Don’t Be Afraid of The Dark: Leonard Cohen in Five Songs
Don’t Be Afraid of The Dark: Leonard Cohen in Five Songs
He was one of the finest songwriters of the 20th century. These were the songs that proved it to me. They will prove it to you too.
“Avalanche”
I once read an article in which the writer argued “Avalanche” was about God. To be honest I didn’t really know what to think. I’d never thought about it that way before. This tune appeared on Cohen’s third album, 1971’s Songs of Love And Hate. It's Cohen at his most grotesque. The songs on this record are uncomfortable, depressing and sometimes scary. Songs of Love And Hate has some of his most ambitious and radical lyrics. It is a masterpiece among masterpieces, and “Avalanche” is one of its two opuses. Based on a poem he’d written called I Stepped Into an Avalanche, the song explores dread, paranoia, faith, damnation. Its language bears the weight of a boulder. Its themes are biblical and the more I dug in, the more it made sense. Yes, indeed, this is a song about God; specifically the inescapability of God.
Cohen seemed possessed in a way by the idea of following a spiritual path. So much of the music is about God, the idea of God, the relationship to and with spiritual power, and so on. “Avalanche” is menacing and its exploration of what salvation may look like is paranoia inducing. In some ways he’s right to make “being saved” look and sound ugly because spiritual healing is often a painful and ugly process. The narrator in the song is speaking directly to the listener, and it’s interesting to call the speaking voice God as opposed to actually giving it a name. Once I started to consider what it would mean to be challenged as a listener in this way, to think about what kind of God would say things like, “Do not dress in those rags for me… It is your turn beloved, it is your flesh that I wear.” Indeed what sort of God would say something like that? Not a kind God. Cohen’s God as presented in “Avalanche” is daunting and demanding, something one might be afraid of. What would happen if one were to upset this God? The more I think about it the more I’m thinking about people like Samuel Parris and John Hale, two prominent ministers during the Witch Trails in Salem. Something about how paranoid they were, how profoundly disturbed they were by these episodes of inexplicable behavior on the part of these women. Fear, power, omniscience—the line connecting the trials and a song by Leonard Cohen isn’t stick straight, but it’s a line nonetheless.
What’s most striking about “Avalanche” is how unrelenting it is. It’s a paralyzing piece of narrative art (forgive me for being lofty for a second). When I was in college I used to work part time at a radio station as a production assistant. My shift started at five o’clock and lasted until around 10 p.m. three days week. It was brutal. The commute was about 90 minutes on public transit. I remember putting this song on one night on the train. I was the only one in the car and it was dark and cold and it smelled like dead fish. The tickling of the nylon guitar strings, the almost threatening string arrangement underneath Cohen’s nasally delivery haunted me. I really felt like someone from someone unseen corner of the universe was watching me. Some Mr. Hyde adjacent creature lurking in the shadows.
It was exhilarating. To encounter a piece of art so visceral and so deceptively simple is an astonishing and unforgettable experience. I was never the same and from that night on I was hooked. He got me, or I started to get him… or both.
“Joan of Arc”
I love this song. As a listener I’m soothed by his voice and his gentleness and as a writer I am in awe of this lyric.
Tucked away on the second side of Songs of Love And Hate, “Joan of Arc” is a fascinating study in personification. It’s written as a dialogue between Joan and the flame consuming her as she burns at the stake. Sharon Robinson, who sang back up with Cohen and cowrote a couple of tunes with him, said spiritual enlightenment was his “primary occupation”, and in his exploration of Joan of Arc, the seeker and the beloved become one physically. What struck me the most about the lyric is how relaxed the tone of voice is. It’s almost as if the voice of the flame is welcoming her, it’s been waiting in some strange way. It presents her fate as inevitable. There’s something melancholy in there but it’s also tender and warm, inviting. By presenting the spectacle of her execution as a wedding between her and Christ, the listener is encouraged to exercise compassion. As opposed to feeling angry or horrified about her being arrested and killed by the state, the listener is invited to change their perspective—or at the very least consider a different perspective—and wonder whether or not she found peace.
In eight stanzas Cohen makes space for two completely separate points of view without forcing you to choose between which you think is right or wrong. Anyone who tells you Cohen wasn’t provocative or subversive doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Far too often Cohen’s music is referred to as boring or depressing, and he can be depressing sure. However, he is anything but boring. His songs, especially the earlier work, require a lot of brain power. One must actually listen to the words if one wishes to appreciate Cohen as a writer, as a poet, as an artist in his fullness. “Joan of Arc” is one of the finest examples of his fearlessness as a writer. As a writer myself I sometimes hear the words before I hear anything else going on in a piece of music. Often it takes me a while to hear little things the musicians are doing because I’m trying to hear whatever the singer is saying. Language matters and few people have had such command and power over the use of language as Cohen.
“Hallelujah”
I hesitated to put this song on the list because it’s the one almost everyone living and breathing on earth knows. I don’t think I know anyone who doesn’t know “Hallelujah” or has at least heard it somewhere at some time. It is so ubiquitous in the culture you almost forget it came from somewhere. It just exists in space and time and humans have just accepted it as a fact of nature. Something happens though when you learn the story of “Hallelujah”. It was written and rewritten over 100 times. At one point Cohen claimed to have around 150 drafts of it. It landed on an album that Columbia Records rejected after it was recorded and by the time it came out, it went largely unnoticed by the listening public. There’s something ironic about all this, a sad kind of irony. A devotional song, a song about throwing oneself in front whatever God you believe in, goes unnoticed and unheard. Whenever I hear “Hallelujah”, whether it’s the original or Jeff Buckley or Rufus Wainwright or John Cale or anybody else’s take for that matter, all I hear is a singer on their knees. It’s about as close to a hymn as ever a piece of popular music has yet to come.
It’s about surrender. Cohen once talked about how Hallelujah was a way to embrace the mess of life, the good and the bad and the ugly all at once. Hallelujah! Here it all is. Here it all is and there’s nothing any one of us can do about it. The only thing we have the power to do is surrender, throw our hands up and let go. It’s a painful song. It’s not easy to listen to and it’s not something I can listen to all the time because to fully allow God (God as in the thing we cannot explain) into your life, you have to be willing to relinquish control over your mind and your thought patterns. You have to be willing to let it all go, to release it all into the universe. It can be unimaginably difficult to do that, especially when times are hard for one reason or another. But that is exactly why songs like “Hallelujah” matter, and it is also why the idiot suits at Columbia Records who threw the album in the can can eat it.
If you need it to a song like “Hallelujah” will save your life. Business weasels will never understand, and it’s a shame. He was devastated after this, who wouldn’t be. And yet! Like all great art, it founds its way. Thank God it found its way. If I had to guess, Cohen wouldn’t have wanted to be referred to as a guru like figure. I don’t think he would want to refer to him as a Great Teacher, and yet I feel as though he would have been touched at the very least to know some listeners out there have leaned on “Hallelujah”; and allowed it to be there for them. I want to believe every artist worth their salt would be moved to know their work has been relied upon. I know I would be.
“You Want it Darker”
There is something about the later work that is inexplicable to me. There is something almost corporeal about the last few albums he made. Being trapped in a body or being aware of being inside a body, such a fascinating thing to think about. 2016’s You Want It Darker was recorded in the living room at his home just outside Los Angeles. He was beginning to feel the effects of life on the road and experienced multiple fractures in his spine among other ailments shortly before beginning work on this record. It’s the final hurrah, Pitchfork called it his “last testament, the informed conclusion of a lifetime of inquiry.” It sees Cohen looking back on his life, on his faith and, like much of his best work, it doesn’t offer easy answers to life’s biggest questions. Nor should it.
The closeness of his voice always hits me the hardest. You can hear that his mouth was almost touching the microphone, or at least it sounds as if that’s true. It’s almost as if he’s in your ear whispering each phrase through gritted teeth like he needs you to get the picture. Cohen died on November 7th of that year, just a couple months shy of the song’s release and so it was a King Lear moment if ever he had one. The last big fight. It was beautiful. His voice is frail, smokey, almost tired sounding. Every crack, every breath sounded like it took effort. It’s not easy listening, in fact it’s quite difficult to hear. There is, however, a gentleness in his delivery that I’ve always appreciated. His softspoken-ness has always endeared him to me. Despite his complexity, it always warmed my heart to hear the humility and self-deprecating humor in his voice. “You Want it Darker” is one of those rare moments in an artist’s career where they get to make one last stand, one final cry. It’s a remarkable thing and, when my time comes, I can only hope to have an awareness that I have said everything I have come here to say.
“Light as the Breeze”
I was having a conversation with some friends recently about Leonard Cohen’s poetry. One of the things we talked about were his love poems and how sensual and seductive they are, and how surprising that is to a lot of people. Cohen wrote about romantic longing in a way that made it feel holy. Now, for the unenlightened among us, Cohen was indeed one of the finest romantic poets of his generation, perhaps ever. His poetry about sex stands right up next to some of the great erotic poetry every composed. Of course I’m talking about e.e. cummings, Audre Lorde and Sharon Olds among many others. Cohen also explored sex and desire and passion in many of his songs over the course of his career. One of my personal favorites is “Light as the Breeze”. The lyrics read like a scene out of my favorite books by Henry Miller or John Updike. They make me feel the same way at the very least.
The performance of sex, the act itself, they are characters in the story in a way. Sex is a manifestation of desire, not just something that happens. It’s one of the reasons it’s sometimes difficult for me to read a romance novel. In a romance novel it’s always felt like the sex between the characters is just a thing happening between them or around them. In books like Couples (Updike) or The Tropic of Cancer (Miller), the sexuality is an extension of something happening within the character. I’m not a literary critic or theorist, but as a reader that’s always how it appeared to me, and it shook up the gum-ball machine in terms of how I thought about sex in relationships. I’m going to be blunt and say “Light as the Breeze” is written by a man who knows what he’s doing. And that is true for most of the writers I mentioned. They wrote about what they knew, what they know and they all have an acute sense of how physical intimacy informs the process of art making. This narrator understands that pleasure is something given to another person, not just received or taken, but given and shared between two people.
Until I did some reading on him and really dug into these songs, I had no idea how much a savant he was, and how much this complicated his reputation. Understanding this side of Cohen is key in understanding who he was both as a person and a musician.
But I’ll be damned… he could write a love poem… could he ever…