When you're feeling introspective, whose songs do you reach for? Look no further than the poetic mastery of Leonard Cohen, says Tony Clayton-Lea
'Tis the season to be jolly? Try telling Leonard Cohen that. It's instructive to note that of all of the Greatest Hits packages currently being thrown our way by record company archivists and accountants, The Essential Leonard Cohen is probably the least likely to compete against the likes of compilations from David Bowie, Blondie, Kylie, Pulp, Westlife, Manic Street Preachers, et al.
Yet Cohen, a man in his late 60s, whose first professional performance took place in 1958, holds an important place in rock music - not least because he's an unguarded songwriter who quietly boasts as good a disarming, elegant form of poetry as you're ever likely to read within the rock genre. He is also a songwriter who has influenced (and continues to influence) a wide range of musicians working within rock and pop, with many people - from Nine Inch Nails's Trent Reznor to Peter Gabriel - extolling the virtues of Cohen's tower of song. And it's not just the established artists, either; there isn't a so-called nu-folk artist worth their salt who doesn't bow at the altar of Cohen.
"I remember when I was in my teens," Ron Sexsmith, the Canadian singer/songwriter tells me. "I borrowed one of Cohen's records and I didn't get it at all. Then years later I bought the same record, and all of a sudden it made sense to me; it was one of the things that got me writing. I was trying to write before that, but it was after hearing Cohen that I started writing my first batch of good songs - material that would end up leading to a publishing deal. The thing I love about him is that it's always about the music - never frivolous, not jumping up and down, not being embarrassing. In my 20s, I made a promise to myself to write songs that I could grow old with gracefully."
Growing old? Some would say that Leonard Cohen has always been old, which is probably the reason he has never appealed to the essentially fluffy pre-teen and mid-teen market in all the decades he has been around.
He was in his 30s by the time his first album, Songs Of Leonard Cohen, was released in 1968. That album set the standard for what was slowly to come: modest sales that sat side-by-side with critical praise and peer group admiration. He didn't share the 1960s enthusiasms for radical politics or left-wing proclivities; favoured expensive suits instead of jeans; told interviewers he wasn't ashamed of his education, his country, his background. He went to college and he wrote books, he said. He was not trying to make opinionated statements or set himself apart.
Yet despite the early success of his gracious, confessional songs ("bittersweet mood music for the dark nights of the soul," according to the Rolling Stone Album Guide), Cohen failed the pop-star test by not complying with the celebrations. At the beginning of the 1970s, deeply depressed and dissatisfied with his new-found but profoundly hollow life, he embraced Zen Buddhism. The training was rigid and disciplined (he described it as preparing Marines for the spiritual world), but it gave him a respite from being asked to provide answers to questions such as "what is life" and "why are we here?" The primary aspect of Zen that appealed to him, he has said, is that the religion simply doesn't demand an answer.
But if Zen Buddhism doesn't demand an answer, there is still a questioning spirit burning bright within Cohen. About 18 months ago, after more than six years as a Zen monk, Cohen left his retreat in California's Mount Baldy. (No one really knows exactly why he left. Cohen has described his time there as "ordinary life under a microscope", and has said he was sucked in by, initially at least, "the voluptuous simplicity of the day".) Twelve months ago, he released Ten New Songs, his first record since 1992's The Future. Like his first record, it achieved modest sales in tandem with critical praise and peer group respect, but its very existence - its sure touches of musical subtleties, its sustained, witty, poetic lines: "I smile when I'm angry, I cheat and I lie. I do what I have to do to get by" - and the reception it received, proves that in an industry of one-hit wonders and inflated reputations, Cohen is Senior Citizen Kane.
It has been said of him that he's a narcissist who hates himself - although St Augustine's "I am a problem to myself" might just as easily apply. Listening to the latest gathering of his better-known songs, one finally accepts the theory that his art is a form of spiritual autobiography.
Overshadowed throughout his career by Bob Dylan's somewhat more iconographic-hipster status, Cohen's songs are created in the slipstream of Yeats's "foul rag and bone shop of the heart" and his own dictum of wanting to delve deeper, to sing sadder. That said, by most available current accounts, he reckons his anxious days are over with. He was recently asked if he is experiencing a graceful period in his life. "For the moment," he replied, "but you never write the end."
The Essential Leonard Cohen is on the Sony label
Cohen on Cohen
Sisters Of Mercy (1967)
"This was inspired by two young women that I met in a snowstorm in Edmonton. They didn't have any hotel but I had one, so we all went back and they fell asleep on the double bed, and I sat in the armchair. They were so lovely, just sleeping. You have to remember I was someone who had always struggled with this problem of loneliness, and I was always hoping to meet women on the road. I was awake and I remember the moonlight shining on the ice of river and thinking this was as good as it was going to get."
Hey, That's No Way To Say Goodbye (1967)
"It's hard to be honest when I talk about this song because it's connected with somebody, and I don't feel like disclosing the name. I was leaving one woman and courting another, and I wasn't quite sure what I was feeling at the time."
Famous Blue Raincoat (1971)
"This is a song that perplexes me because I thought there was something unclear about it. I like hard edges and very, very clear imagery, and I wasn't ready to accept that I had written an impressionistic song. I worried that I was asking the listener to make certain leaps, and I still don't know if that's legitimate."
Hallelujah (1988)
"This has the notion that there is no perfection - that this is a broken world and we live with broken hearts and broken lives, but still that is no alibi for anything. On the contrary, you have to stand up and say hallelujah under those circumstances."
Anthem (1992)
"It is one of the best songs I have written, maybe the best. Like Hallelujah, it is saying there is a crack in everything- forget about your perfect offering. I knew that song was everything that my whole work and life had somehow gathered around. It is absolutely true to me."