the same question Leonard had been asked by the press when he was ordained a monk; he had answered it in his poem “Not a Jew.”

Leonard answered Finley that it did not have to square; Buddhism was nontheistic and Roshi was a great man with a great mind. “Leonard made it very clear to me that it had nothing to do with his religion, nor his beliefs. As we got to know each other better, I was delighted to see that he is a very learned Jew. He's deeply well-read, very committed to understanding Kabbalah and—in a very similar way that I do—is using the Kabbalah not so much as a theology but as spiritual psychology and a way to mythically represent the Divine. If you understand that human consciousness is basically symbolic, then one has to find some kind of symbol system that most closely articulates one's understanding of all the levels of reality.”

Finley, being nearer to Anjani's age than Leonard's, and an American, did not grow up with any great awareness of Leonard and his work. He started to investigate; everything he read felt “like a prayer. He always operates in the metaphysical realm; even anything that he writes about on the material realm has the metaphysical echoing into it, an echo of the cosmic even in the most mundane of things.” On one occasion, Leonard showed him the book his grandfather Rabbi Klonitzki-Kline had written. “It's a very fine volume, a substantial, learned book. It's tragic that it has not been translated and put out in wide circulation.” They opened the book—which was written in Hebrew—and talked about various passages in it, and Finley was impressed by Leonard's scholarship. “He grew up in an ambience of deep, serious, Jewish study. He was up-to-date, he knew who the great Jewish thinkers were and understood their arguments. There are obscure parts of Kabbalah that we actually differed on and sometimes we would be talking about one thing and come back to that thing, ‘Here we are again.' He could be a great teacher of Judaism. If that were his thing, to be a rabbi, he had it in his power to have been one of the greatest of our generation.

“By the way,” Finley adds, “modern students of Kabbalah are very interested in Leonard's work, because they see Leonard as not a professor of Kabbalah, not a theologian, but someone who really understands Kabbalah from within, [and his poetry as] the best poetry on the Kabbalah they've ever read. He gets the inner ethos of brokenness and healing and the tragedy of the human condition, in that we're not particularly well suited for this life but you still have to find your way through.”

O
n May 13, 2006, in Toronto, Leonard gave the closest thing to a public musical performance in more than a decade. It was at a bookstore, where he was signing copies of
Book of Longing.
Three thousand fans showed up—the book was already on its way to the top of the bestseller list—and the police had to close off the street. On a small stage, Anjani, Ron Sexsmith and Barenaked Ladies provided the entertainment. Leonard had not planned to sing, but during her set Anjani asked him to join her and would brook no refusal. After duetting with her on “Never Got to Love You,” Leonard went on to sing solo “So Long, Marianne” and “Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye.” The response was rapturous.

Blue Alert,
the album Leonard and Anjani had worked on together, was released, as was
Book of Longing,
in May 2006. Like
Ten New Songs
it was a full collaboration—Leonard's words, Anjani's music. But unlike
Ten New Songs
it was not a duet album, it was an Anjani album. Her picture adorned the front cover. Underneath her name, in much smaller letters, was written “Produced by Leonard Cohen.” It was as if this man who so loved women, who so often wrote songs about women (or, as he had often claimed, wrote to attract women), who believed, as he said, that women “inhabited this charged landscape that poetry seemed to arise from, and that it seemed to be the natural language of women,”
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had finally achieved with this album what perhaps he had been working toward since his debut, which he had experienced once with Jennifer Warnes's
Famous Blue Raincoat
and which, on the albums he had made since leaving the monastery, he had come ever closer to achieving: to hand his songs over to the female voice to sing.

It was a first for Leonard to make an album whose muse was not only his current romantic partner but his cowriter. The fact that it would be Anjani's album, not his, seemed to speed up the writing process. Anjani had found the words for what would become the title song on Leonard's desk—it was a new poem he had written for
Book of Longing
. She asked if she could try to make a song from it and when he consented, and told her he liked what she did with it, she moved on to another one. She took an old poem, “As the Mist Leaves No Scar,” from
The Spice-Box of Earth—
a volume published when Anjani was two years old—and set it to music, unaware that Phil Spector had already done so with “True Loves Leaves No Traces” on
Death of a Ladies' Man
. Anjani's melody for the song, which she titled “The Mist,” was very different though, with the feel of an old folk song. The ballad “Never Got to Love You,” a noir short story of love, regret and moving on, was put together from unused verses for the song “Closing Time.” Sometimes, as she went through Leonard's notebooks, Anjani would find small scraps of lyrics that she liked, and she would tell him, “Just finish the song.” “Thanks for the Dance” started out as a few lines in one of Leonard's journals: “
Thanks for the dance, I hear that we're married, one-two-three, one-two-three, one.
” “I said, ‘Finish that; I could really sing
that
song,' which is like telling Leonard to write ‘Hallelujah' in a couple of weeks. But he enjoyed the task, because it was very freeing—he didn't have to sing it, he was writing it for me now, and the standards of what he would write for himself didn't apply, so it came quite easily. It also happened for ‘No One After You.' It was funny because I said, ‘Okay, it's almost there, it's almost good,' and then I remember there was one night when I was going in the studio the next day and I said, ‘You've got one hour to come up with that last line.' He said, ‘Okay, well give me some chocolate.' So he's nibbling at a bar of chocolate and he's wandering back and forth until he shouted, ‘I'm a regular cliché.' I thought, ‘Thank you, you
can
write under pressure.' ”

The recording process was not so easy. “There were some moments when it really wasn't pretty,” Anjani remembers. “I was crushed, especially early on. Don't get me wrong, he's wonderfully gracious, he's generous, he's everything that he appears to be, but nobody's perfect, myself included, and we both definitely have strong ideas. On
Blue Alert
I really started to get independent about what I wanted to do. In 2004, when we were making songs for his record
Dear Heather,
a friend of mine had died and I was really sad about it, and Leonard walked into the room and said, ‘Here, maybe this will make you feel better,' and it was the lyric to ‘Nightingale,' ” a song that appeared on both
Dear Heather
and
Blue Alert.
“But the sections were reversed. It started off, ‘
Fare thee well, my nightingale.
' When I was reading it, the melody came into my head and I immediately thought, ‘This should go here and that should go there.' It was like a puzzle I was solving. I took it home and I didn't change the words but I rewrote the structure and I recorded it and I played it for him. And I could see his eyes open wide, because I'd actually fucked with his song. It didn't even occur to me that he might react that way. He kept listening intently and afterward he said, ‘Well of course it starts with “
I built my house
.” ' ” At some point, though, it became clear that they needed a referee. Leonard called John Lissauer, his old producer, and the man who had first brought Anjani into Leonard's life.

Lissauer describes what he witnessed in the studio as “a tug-of-war.” As he saw it, when Leonard had worked with Sharon Robinson on
Ten New Songs,
it had been Leonard's record, but although
Blue Alert
was Anjani's album, “Leonard was still expecting it to be Leonard's record. Leonard would want one thing and Anjani would want another, and I was sort of in the middle of that because I knew them both and I was trying to answer to both of them.” When he listened to the demos, Lissauer thought the songs beautiful but was not impressed with all the synthesizers and drum machines they played them on. “I said, ‘Let me at least get some organic instruments and add some colors here and there.' ” Taking six songs away with him, Lissauer added instrumental touches, much as he had done on Leonard's albums
New Skin for the Old Ceremony
and
Various Positions.
He thought they sounded “lovely,” as did Leonard and Anjani, “but they were bickering quite a bit, like they were trying to get custody. And—this was the most bizarre thing—their trade-off was ‘I'll throw that thing of John's out but you have to . . . ,' and one by one, in order to settle their arguments and to spite each other, they threw out the improvements and wore away all the colors and stripped it back down to the demo sound.” All that remained of his work, Lissauer says, “was the baritone saxophone solo on ‘Blue Alert' and the waltz song ‘Thanks for the Dance' that we did together.”

The album was ultimately recorded on neutral territory, with engineer and coproducer Ed Sanders in his analog studio in L.A. Sanders had worked with Anjani on her last album,
The Sacred Names,
and, ever since she introduced him to Leonard during the making of
Dear Heather,
he had also been working as Leonard's administrative assistant. No one had been killed in the making of the album, although Lissauer, as often seemed to happen, was left a little bruised by the experience. Still, it did not prevent him from describing
Blue Alert
as “one of the great albums of the decade.” It is certainly fascinating to hear the erotic desires of an old man and lyrics about memories, fatigue and valedictions expressed in the voice of a young woman and couched in elegant folk-jazz melodies. In the liner-note booklet, Leonard is photographed sitting alongside the youthful, beautiful Anjani, his face out of focus, fading, as if he were in the process of becoming a ghost.

I
n October 2006,
Came So Far for Beauty
took its final bow in Ireland as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival. The lineup included many of the previous participants and others including Lou Reed, Mary Margaret O'Hara and Anjani, the last of these three at Leonard's request. Willner was happy to oblige. Anjani broke with the tradition of singing whatever Willner allotted and performed two songs from
Blue Alert.
Lou Reed also selected his own songs—two from
Songs of Leonard Cohen,
the album that Leonard was in New York recording when Reed met him for the first time. Willner asked Reed if he would also sing “Joan of Arc” as a duet with Julie Christensen. “First of all I don't do
la-las
,” said Reed, but he agreed. Nick Cave, who this time had been given two songs from
Songs of Love and Hate,
his favorite, remembers Reed's treatment of “The Stranger Song” as “extraordinary, so irreverent. It was a Lou song that happened to sound like Leonard Cohen had written it before Lou.”

That autumn, Lian Lunson's film
Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man
started to do the rounds of independent U.S. cinemas. Leonard slipped into a movie theater in L.A. to watch it with Anjani. It is a curious film, part concert movie, part biographical interview. Selected stage performances from the tribute concerts and testimonies from participants—“This is our Shelley,” says Bono, “this is our Byron”—are interspersed with artily shot black-and-white footage of Lunson's conversation with Leonard. As the filmmaker and her subject tread gently through the touchstones of Leonard's past—his father's death, the Montreal poetry scene, the stories behind “Suzanne,” the Chelsea Hotel, Phil Spector and the monastery—Leonard offers up old, familiar lines as if they have just occurred to him: “I started writing poetry trying to get girls interested in my mind”; “The less I was of who I was, the better I felt.” For his newer fans, those who came to his songs through the famous cover versions that kept turning up on film and TV and in Willner's tribute concerts, it was an intriguing introduction. If Leonard, wise, dapper and self-deprecating, said nothing that his old fans did not already know, they were still happy to hear him, and especially see him, saying it, since few outside of Canada had seen him in years. And the scene in which he sings “Tower of Song,” backed by a doting U2, showed he still had the chops. A soundtrack album was released, with sixteen Leonard Cohen covers recorded live at the Sydney and Brighton concerts. “Tower of Song” made it on, but one song that did not was the rousing “Don't Go Home with Your Hard-On.” Phil Spector, Leonard's cowriter, refused to give his permission.