How Leonard Cohen’s son brought his final song to fruition
After a long career building a golden legacy, Leonard Cohen’s final album was a beautiful and fitting goodbye. While some posthumous releases can feel questionable, Thanks For The Dance was a labour of love, helping Adam Cohen process his father’s passing as he meticulously finished the record they’d started together. The story of the final track, especially, is a moving tale of saying goodbye to a formidable talent.
Leonard Cohen was a perfectionist on the grandest scale. One time, when Bob Dylan asked him how long it took him to write ‘Hallelujah’, Cohen answered, “Two years”. Even that was him downplaying his lengthy process. In fact, the hit took him over five years and apparently over 80 drafted verses that he kept adding to and editing. That was the way he tackled all of his songs.
“If it is your destiny to be this labourer called a writer, you know that you’ve got to go to work every day, but you also know that you’re not gonna get it every day,” he said of his purpose. While other musicians would claim their art to be a calling or that the words flow through them from God or some higher power, Cohen always recognised the work in his words. His songs, just like his poems, would be drafted and edited repeatedly until they were perfect. Then, they would be recorded to fit his clear and distinct idea for them, nothing more and nothing less.
Adam Cohen, Leonard’s son, knew this about his father. “As a kid, when I would ask my dad for money to buy sweets at the corner store, he’d often tell me to search the pockets of his blazer for loose bills or change. Invariably, I would find a notebook while going through his pockets,” he wrote in his forward for The Flame, Cohen’s final poetry collection. “Later in life, when I would ask him if he had a lighter or matches, I would open drawers and find pads of paper and notebooks. Once, when I asked him if he had any tequila, I was directed to the freezer, where I found a frosty, misplaced notebook. Indeed, to know my father was (among many other wondrous things) to know a man with papers, notebooks, and cocktail napkins—distinguished handwriting on each—scattered (neatly) everywhere.”
As a writer and musician, Cohen was both prolific and a perfectionist who worked meticulously and tirelessly until the day he died. When he was gone, his son was left with blueprints to work from and a task at hand.
“Had we had more time and had [Leonard] been more robust, we would have gotten to them,” Cohen said of his father’s final songs. “[We had] conversations about what instrumentation and what feelings he wanted the completed work to evoke.” But he always knew he would be finishing them alone as he said, “Sadly, the fact that I would be completing them without him was given.”
For every other song on the album, Cohen sat in a garage near his late father’s house and worked them through, following the recipe he had set. He was familiar with these songs by now, as they were years into the drafting process by the time his father died. It was only at the end of his life that Cohen finally let his son in to help. “I’d heard it under construction for years, on the front lawn or while we were having coffee or dinner, and I’d always begged him to attempt to write music to it,” Cohen recalled of one track, ‘The Night Of Santiago’. “In a weakened state, he said, ‘Look, I’ll just recite the poem to a certain tempo and you go ahead and you write the music and try to tell the story.” That was how the majority of the album was made.
But the process was different when it came to the album’s final song, ‘Listen To The Hummingbird’. The track serves as Cohen’s last words, as the closing remarks on his final album. After spending months working with his leftover material while grieving the loss, Cohen felt closer and more connected to his father’s legacy than ever. While crafting the record, he remembered all the words, songs and art Cohen left behind either in released albums, rough recordings or discarded notepads. How do you even attempt to summarise that? Or try to wrap it up to some ending in a way that is respectful to Cohen’s wishes but doesn’t just abandon a lifetime of great work?
They had eight songs, built as his father wanted, but Cohen knew they needed one more. For the final song, he leaned into his father’s trust and crafted something new with the help of a musician next door and a memory.
“We were in Berlin, and Justin Vernon from Bon Iver was in the studio next door to ours, making these incredible, really emotional, stirring sounds. And there was something about the mood that was so captivating and inspiring that it reminded me of my father’s last press conference,” he said.
Cohen’s final press conference happened in 2016 while promoting You Want It Darker. In the middle of the appearance, unprompted, he leaned into the microphone and said, “You guys wanna hear something I wrote last night?” He then recited, into the crackling cheap mouthpiece, ‘Listen To The Hummingbird’.
Remembering the poem, Cohen set about trying to track down the best possible audio recording of it. When they had the best one they were going to get, he let his memories of his father and his grieving love lead as he composed music to soundtrack the final words, “with those atmospheric sounds from Bon Iver coming through our shared wall in Berlin”.
As a closing remark, ‘Listen To The Hummingbird’ couldn’t be more perfect. “Listen to the hummingbird. Don’t listen to me,” Cohen reads in his typical fashion that merges wry wit with vast, spiritual sentiment. A reminder that he was not a God but simply just another human who worked hard at his passion and nurtured his talent. It’s a humble ending to an incredible career.
