Transcript
Leonard Cohen (0:00)
Foreign.
David Remnick (0:07)
This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
Leonard Cohen (singing) (0:11)
Like a bird on the wire Like a drunken in midnight choir I have tried in my way to be free.
David Remnick (0:32)
Last year I spent a few days with the songwriter Leonard Cohen. Cohen had been avoiding interviews for the past four, five, six years. But once he agreed to talk, we talked for days and covered the length and breadth of his career. And I'm grateful that I had the chance to visit when I did, because not long after, Leonard Cohen died at the age of 82. Cohen once wrote a song called the Tower of Song in which he compared himself really unfavorably to Hank Williams, but along with the other masters, Bob Dylan, certainly Joni Mitchell, Kanye west, everybody's got their own list. Leonard Cohen is way up there in the ranks of songwriters. When I visited him in Los Angeles, he was suffering from a number of very serious illnesses, although he was keeping that very, very private. He was in deep pain, especially from compression fractures in his spine, and he had to sit in a big blue medical chair. He was very thin, maybe 110 pounds at the most. But I have to say that he was in an ebullient mood somehow. For a man who knew where life was taking him and it was going to take him there in a hurry, he was the most gracious host this side of my mother.
Leonard Cohen (speaking) (1:44)
Would you like a few slices of cheese and olives?
David Remnick (1:46)
No, I'm good, thank you.
Leonard Cohen (speaking) (1:47)
You're cool.
David Remnick (1:48)
Cohen had just finished up a new album called you'd Want it Darker. He'd recorded almost all of it sitting in that medical chair right there in the living room. A really modest space with just a couple of guitars, some recording equipment and a keyboard. And even as our talk, like the album itself, never really strayed far from the end of things, his sense of humor, his vicious self mockery was always present.
Leonard Cohen (speaking) (2:13)
Sorry, darling, could you bring my hearing aid? Yes, of course. I can't hear a fuck all.
David Remnick (2:21)
Cohen grew up in Montreal in a prominent Jewish family, a well to do established family. There his family ran a clothing concern. And it was almost as an homage to his family business that Cohen, even in the 60s, always wore beautiful well cut suits, including a tailored dark blue number that he had on when I saw him. When Leonard was nine years old, his father died. And that event became a kind of origin story for his career as a writer and as someone who believed in writing as an almost sacramental act.