‘Bird on the Wire’: Leonard Cohen’s greatest opening line
A great song doesn’t need a great opening lyric, but most great opening lyrics result in great songs. It is the pistol shot at the start of the race, and if it gets the song off to a flyer, then the rest of the strides often seem to follow suit, almost as though the song was fully realised before the pen even touched the page. Leonard Cohen had a sweet knack for allowing classics to unravel after the first kiss of ink and paper.
He was a writer before he was a musician. But his literary work was failing to reach any great heights, leaving him disillusioned with a slew of hangers-on. So, after a fair bit of happenstance, he headed off to one of the world’s most dreamy spots. “There is nowhere in the world where you can live like you can in Hydra, and that includes Hydra,” he once said.
In the 1960s, this fleck of paradise, seemingly floating in the Aegean Sea like a leaf blown onto a pond, was awash with a swarm of bohemian artistry. Cohen and a coterie of his glossy-eyed cronies had washed up on its shore and begun to plunder its beauty for their poems, songs, paintings or whatever creative endeavours they spent their languid days doing. Cohen, with a $2,000 grant from the Canadian Arts Council, had been drawn to the island after a particularly gloomy April in Hampstead, London. During a party that spring, he met Barbara Rothschild, and she told him of a mansion she knew of with much better weather.
He fled there in a hurry, hoping to shed some skin. In short, he was trying, in his way, to be free. So, as he lay in a hotel bed, watching birds acquaint themselves with the newly installed tendrils of telephone wires that were spreading over the island like a spider’s web, he saw himself in his avian friends. They, too, were quite literally trying to find their place in this new environment. Cohen began to write.
He wouldn’t stop writing ‘Bird on the Wire’ for the rest of his life. The version that we know carried on from that hotel bed in Hydra through to memories of nights gone by before settling back down in a motel room in Hollywood where he finished the track. Along the way, it would never be anything other than brilliant, but it was also that first moment of inspiration that gave it wings:
“Like a bird on the wire,
Like a drunk in a midnight choir,
I have tried in my way to be free.”
The brilliance of much of Cohen’s lyricism is that it etches itself on the sensibilities of any attentive listener. As such the refrain of “I have tried in my way to be free” is one that snuggles into the psyche like a bird in the nest. It establishes the outlook of the protagonist in a way that is both perfectly clear but mindfully multifaceted. ‘Free’ is as vague as Cohen’s attempts to be it—even birds who could be anywhere end up perched on ugly wires.
All of this is set up from the opening vignette—simple and colourful in equal measure. Weary but still wandering, Cohen gets the lines off his chest before the needle has had a chance to nestle into the groove. In the process, he establishes that the song is almost confessional, and he takes catharsis in that as he staggers through the past and beyond.
