The Extraordinary Life of Leonard Cohen
This article was first published in Dumbo Feather magazine in 2017
In the last days of his life, Leonard Cohen was still singing. His body ravaged by cancer, his spine riven with compression fractures, he recorded his final album You Want It Darker from an orthopaedic medical chair at home, in tremendous physical pain. Still, at times, filled with joy, he’d overcome his pain to rise from the chair and stand swaying before the speakers, singing. His son Adam, who recorded and produced the album, has spoken of the humour and playfulness of these sessions, the laughter, the medical-marijuana fuelled philosophical debates. Listening to these last recordings of the great poet and songwriter, Cohen’s voice is deeper and more intimate than ever, a gravelly near-whisper as he delves for the last time into his perennial preoccupations: sex, love, death and God.
Death and God in particular. Perhaps it is significant that the backing female chorus that has been a constant on all his albums since 1968’s Songs of Leonard Cohen is almost absent on this, his last work, replaced by a male cantor choir supplied by Canada’s oldest Ashkenazi synagogue. After all, as the line from “Leaving the Table” goes: “I don’t need a lover/The wretched beast is tame.” But if age, pain and the tangible proximity of death had finally cooled the ladies’ man’s ardour, he was not…
