The singer Leonard Cohen called “the highest mountain” for songwriters
Leonard Cohen wasn’t only an incredible songwriter, whose works will still be lauded for their profound brilliance long after we have all returned to dust, but he was also one of the great beacons of literary excellence throughout his existence.
Songwriters come in all shapes and sizes across the musical landscape, but for quite a while, the focus of the industry was on churning out as many nondescript pop hits as humanly possible. Even today, there are countless landfills full of love songs specifically designed to be as diffuse and universally relatable as can be. Cohen, on the other hand, was always striving for something with a considerable degree of substance.
It isn’t as though Cohen never wrote a love song, of course, but his efforts were never pithy. Every word he uttered was dripping in a vast array of complex and intense emotions, as though he had been a lauded poet of the romantic period in a past life. Without the songwriting revolution of the 1960s, though, Leonard Cohen might have been just that: an incredible yet largely unknown poet, without the incredible discography he went on to amass.
That singer-songwriter era that produced a litany of incredible writers, as well as providing some key inspiration for the commencement of Leonard Cohen’s musical career. If that movement had a leader, though, the only viable candidate would have been Bob Dylan.
A prime candidate for the title of ‘greatest songwriter of the century’, Dylan’s folk origins and socially-conscious outlook struck upon a plethora of earth-shattering, socially-conscious, and revolutionary songwriting efforts.
Dylan’s mastery wasn’t contained exclusively to the 1960s, either. Across the entirety of his illustrious career, from the self-sabotaging masterpiece of Self-Portrait to his much-maligned gospel period and beyond, Bob Dylan has always been one step ahead of every other songwriter, and his standards for songwriting have rarely dipped.
Back in 2016, those efforts were officially recognised when Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, the only musician to ever be bestowed with that award. For the vast majority of his lifelong supporters, though, the award didn’t come as much of a surprise. Leonard Cohen, for instance, saw it almost as an unnecessary, foregone conclusion.
During a Q&A in Los Angeles shortly after that award was given, Cohen was asked about it, to which he replied: “To me, [it] is like pinning a medal on Mount Everest for being the highest mountain.” In other words, everybody in the world already knew that Dylan’s literary talents are some of the greatest of modern times, and giving him an official prize for his work was rather superfluous as a result.
Nevertheless, there is no doubting that Dylan was well-deserving of that particular award, regardless of how seemingly unnecessary it was in the eyes of Cohen and other Dylan devotees. Ironically, of course, if any other songwriter was deserving of that prize for literature, it would probably be Leonard Cohen himself.
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