‘Closing Time’: Leonard Cohen’s “giant hit” that disappointed his producer
While the 1980s has been less kind to his 1960s peers, Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen wandered the era’s bewildering cultural terrain of MTV and commercialisation managing to keep his confessional folk mystique intact. Releasing material sparingly, and Various Positions‘ ‘Hallelujah’ yet to enter the canonical hymn sheet following John Cale’s and Jeff Buckley’s later renditions, it was 1988’s I’m Your Man that truly marked a new chapter in Cohen’s career, a deeper lyrical embrace of sardonic wit and complex musings on life and love set to the emerging synthesizers and digital technologies that dominated the pop climate of the day.
While the songs are on point, boasting some of his finest pieces including ‘Everybody Knows’ and ‘Tower of Song’, the production hasn’t aged well, coating his sublime songwriting with a soggy instrumental flourish stunting the LP’s longevity.
It ushered new mainstream attention to the sage songsmith, however, serving as his most successful album to date in America and redefined his public persona with the accompanying videos and front cover, a greater dose of self-deprecation with the dapper Cohen munching on a banana puncturing the misconceptions of his stuffy and over-serious self-absorption.
The world rapidly changed between I’m Your Man and 1992’s The Future. The Cold War had come to a close and cast a new political uncertainty, and the race riots that engulfed Los Angeles inspired Cohen to act as a world reporter as much as the lyrical excavator of his own psyche.
Pulled from the apocalyptic dread that coloured his ninth album was channelled into its lead single ‘Closing Time’, a picture of last-minute hedonism and panicked partying in a dance hall staving off the horrors consuming society outside. Capturing that universal pang felt by all when the houselights turn on and the DJ’s finished their set, the grim pull to reality forcing the revellers to a reckoning with upended humanity, the close of a relationship, or life’s final curtain.
So far so Cohen. Yet, it was his idea to turn such melancholy mordancy into a brighter pop hit. Initially working the single around a violin sample on a Casio keyboard, the demo was fleshed out with a six-string bass and presented as a much more downbeat and moodier affair. “He came in for next weekend and said, ‘It’s all wrong, I’m starting over’,” engineer Leanne Unger told Uncut. “I was like, ‘Noooooo!’ Devastated. He brought it back in a week later and it was uptempo, jumping, and he had a giant hit with it in Canada. So what do I know?”
His instincts were correct, peaking at number 70 on the Canadian charts and proving his biggest home country hit since ‘Hallelujah’, helped by its Juno Award-winning video with Curtis Wehfritz.
Cohen would continue penning songs of guarded hope in the face of bleak social and political unfolding, heading toward greater mortal grappling on 2016’s You Want It Darker released 17 days before his death, but it’s ‘Closing Time’ that serves as one of his most relatable pieces at odds with ‘Hallelujah‘s stirring yet loftier standing.
