The world at large first encountered Leonard Cohen’s words neither in poems nor novels (even though he had produced notable examples of both by the time he released his first album), but as song lyrics.
Cohen’s mesmerising debut LP The Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967) gradually became part of the consciousness of a whole generation on both sides of the Atlantic... and not just because of the gorgeous tunes. Behind the haunting folk-flavoured melodies were lyrics that were variously dark, droll, religious and romantic. They were usually written in a very exact way that owed nothing to the drug-fuelled flights of fancy of Bob Dylan or the vague whimsy of the fading Flower Power generation. Cohen, a diligent wordsmith already recognised as a gifted writer in his native Canada, brought both passion and precision to his new medium of song.
Leonard Cohen would go in and out of fashion over the next forty years or so, but he kept making fascinating albums throughout, frequently crafting highly literate songs about love and loss, faith and despair. Despite the occasional musical setting given to an old poem, Cohen’s best lyrics were no more poems than his poems had been song lyrics; he knew how to write lines whose rhythms matched those of the music. The lyrics to ‘Suzanne’ (1967) perfectly echo the song’s dreamy swirling melody just as, some 25 years later, a comic line in ‘Closing Time’ would get an extra lift from its staccato foot-stomping melody: “The place is dead as Heaven on a Saturday night”. And that is another good reason for considering Cohen’s lyrics on their own. For a man sometimes lazily labelled as a morose prophet of doom (“songs to slit your wrists by” was an old gag about Cohen’s œuvre) his lyrics are frequently shot through with deadpan humour as well as some highly original ideas. ‘Hallelujah’ may, in fact, be the only popular song ever written in which the lyric gives a running commentary on the melodic structure (“...well it goes like this the fourth, the fifth / the minor fall and the major lift...”) while ‘The Tower of Song’ has Cohen dryly intoning in his imperfect bass baritone “I was born like this, I had no choice / I was born with the gift of a golden voice...”.
In 1987, three years after his record company actually declined to release one of Cohen’s albums in the US, Jennifer Warnes recorded an entire album of his songs. It looked like a kind but lonely gesture at the time but it helped kickstart a revival in his popularity. These days big names line up to appear on tributes to Leonard Cohen: Bono, Rufus Wainwright, Nick Cave, Willie Nelson, R.E.M., John Cale, Sting, Martha Wainwright and others are more than pleased to reinterpret the songs of Quebec’s most unlikely and enduring musical legend. The 100+ Leonard Cohen song lyrics collected here go a long way to explaining why.
Graham Vickers