“I met Leonard Cohen through a mutual friend in Montreal when I was making a movie there in 1988. He took me to a pool hall, to a church, and then we ate pastrami sandwiches. Part wolf, part angel, his music speaks to the soul, his love songs from the dark recesses of the heart. He comes to my house in Venice, California wearing his usual uniform—white shirt, dark suit. His hair is cropped short. He has come from an ashram on Mount Baldy, in California, where he has been living for some time.”
— Anjelica Huston on Leonard Cohen, Interview Magazine, November 1995
a favourite subject and photographer, Anjelica Houston by Eve Arnold 1968
Give me back my broken night my mirrored room, my secret life it's lonely here, there's no one left to torture Give me absolute control over every living soul And lie beside me, baby, that's an order!
Give me crack and anal sex Take the only tree that's left and stuff it up the hole in your culture Give me back the Berlin wall give me Stalin and St Paul I've seen the future, brother: it is murder.
Things are going to slide, slide in all directions Won't be nothing Nothing you can measure anymore The blizzard, the blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold and it has overturned the order of the soul When they said REPENT REPENT I wonder what they meant When they said REPENT REPENT I wonder what they meant When they said REPENT REPENT I wonder what they meant
You don't know me from the wind you never will, you never did I'm the little jew who wrote the Bible I've seen the nations rise and fall I've heard their stories, heard them all but love's the only engine of survival Your servant here, he has been told to say it clear, to say it cold: It's over, it ain't going any further And now the wheels of heaven stop you feel the devil's riding crop Get ready for the future: it is murder
Things are going to slide ...
There'll be the breaking of the ancient western code Your private life will suddenly explode There'll be phantoms There'll be fires on the road and the white man dancing You'll see a woman hanging upside down her features covered by her fallen gown and all the lousy little poets coming round tryin' to sound like Charlie Manson and the white man dancin'
Give me back the Berlin wall Give me Stalin and St Paul Give me Christ or give me Hiroshima Destroy another fetus now We don't like children anyhow I've seen the future, baby: it is murder
" I get up at four thirty. My alarm is set for four thirty. Sometimes I sleep through it. But when I am good to myself, I get up at four thirty, get dressed, go down to a zendo (meditation hall) not far from here. And while the others, I suppose, are moving toward enlightenment, I am working on a song while I am sitting there. At a certain moment I can bring what I have learned at the zendo, the capacity to concentrate, I can bring it to bear on the lines that are eluding me.
Then I come back to the house after two hours. It is about six thirty now, quarter to seven. I brew an enormous pot of coffee and sit down in a very deliberate way, at the kitchen table or at the computer, and begin, first of all, to put down the lines that have come to me so that I don’t forget them. And then play the song over and over again, try to find some form.
Those are wonderful hours. Before the phone starts ringing, before your civilian life returns to you with all its bewildering complexities. It is a simple time in the morning. A wonderful, invigorating time".
[speaking of early Leonard Cohen . . .we were, we were]
Before he was famous, Leonard Cohen was just a poet with a dry wit, a great story, and coffee on his mind! ☕
⏪✡️ Celebrate Canadian Jewish Heritage Month with this 1965 throwback — then stream the full documentary for free on our website and app → bit.ly/3TvR7zW
This world is full of conflicts and full of things that cannot be reconciled. But there are moments when we can... reconcile and embrace the whole mess, and that's what I mean by 'Hallelujah.’
And then after a period of running on stage in his seventies delivering a three hour set, serenading and seducing us like a wandering troubadour, he was gone
So that happened . . . .and I’d really rather it didn’t
But in some certain way we’re glad that it did . . .does that make any sense?
‘Lenny’ always had a good turn with a love sone despite the sardonic twists and bleaker darker moments. . . .this is favourite song of all time
“Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin. Dance me through the panic till I’m gathered safely in. Touch me with your naked hand or touch me with your glove. Dance me to the end of love..”
"(one of the recordings that was done with the original producer for Songs of Leonard Cohen, John Hammond, but wasn’t rerecorded with John Simon so was not included on the album, but was released on the 2007 reissue)"
"Somewhere in the world, possibly hanging unassumingly in a wardrobe, or bathetically stowed away, unrecognised, in a dank basement or dusty attic, a famous blue raincoat might be found. It once belonged to Leonard Cohen, and in the early 1970s it was stolen from the New York apartment belonging to the songwriter’s lover, Marianne Ihlen.
While Cohen was never reunited with his Burberry coat, it was immortalised as the central image in one of his most beloved and enigmatic songs. Released on the 1971 album Songs of Love and Hate, “Famous Blue Raincoat”offers up perhaps the clearest synthesis of Cohen the poet-novelist and Cohen the singer-songwriter, as he relays a vividly characterised tale of adultery, regret and loneliness in just five minutes.
Delivered in Cohen’s warm, recitative style, the song takes the form of a letter (partly composed in an unusual poetic metre called amphibrach) addressed to an unnamed man who, we learn, once unsuccessfully tried to prise away Jane, the wife of the writer (a fictionalised version of the singer himself). But this is no ordinary torrid love-triangle narrative, filled with wounded egos, bitterness, blame and recriminations. Trust Leonard Cohen to come up with something altogether more subtle, spare, and quietly devastating.
Despite his personal reservations about the track, Cohen continued to play it throughout his long career. Perhaps he kept returning to it in the hope that with each performance he’d come closer to finally discovering some clarity within the song. Or maybe he simply never stopped missing his stolen, famous blue raincoat.
Cohen provided little elucidation, possibly so as to not attenuate the song’s open, inscrutable nature, but mainly because he didn’t really have the answers himself. In an interview in 1994, he admitted: “It was a song I've never been satisfied with. I've always felt that there was something about the song that was unclear.”
From ‘The Life of a Song Volume 2: The fascinating stories behind 50 more of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Brewer’s.
Photo Credit: Peter Mazel/Rex
Leonard Cohen - Famous Blue Raincoat (Live in Dublin)2014
