Writer first, musician second: why Leonard Cohen’s writing is his essential work
Before he was a musician, Leonard Cohen was a writer. At the end of his long career and incredible life, Leonard Cohen, now a celebrated artist, was still a writer. That one vocation serves as the key to every other role he took on and everything he ever made. Really, the only way to understand the music is to engage with the poetry.
Cohen was a relative latecomer to music. It wasn’t until 1967 that he began to put any real effort into making and releasing music, already aged 33. For people who look at him just as a musician, Cohen’s story starts slowly and somewhat randomly. It could be seen that he just landed in New York with a few songs, keen to integrate into the new folk scene there. After Judy Collins made his song ‘Suzanne’ a hit, that moment could be marked as the start of his career.
But the truth of his story started long before that. Cohen began as a writer, planning to always and only be a writer. From being a young school child in Canada, where he met his teacher and mentor Irving Layton, his interest was captured by poetry. With Layton’s signature “tell it like it is” style, merged with the richer, more imagery-driven works he was learning back through his interest in Spanish Poetry and Federico García Lorca, those two key inspirations serve as a perfect blueprint for Cohen’s own style.
That dual voice, merging the spontaneous and straight with the flowery and thought-out, is seen in his lyricism. But most evidently, it’s seen in his poetry. In his collection, Book Of Longing, each new page seems to flit between them. One poem, ‘The Sweetest Little Song’, reads only, “You go your way / I’ll go your way too”. Two pages on, ‘Stanzas for H.M’ is almost more like a Keats piece than any modern piece, opening, “O perfect gentleman, and champion / of the Royal Throne; O unbroken stone”. As Cohen moved between the two schools of writing he was raised on, his own language found unique ground that was somehow able to be grand yet intimate and organic.
It is impossible to separate Cohen, the musician, from Cohen, the writer, because one seemed to fall accidentally out of the other. From those early days in school, he appeared to be wandering down a singular path. Cohen would be a writer. He went to school and studied as he wrote poetry, publishing his first collection in 1956 and several more after. When he finished school, he wandered off to the Greek island of Hydra, where he wrote more poetry as well as his debut novel, The Favourite Game. This was his plan. He was going to write books and poems and be a celebrated writer like his heroes of Layton, Lorca, Walt Whitman or William Butler Yeats.
Before Cohen had any music out, he was already well-established with four poetry collections and two novels. In the traditional sense, he had the mental process and work ethic of a writer, dealing with his ideas and thoughts through the lens of poetry or prose rather than songs. So even when things did switch, and he turned his attention to music after failing to get the attention he hoped for as a writer, that mindset never changed.
A well-known fact about Cohen is that the man was an obsessive perfectionist. Songs would often take him years to complete, being drafted over and over with countless verses written and then reworked. “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,” Adam Cohen said of his father, recalling his habit for working a song over and over again.
Famously, his hit ‘Hallelujah’ took him years to complete as he wrote somewhere between 80 and 180 drafted verses. Even as it stands, with six verses that meander through a series of rich images, ‘Hallelujah’ is more like an epic poem than any typical song. The same goes for ‘So Long Marianne’, one of his earliest tracks, which always feels more like a piece of writing that happens to be sung rather than a song specifically crafted to a strict rhythm or style.
It always felt that Cohen refused to sacrifice his poetry for any constraints of music, leading to the exact type of dense, lyrical compositions he made and his history of demos, drafts and long-lost older versions. With his slow, careful process, his songwriting feels more like book editing than the divine strikes of inspiration that other musicians claim to have. “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 process, which was always more rooted in real work, than a flouncy artist. The idea of going to work daily feels more like the slow and dedicated work of the novelist he started out as.
Some of those early drafts exist first amongst his poetry. ‘A Thousand Kisses Deep’ is found in its original form in Book Of Longing, clearly first written for the page before being adapted to music. But perhaps more so than any of his poetic lyrical peers, Cohen blurred the lines between the two forms completely. “All of my writing has guitars behind it, even the novels,” he said of his work, proving that to him, music and writing were always one and the same, but also that his role as a writer was still held firmly, even when he was a musician.
Really, it was in the years before Cohen made any music that his future was set. In the years he spent writing and only writing, he drew out the blueprint for the voice and style the world would come to know best through his songs. However, to truly understand and love Cohen, the key is in the pages, with his poetry collections and early novels being just as essential as any album.
