"Myself," claims Leonard Cohen, "I long for love and light/But must it come so cruel and oh so bright?"* In Cohen's monochromatic, endgame world, where Scott Fitzgerald's famous "In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning ..." could pass for one of the rules of the game, the answer is almost always yes, the truth almost always yes, the truth almost always cruel and bright. And, not willing to leave it at that, the singer rarely forgets Scott's terrifying last phrases "... day after day."
In "Chelsea Hotel #2," a remembrance of a departed lover, the artist reaffirms his kinship "for the ones like us who are obsessed by the figures of beauty."
* But this obsession—starring, as it does, the singer's usual archetypal lonesome heroes and heroines who can never quite connect, whose lives are filled with betrayal, inertia, jealousy — is, for Cohen's detractors, not beautiful at all: the death and despair, the narrow vision, the limited voice, the dark romanticism. Like Graham Greene and Ingmar Bergman, Cohen is concerned with the inevitability of tragedy. He is awesomely open to mythic heroism, to the mystique of love, but in the end he believes, as did Ernest Hemingway, that there are no happy endings between men and women, that the only glory is in the attempt. "Their vows are difficult/They're for each other,"
* says the artist in "Why Don't You Try." The listener may be advised to do the same.
*"Joan of Arc" by Leonard Cohen. ©1971, Stranger Music, Inc.
*©1974, Stranger Music, Inc.
Leonard Cohen is a writer who has touched a great many people in a way that few others have: "Suzanne," "Sisters of Mercy," "The Stranger Song," "Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye," "The Partisan," "Story of Isaac," "Seems So Long Ago, Nancy," "Famous Blue Raincoat" and "Joan of Arc" are a few of the great ones. Some of the songs are deeply pessimistic — one would not be as haunted by the figures in Bob Dylan's, Randy Newman's, Jackson Browne's mirror — but many are not, and in the rooms of today, Cohen's predicaments seem both real and reasonable, albeit frightening. All victories, all relationships, may be transitory, but there are many beginnings and many endings to almost everything of importance in a life, and Cohen's art is more cognizant of this than most.
*©1974, Stranger Music, Inc.
A solitary survivor caught by the spell of love and death, Cohen shoots for the moon in his best songs. Indeed, his chief strengths would seem to be an insistence upon the deep exploration of his themes ("Like any dealer, he was waiting for the card that is so high and wild he'll never have to deal another"*), an optimism that keeps
The off-kilter mix of folk instrumentation, rock swagger and Cohen's lyrical content ensured this didn't receive a lick of airplay in 1974, but it holds up as one of Cohen's best LPs. It contains a number of his most enduring -- and endearing -- songs: "A Singer Must Die," "Lover, Lover, Lover," "Who By Fire" and best of all, the doomed romance of "Chelsea Hotel #2.
