You'd think being Leonard Cohen's girlfriend would help a music career, but Anjani Thomas knows better, she tells Tony Clayton-Lea

Good things come to those who are patient to wait long enough, it seems. Anjani Thomas has a new record out and she's thrilled; it doesn't matter to her that you don't recognize her name, and it won't matter to her if Blue Alert sells in paltry amounts. What is important to her is that she has managed, after more than 20 years of shuffling on the outskirts of the music business (and at one point retiring from the industry altogether), to record and release a collection of songs that are very much of themselves in a seductive, candle-flickering, your-place-or-mine kind of way.

So you might not have heard of Thomas, but you'll have heard of her partner in life and music - Leonard Cohen. They first met in 1984 when Thomas - following a period of jazz gigging in Canada and a spell in Boston's Berklee College of Music - went to audition for backing vocalist on the original recording of one of Cohen's signature songs, Hallelujah.

Thomas recalls that she arrived at Cohen's Manhattan loft where he suddenly appeared in the doorway dressed head to toe in black. He was very imposing, she remembers, as he stood there and listened to her sing. She got the gig, and her life with Cohen began.

"We've known each other a very long time," she says, "although we didn't start dating until 1999, so we've spent quite a few years getting to know each other. We've been through a tremendous amount, what with the debacle with his previous manager [ Cohen's former lover and manager of 17 years, Kelley Lynch, skimmed more than $5 million (€3.9 million) of his savings while he resided at a Californian Buddhist monastery; Cohen has since won a $9 million (€7 million) lawsuit] and that sidetracked us for a couple of years while we tried to untangle it. Blue Alert was made during that time, so it was born out of the most difficult circumstances possible and became a creative release, an organic by-product of the stress. Yet through that we achieved a balance - making lovely songs while crummy things were happening."

Thomas shares with Cohen a devotional, sensual streak, an awareness that evokes a spiritual quest amid folds of physical longing and a philosophical hangover period where one tries to make sense of it all. Prior to Blue Alert, she had released two records - a self-titled debut in 2000 and a year later The Sacred Names, a musical ode to the Greek, Aramaic and Hebrew names of God.

For her, she says, there are moments in the creation and performance of a song which connect with something that is "quite indescribable. I wouldn't say the process is always sacred - certainly the creative part of it is sometimes tortuous, and trying to come up with the right code to break the lock is not always easy to endure. In many ways, though, the moments of exaltation are tempered by what it takes to get there."

You can see how Cohen and Thomas fit - their mutual aesthetic is that the end results of beauty are worth arduous and often painful journeys. It's akin to a Zen approach, wherein occasional moments of exaltation are balanced by rather more functional, pragmatic, almost casual choices. Like most people, Thomas knows all about pragmatic choices; she left home (Honolulu, Hawaii) in her teens to travel to Canada for jazz work. She had no idea where she was going or what she was doing.

"Everything was a forward move, and after Hawaii anything was the big time," she says. "I always had what we called rock fever - the grass was always greener on the other side. Not because I had disagreements with my family - I still go home once or twice a year - but because where I lived was a really small place and I just wanted to get in on where the action was happening."

For a time, Thomas had the unstoppable energy of youth, but it clashed, she admits, with the crush of rejection and the non-acceptance by the general public of her work. After a few brawls between her and the music industry, she began to realise that world domination perhaps wasn't all it's cracked up to be.

"Fighting for that level of fame can kill you with bitterness, regret, anger and a frustration that can become a huge block for people to handle," she says. "When I was in my 20s I felt I had the goods, the talent, the wherewithal, but I look back on myself and have to laugh. I might have had a modicum of talent and all of that, but it's a good thing it didn't happen to me back then because I would have turned out to be a much different person; it would have fed my ego to the point where I really believed I was great."

And so Thomas, in her 30s, simply gave in and gave up. She had come to a point in her creative life where she had spent some years trying to make "bad commercial jazz music, and to me there's nothing more sacrilegious than that". A new life of something that was anything except music beckoned. Disgruntled at being cheated out of a jazz star life, she didn't listen to the radio or records, and didn't pick up an instrument for about five years.

"Truth is," she reasons diplomatically, "perhaps I didn't have anything left to say."

FIVE YEARS OF doing "stuff" was enough, however. On a vacation to her home in Honolulu, Thomas found her guitar in the closet and started playing again. Within six weeks she had written two albums worth of material and was ready, more or less, to re-enter the arena. By this stage, herself and Cohen had become more than professional friends; the strands of her life were slowly being drawn together.

Three albums later, she feels she is almost at a full circle - the point where she thought she'd be about 20 years ago. Yet every year, every adventure, every misadventure, she implies, was completely necessary and affected what subsequently happened.

"Those kinds of defeats wring your ego through the mill; I hate the phrase 'character-building', but you have to realise there are other things beside music that you can do," she says. "For so much of my early life I lived and breathed music, so in one sense it was good that I learned to do other things, to walk in the rather more normal world."

Thomas continues to walk in the normal world by virtue of her experiences battling against indifference to her work; such are the by-products of an age where subtlety and sparseness are deemed to be redundant, unseemly qualities. Things will change, she thinks. She could be right.

"With Leonard, the lyric is the jewel, it is the most important element besides the voice that is delivering it, and so the arrangements are secondary," she says. "Arrangements on the likes of Dear Heather [ Cohen's 2004 album] and Blue Alert support the lyrics, the jewels, by threads in that there isn't a lot of production at all. In a way, the sound is very much like his early work, where there is mainly guitar and voice. It's stripped down to such a very pure and concentrated delivery system that the mind can really fall into the message of the song. Because of this we've been told the music is not radio-friendly, but the work isn't necessarily radio-friendly anyway and we don't think it would have made a great difference to cater to pop- radio formats."

Thomas arrives in Ireland at the end of this month for rehearsals for Hal Willner's Came So Far for Beauty, a celebration of the work of Leonard Cohen. Along with the likes of Antony (of Antony and the Johnsons), Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, Jarvis Cocker, Mary Margaret O'Hara, Gavin Friday and Nick Cave, she will sing words written by the man she loves.

So how does that work on a personal level - can she distinguish the man from the songwriter? It seems so.

"We don't say 'how great you are' to each other," she says, laughing. "He's a very humble person and that kind of thing never comes up - he's just Leonard to me. I see Leonard the revered author/ singer/poet in other people's eyes, but to me he's just the chap in the other room who makes my breakfast. I sew the buttons on his shirt, you know - it's just a normal relationship."

Blue Alert is on release. Came So Far for Beauty: An Evening of Leonard Cohen Songs, is at Dublin's Point Theatre on Wed and Thur, Oct 4 and 5, as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival