Leonard Cohen’s “cowboy song” inspired by Japanese monks
Leonard Cohen was constantly working hard and pushing himself creatively, sometimes to his detriment. Cohen was always a poet and a writer before he became a musician, which means that he used to comb over lyrics, passages, and themes persistently, often causing a decline in his physical health. Some would say it was worth it for the beauty in his art, but there were periods when it looked like Cohen might not work again because of extensive writing periods.
There was one instance when he moved to the Greek Island of Hydra so that he could work in peace. It was during this period that he lived in complete solitude, surrounded by nothing but LSD and drafts of his work. He was writing for an elongated period, and by the time his work was finished, he wasn’t well enough to look after himself.
“Leonard sat in his room in his house on the hill in Hydra, writing furiously,” recalled the writer Sylvie Simmons, “He was driven by an overpowering sense of urgency. He had the feeling, he said, of time running out.” Cohen ended up in the hospital at the end of this period, highlighting just how much he was willing to suffer for his art.
Of course, this kind of mindset isn’t sustainable. It’s one thing to suffer for your art and to push yourself, but another thing to put your life at risk. Cohen had to try to find a medium, go somewhere, or do something where he could engage with himself and subsequently connect with his art while also making sure he didn’t push himself completely to the edge.
At one point, he managed to do this by going to a silent retreat, where he could look inward for some time but also engage with the world around him to find some inspiration. During this period, he came across the work Mare Ten Bull, which illustrates the different stages towards enlightenment. When Cohen left the retreat, he went to visit his friend Jennifer Warnes with a brand new song in tow: ‘Ballad of the Absent Mare’.
Warnes recalls the moment that Cohen came to visit. She was living in a small flat at the time and had a rented piano, which Cohen sat himself at and began playing. “Leonard’s 12 elegant, spartan verses unfolded,” she said, “I remember thinking… something miraculous is happening, right this minute, in my stupid little living room.”
“Leonard had found some old pictures somewhere,” Warnes said, discussing the supposed inspiration behind the song he had written. “They were called The Ten Bulls, old Japanese woodcuts symbolizing the stages of a monk’s life on the road to enlightenment. These carvings pictured a boy and a bull, the boy losing the bull, the bull hiding, the boy realising that the bull was nearby all along. There is a struggle, and finally the boy rides the bull into his little village.”
While these wood carvings depicted the story of a Japanese monk, Cohen saw a different way to interpret them within his music. He felt the story was somewhat reminiscent of a cowboy film. Warnes remembers him saying, “I thought this would make a great cowboy song.”
