Musician Leonard Cohen. (photo: Getty)
Leonard
Cohen Has Died Aged 82
11 November 16
Hugely
influential singer and songwriter's work spanned nearly 50 years
Leonard Cohen, the hugely influential singer and songwriter whose work spanned nearly 50 years, died at the age of 82. Cohen's label, Sony Music Canada, confirmed his death on the singer's Facebook page.
"It is with
profound sorrow we report that legendary poet, songwriter and artist, Leonard
Cohen has passed away," the statement read. "We have lost one of
music's most revered and prolific visionaries. A memorial will take place in
Los Angeles at a later date. The family requests privacy during their time of
grief." A cause of death and exact date of death was not given.
"My father
passed away peacefully at his home in Los Angeles with the knowledge that he
had completed what he felt was one of his greatest records," Cohen's son
Adam wrote in a statement to Rolling
Stone. "He was writing up until his last moments with his unique brand
of humor."
"Unmatched in
his creativity, insight and crippling candor, Leonard Cohen was a true
visionary whose voice will be sorely missed," his manager Robert Kory
wrote in a statement. "I was blessed to call him a friend, and for me to
serve that bold artistic spirit firsthand, was a privilege and great gift. He
leaves behind a legacy of work that will bring insight, inspiration and healing
for generations to come."
Cohen was the dark
eminence among a small pantheon of extremely influential singer-songwriters to
emerge in the Sixties and early Seventies. Only Bob Dylan exerted a more
profound influence upon his generation, and perhaps only Paul Simon and fellow
Canadian Joni Mitchell equaled him as a song poet.
Cohen's haunting
bass voice, nylon-stringed guitar patterns and Greek-chorus backing vocals
shaped evocative songs that dealt with love and hate, sex and spirituality, war
and peace, ecstasy and depression. He was also the rare artist of his
generation to enjoy artistic success into his Eighties, releasing his final
album, You Want It Darker, earlier this year.
"I never had
the sense that there was an end," he said in 1992. "That there was a
retirement or that there was a jackpot."
"For many of
us, Leonard Cohen was the greatest songwriter of them all," Nick Cave, who
covered Cohen classics like "Avalanche," "I'm Your Man" and "Suzanne," said in a statement. "Utterly unique
and impossible to imitate no matter how hard we tried. He will be deeply missed
by so many."
Leonard Norman Cohen
was born on September 21st, 1934, in Westmount, Quebec. He learned guitar as a
teenager and formed a folk group called the Buckskin Boys. Early exposure to
Spanish writer Federico Garcia Lorca turned him toward poetry – while a
flamenco guitar teacher convinced him to trade steel strings for nylon. After
graduating from McGill University, Cohen moved to the Greek island of Hydra,
where he purchased a house for $1,500 with the help of a modest trust fund
established by his father, who died when Leonard was nine. While living on
Hydra, Cohen published the poetry collection Flowers
for Hitler(1964) and the novels The
Favourite Game (1963) and Beautiful Losers (1966).
Frustrated by poor
book sales, and tired of working in Montreal's garment industry, Cohen visited
New York in 1966 to investigate the city's robust folk-rock scene. He met folk
singer Judy Collins, who later that year included two of his songs, including
the early hit "Suzanne," on her album In My Life. His New York milieu
included Andy Warhol, the Velvet Underground, and, most importantly, the
haunting German singer Nico, whose despondent delivery he may have emulated on
his exquisite 1967 album Songs
of Leonard Cohen.
Cohen quickly became
the songwriter's songwriter of choice for artists like Collins, James Taylor,
Willie Nelson and many others. His black-and-white album photos offered an
arresting image to go with his stark yet lovely songs. His next two albums, Songs From a Room (1969) and Songs of Love and Hate (1971),
benefited from the spare production of Bob Johnston, along with a group of
seasoned session musicians that included Charlie Daniels.
During the
Seventies, Cohen set out on the first of the many long, intense tours he would
reprise toward the end of his career. "One of the reasons I'm on tour is
to meet people," he told Rolling
Stone in 1971. "I
consider it a reconnaissance. You know, I consider myself like in a military
operation. I don't feel like a citizen." His time on tour inspired the
live sound producer John Lissauer brought to his 1974 masterpiece, New Skin for the Old Ceremony.
However, he risked a production catastrophe by hiring wall-of-sound maximalist
Phil Spector to work on his next album, Death
of a Ladies Man, whose adversarial creation resulted in a Rolling Stonereview titled "Leonard Cohen's Doo-Wop
Nightmare."
Cohen's relationship
with Suzanne Elrod during most of the Seventies resulted in two children, the
photographer Lorca Cohen and Adam Cohen, who leads the group Low Millions.
Cohen was well known for his wandering ways, and his most stable relationships
were with backing singers Laura Branigan, Sharon Robinson, Anjani Thomas, and,
most notably, Jennifer Warnes, who he wrote with and produced (Warnes
frequently performed Cohen’s music). After indulging in a variety of
international styles on Recent
Songs (1979), Cohen accorded
Warnes full co-vocal credit on 1984's Various
Positions.
Various Positions included "Hallelujah," a
meditation on love, sex and music that would become Cohen's best-known
composition thanks to Jeff Buckley's incandescent 1994 reinterpretation. Its
greatness wasn't recognized by Cohen's label, however. By way of informing him
that Columbia Records would not be releasing Various
Positions, label head Walter Yetnikoff reportedly told Cohen, "Look,
Leonard; we know you're great, but we don't know if you're any good."
Cohen returned to the label in 1988 with I'm
Your Man, an album of sly humor and social commentary that launched the
synths-and-gravitas style he continued on The
Future (1992).
In 1995, Cohen
halted his career, entered the Mt. Baldy Zen Center outside of Los Angeles,
became an ordained Buddhist monk and took on the Dharma name Jikan
("silence"). His duties included cooking for Kyozan Joshu Sasaki
Roshi, the priest and longtime Cohen mentor who died in 2014 at the age of 104.
Cohen broke his musical silence in 2001 with Ten
New Songs, a collaboration with Sharon Robinson, and Dear Heather (2004), a relatively uplifting project
with current girlfriend Anjani Thomas. While never abandoning Judaism, the
Sabbath-observing songwriter attributed Buddhism to curbing the depressive
episodes that had always plagued him.
The final act of
Cohen's career began in 2005, when Lorca Cohen began to suspect her father's
longtime manager, Kelley Lynch, of embezzling funds from his retirement
account. In fact, Lynch had robbed Cohen of more than $5 million. To replenish
the fund, Cohen undertook an epic world tour during which he would perform 387
shows from 2008 to 2013. He continued to record as well, releasing Old Ideas (2012) and Popular Problems, which hit
U.S. shops a day after his eightieth birthday. "[Y]ou depend on a certain
resilience that is not yours to command, but which is present," he told Rolling Stone upon its release. "And if you can
sense this resilience or sense this capacity to continue, it means a lot more
at this age than it did when I was 30, when I took it for granted."
When the Grand Tour
ended in December 2013, Cohen largely vanished from the public eye. In October
2016, he released You Want It
Darker, produced by his son Adam. Severe back issues made it difficult for
Cohen to leave his home, so Adam placed a microphone on his dining room table
and recorded him on a laptop. The album was met with rave reviews, though a New Yorker article timed to its release revealed that he was
in very poor health. "I am ready to die," he said. "I hope it's
not too uncomfortable. That's about it for me."
The
singer-songwriter later clarified that he was
"exaggerating." "I’ve always been into self-dramatization,"
Cohen said last month. "I intend to live forever.”
C 2015 Reader Supported News
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