Why Leonard Cohen was happy to lie to Bob Dylan’s face: “Much more like chiselling marble”
The work of lyricists is about as close to ancient ritual as we can get in our modern era. To find poetry combined with rhythm is to find the spirituality of human existence: an expression of the physical and the emotional, all in one composite. Because of this, and other reasons, for years, the lives and careers of Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan intertwined.
Both pioneers of alternative music, the two singer-songwriters had unrelenting admiration for each other’s work as they negotiated their creative vision down similar roads. One imagines that all folk artists shared a similar viewpoint and, therefore, a similar process to get to it. But for Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, that notion couldn’t be further from the truth.
Having crossed paths multiple times after their initial meeting in the 1960s, Cohen’s son, Adam, has remembered one specific moment when his father felt compelled to lie to Dylan after meeting up for a coffee in Paris. It’s the kind of lie we’ve all told in our lives once before.
“A lot of people have made the comparison between Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen over the years and there’s some hilarious stories,” Adam Cohen said in a past interview with the BBC’s The Afternoon Show. “Like the two of them are sitting in a cafe in Paris and Dylan says to him, ‘How long did it take you to write Hallelujah?” Adam continued. “And my father completely lied to Dylan and said, ‘Oh you know a couple of years’,” Cohen replied casually knowing that the reality was very different.
Adam continued: “I think it was [actually] seven years,” he clarified. An arduous process that also required the help of John Cale to bring it to its most popular form, but a worthwhile contribution nevertheless. “And then my father returned the favour and said, you know, ‘How long did it take you to write Like a Woman?’ and Dylan said, ‘Fifteen minutes’”. A dagger blow to anybody who has sat down to write a song, that one as inch-perfect as ‘Just Like A Woman’ could flow through you and reach the page and the strings of a guitar within such a short time.
Cohen quantified the process: “And that’s very much about process, I think. Dylan had this quality where he would ‘from the hip’, you know spit and polish, spit and vinegar, and then this old man of mine was much more like chiselling marble.”
“That song ‘Hallelujah’ has resonance for me,” Dylan later told the New Yorker. “It’s a beautifully constructed melody that steps up, evolves, and slips back, all in quick time. But this song has a connective chorus, which when it comes in has a power all of its own. The ‘secret chord’ and the point-blank I-know-you-better-than-you-know-yourself aspect of the song has plenty of resonance for me.”
The truth is, though they operated in different ways Cohen and Dylan were kindred spirits. Naturally, they took different paths. Though Dylan believed in quick expression and unfiltered honesty, he would live a fairly docile life for the majority of his songwriting career, finding a way forward through a completely unmitigated devotion to his own work. Paradoxically, Cohen would seemingly get wilder with age as he slunk in and out of the spotlight until joining a Buddhist monastery and finding some enlightened peace.
But while Dylan was the voice of a generation, and Cohen spoke for the voiceless, both men took it upon themselves to express themselves with unabashed and brilliant authenticity. It is this facet of their songwriting chops that will, forever, keep them floating through the airwaves as two wings of a butterfly.
Listen to Adam Cohen’s story, below.
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