How Don Henley paid tribute to his songwriting hero Leonard Cohen: “They actually have wisdom”
Growing up is usually an unwelcome part of life. We may spend our childhood nights in bed wishing to be old enough that we can be a part of the party going on downstairs beyond 8pm, but otherwise, the thought of getting older is one we’d all rather put to the back of our minds. Musicians like Don Henley are just the same.
Despite being in one of the most successful groups of all time, the Eagles man has struggled to reconcile the new position in the music world that his age has given him. Past the heyday of the 1970s and ’80s, Henley now operates as a figure of cultural wisdom but doesn’t get to take to the airwaves as often as he would like. But that isn’t the case for every rock star.
A very select few simply get better with age and, perhaps more impressively, are actually recognised as such. One man who only grew in stature as he years passed by was Leonard Cohen, and for that alone, he remains one of Henley’s most cherished songwriters.
“It’s frustrating for older artists,” Henley opened up, demonstrating the inequity of gaining knowledge but losing time to share it, “Because some people like Leonard Cohen get better as they get older; they actually have wisdom to impart, and they have things to say in their songs, and they don’t get played. You hear this mindless bubble gum crap. But that’s the way it works.”
It’s hard to argue with him. Cohen may have flown out the gates with two of the greatest singer-songwriter albums ever released in Songs of Leonard Cohen and Songs of Love and Hate but his stock would fall quite dramatically until the 1980s. From that moment on until Cohen’s death in 2016, the star’s acclaim would only gather more and more praise. Cohen was soon touted as perhaps the world’s greatest songwriter, bringing poetry to pop music in a way most had only dreamed of achieving.
Henley would shower Cohen with more acclaim, equating him with the writers he considered untouchable geniuses: “I think [Randy Newman’s] a genius. Randy Newman, Paul Simon and Leonard Cohen were it for me; they’re the best songwriters.” But there’s a case to be made to consider Cohen Henley’s ultimate songwriting hero, largely because out of those three, it is only the Canadian bard whom Henley has covered. And on a number of occasions.
The first came in 1993, as Bill Clinton reached the White House. For the incumbent President’s inauguration, Henley jumped up to the mic and gave a rendition of ‘Democracy’. Speaking to Zollo, Cohen admitted that the track was certainly born out of being “that gloomy fellow who always turns up at a party to ruin the orgy or something” as the Berlin Wall came down, and he saw the potential for trouble ahead.
However, the songwriter reflected: “I asked myself, ‘Where is democracy really coming?’ And it was the USA…So while everyone was rejoicing, I thought it wasn’t going to be like that, euphoric, the honeymoon. So it was these world events that occasioned the song. And also the love of America. Because I think the irony of America is transcendent in the song. It’s not an ironic song. It’s a song of deep intimacy and affirmation of the experiment of democracy in this country.”
It made itself the perfect song for Henley to sing as the country faced a new regime with a brighter future in the hands of Clinton. The population was buoyed, and Cohen’s message of pride in democracy was the perfect fit. So much so that the track was often misrecognised as Henley’s own.
This happened again when Henley took on Cohen’s 1988 protest anthem ‘Everybody Knows’, which ditches the ideals of democracy for an unabashed drive at the leaders of the free world and was later featured on Henley’s1995 greatest hits album, Actual Miles: Henley’s Greatest Hits. The tributes would continue in a more formal setting in 2024.
As part of Here It Is: A Tribute to Leonard Cohen, Henley would be a part of covers including ‘Democracy’, ‘Waiting for the Miracle’ and perhaps Cohen’s most beloved hit ‘Hallelujah’. It’s proof of a few things. Firstly, that Henley is a very gifted singer, able to bring his honed vocals to almost any track, and secondly, he would much rather those songs be written by Leonard Cohen.
While he hasn’t given us tomes of praise in the form of words, we can be safe in the knowledge that a musician like Don Henley would show his true love for an artist through his music. And if we go by that metric, there is no musician he loved more than Leonard Cohen.
