Team or Enterprise Premium FT. Pay based on use. Does my organisation subscribe? Group Subscription. Premium Digital access, plus: Convenient access for groups of users Integration with third party platforms and CRM systems Usage based pricing and volume discounts for multiple users Subscription management tools and usage reporting SAML-based single sign-on SSO Dedicated account and customer success teams.
Learn more and compare subscriptions content expands above. Full Terms and Conditions apply to all Subscriptions. Or, if you are already a subscriber Sign in. Other options. For nearly 50 years, artists who followed Cohen — Patti Smith and Kurt Cobain among them — found a brave nerve and sympathetic mind. It took Cohen five years to write, and he pared down dozens of verses to four.
The song might have languished in obscurity, had not John Cale recorded it for a Cohen tribute album. But in this case — it was given to me. He was born September 21st, , in Westmount, Quebec, an English-speaking city on the island of Montreal, into a middle-class Jewish family. His mother, Masha, was the daughter of an author and Talmudic scholar. It was both comic and self-aware.
But I would not describe her as morbidly melancholy, as I was. The death of my father was significant, and the death of my dog were the two, I would say, major events of my childhood and my adolescence. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth.
His mother had encouraged him in those ways. Yeats — and W. Auden, who mixed cultural and religious themes. Cohen also heard socialist folk songs from a director at summer camp. Aspirations to mythology and possibility — along with an appetite for women — came early and forcibly. There was no prestige attached to the thing. That began to change for Cohen in , when he published his first book, Let Us Compare Mythologies. On Hydra, he lived with the first of his legendary romances, Marianne Ihlen, from Oslo.
I felt it throughout my body. Things turned tempestuous. David Remnick of The New Yorker noted that Ihlen could become enraged when she drank, and that neither she nor Cohen proved faithful. Cohen worked on a second novel, Beautiful Losers , while living on Hydra. It just about cost him his mind. I knew that it was a living work. I wrote it outside in the Greek sun, on a little folding table in the back of my house.
I knew that something was unfolding, and there was a joyous activity behind it — but, as I say, slightly crazed, which freed the writing tremendously. I was smoking grass and taking acid from time to time. Marianne tended to him. Beautiful Losers was published in Cohen had the imagination and facility to achieve the sort of literary repute bestowed on authors like Thomas Pynchon and Henry Miller. But he had something entirely different in mind. Cohen returned to Montreal from Hydra in to find Beautiful Losers reaping attention.
But there were only maybe 3, copies of Beautiful Losers worldwide. Cohen, though, began to sense a new possibility for himself. On his way, Cohen stopped off in New York and found his work had preceded him. I felt very close to them. I attempted suicide myself at 14, before I found folk music, so of course I loved it.
The record clearly established a reputation for Cohen as somebody who spoke for those who feel lost and are in search of any saving grace, whether it be religion or sex. That seriousness was no act.
Cohen found himself increasingly forlorn in New York. Marianne and her son had followed him to the city, but the relationship between her and Cohen was coming toward its end. Sometimes weeks where the only contact I would have was with the woman I bought cigarettes from, and a day could be redeemed by her smile. I understood that a lot of other people must be in this predicament, because I have these biblical metaphors circling around in my mind. I began to develop this idea that some catastrophe was taking place.
Cohen and Marianne Ihlen separated during this time. In , he met year-old Suzanne Elrod, kicking off a rocky relationship that lasted nearly a decade. But I also had some kind of trust in his method — I respected his work so much. I hesitated. Cohen sat in a red leather booth; elegant, dark-haired women on either side of him, fixed by his charm. We talked a little about the debacle with Spector. The conversation went well, and we talked some more, including one or two trans-Atlantic telephone interviews, while Cohen was in Europe.
Where is truth? Where is life? Cohen knew every inch of what any of his songs signified — he explained others that night, meticulously — and if some of his phrases or images seemed ambiguous, he was not.
As we kept talking, I heard the clink of a bottleneck on a glass. Cohen chuckled. Columbia Records released Recent Songs a short time later, and maybe regretted it. As a writer-musician, Cohen was a one-off. It is one that shows, perhaps more clearly than Dylan, that songwriting can indeed be a literary art. Portsmouth Climate Festival — Portsmouth, Portsmouth. Edition: Available editions United Kingdom. Become an author Sign up as a reader Sign in.
David McCooey , Deakin University. Bob Dylan Songwriting Leonard Cohen.
0コメント