The first song Leonard Cohen wrote on the Greek island of Hydra
One of the most important and creatively nurturing periods for Leonard Cohen was spent on the Greek island of Hydra. The Canadian poet and singer-songwriter felt a mystical attraction to the island and decided to live there for seven years from 1960 to ’67. He arrived a destitute, aspiring creative in his mid-20s and left a more artistically coherent man in his early 30s, ready to take the world by storm.
In 1951, Cohen won the Chester MacNaghten Literary Competition for his poetry entry; it became clear what career path he would take, but it wouldn’t be an easy rise to the top. Cohen had spent his late academic career and early 20s pursuing a career in literature but grew weary of his surroundings in Canada. Opting for a more creatively inspiring setting, he found Hydra.
On September 27th, 1960, just six days after his 26th birthday, Cohen bought a house in Hydra for $1,500, using money he had inherited from his recently passed grandmother. Cohen was attracted to the island’s mystical aura and soon found the move to be the best decision he ever made.
Cohen described his three-story white-washed residence in a letter to his mother. He said: “It has a huge terrace with a view of dramatic mountain and shining white houses. The rooms are large and cool, with deep windows set in thick walls. I suppose it’s about 200 years old, and many generations of seamen must have lived here”.
Adding: “I will do a little work on it every year, and in a few years, it will be a mansion… I live on a hill, and life has been going on here exactly the same for hundreds of years. All through the day, you hear the calls of the street vendors, and they are really rather musical… I get up around seven generally and work till about noon. Early morning is coolest and therefore best, but I love the heat anyhow, especially when the Aegean Sea is 10 minutes from my door.”
In Ira B. Nadel’s biography, Various Positions, a letter Cohen wrote to a friend was quoted in which he explained his choice to keep the urban lifestyle at arm’s length. “Having this house makes cities less frightening,” he wrote. “I can always come back and get by. But I don’t want to lose contact with the metropolitan experience.”
“The years are flying past, and we all waste so much time wondering if we dare to do this or that. The thing is to leap, to try, to take a chance,” he added.
Shortly after moving to Hydra, Cohen befriended the Australian writer Chairman Clift, who lived with her husband and literary collaborator George Johnston. The couple inspired Cohen no end, leading an example he was sure to follow. “They drank more than other people, they wrote more, they got sick more, they got well more, they cursed more, they blessed more, and they helped a great deal more. They were an inspiration,” Cohen later said of the couple.
In 1980, the couple had been dead for over a decade, but Cohen remembered to pay his respects during his first performance in Sydney. “To George Johnston and Charmian Clift, who taught me how to write,” he said, introducing ‘Bird on a Wire’, his first Hydra-inspired song, which he began writing on the island.
Cohen’s time on Hydra was mainly spent collating material for his 1964 poetry collection Flowers for Hitler and his 1963 novel The Favourite Game, a Bildungsroman that follows a young man who finds himself through writing; as one might guess, this was mainly an autobiographical work.
All the while, Cohen began to hone his skills on the guitar, realising that music would be a great conduit through which to showcase some of his more melodic poetry. The most famous of his Hydra compositions was ‘Bird on the Wire’, inspired by a bird Cohan saw sitting on one of the island’s newly installed telephone lines.
In the lyrics, Cohen notes his search for freedom from depression and his newfound romantic muse, Marianne Ihlen. Cohen met the beautiful Norwegian woman, who was in a moribund marriage to the author Axel Jensen at the time. As legend has it, she handed Cohen his guitar one day to lighten his mood whereupon he saw the bird on the wire and set to work.
The relationship between Cohen and Ihlen became intense following her divorce from Jensen in 1962. Through a series of ups and downs, the couple travelled between New York, Montreal, Oslo and Hydra through the 1960s. However, in 1967, Cohen left Hydra as his primary residence to focus on his art in New York City.
At this point, too, Cohen and Ihlen drifted apart, but her influence lives on in ‘So Long, Marianne’, which featured on Cohen’s debut album of 1967, Songs of Leonard Cohen. ‘Bird on the Wire’ would later be recorded as the first track on his follow-up album, Songs from a Room.
“I began this on Aylmer Street in Montreal and finished it a year or so later at the Chelsea Hotel in New York,” Cohen said of ‘So Long, Marrianne’ in the liner noted for 1976’s Greatest Hits. “I didn’t think I was saying goodbye, but I guess I was. She gave me many songs, and she has given songs to others too. She is a Muse. A lot of people I know think that there is nothing more important than making a song. Fortunately, this belief arises infrequently in their conversation.”
Cohen and Ihlen remained in each others’ fond thoughts for the remainder of their lives. Just before Ihlen’s death in July 2016, Cohen wrote to her in a letter: “I’m just a little behind you, close enough to take your hand. […] I’ve never forgotten your love and your beauty. But you know that. […] Safe travels, old friend. See you down the road. Love and gratitude.” Cohen passed away just over three months later, on November 7th.
Listen below to ‘Bird on the Wire’, Leonard Cohen’s first musical composition on Hydra.
