Leonard Cohen (Jaeda's Artists' Cafe 11/14/99)

I've been listening to Leonard Cohen sing all day now. Same CD (Cohen Live) over and over. His poetry and music are the perfect cure for excessive happiness. Unfortunately I didn't have that condition when I spun the disk, but it's impossible to shut off the brown and black with zydeco riff music, so rather than dwell on the state of the world as seen by the artist, I'm trying to reverse engineer how he does this.

Art doesn't come easy. Every song Cohen is performing I've heard before on other albums. His work isn't infinite. What has he thrown away? Wouldn't you love to have the outtakes from his studio, to listen to what he didn't think was good enough? If he threw out something that's only 90% as good as the least of his published music, I'd listen.

But this isn't hero-worship. Cohen is a man. He's a monk, looking inside himself, but not rejecting the world in the process. How does he work? Does he start with the poetry, with a phrase or a word, and build on it, stretching for the rhyme and meter? Do colors of words play into it; do words have to make grammatical sense for the coloration to work?

How many discards does he go through for one keeper, and how many keeper lyrics does he have without music that works for him? Does he say "shit" when he throws the failures out? Does he care what people think of his work, or is that a secondary consideration?

"...dance me to your beauty with a naked violin...dance me to the end of love..."

Just thinking out loud.

-Don