The ethereal love song Leonard Cohen wishes he had written: ‘It’s about surrendering”
The music and words of Leonard Cohen aren’t just something that you decide you want to get into one day. You can approach his music with strong will and hope to come out of the other side with a new experience of enlightenment, but the beauty of his poetry is that it comes to you when you least expect it. The worlds that Cohen offers are always there waiting for discovery, but his confronting style is more impactful when he is met with an equally open heart.
In this intensely broken, fragmented world, it has become human nature to build walls around our vulnerabilities and hide away the truths that make us who we are. Cohen has become somewhat polarising in recent times because his music looks at the world with brutal honesty, transforming realities into poetic musings that make sense only to those who have felt loss, love, pain, and anguish.
While a large portion of Cohen’s appeal lies in his ability to articulate complicated feelings, he also offers glimmers of hope, humility, and even hilarity in navigating our most insecure thoughts and feelings. Although not said explicitly, it’s clear Cohen believed in the power of exposing yourself and transcending above the madness to become the purest of forms, which could only be represented in all its beauty through the medium of art.
Even Bob Dylan, the epitome of wordsmith royalty, once said Cohen was a “genius” whose songs were “like prayers”. Although he enjoys his melodies, he cited his ability to write great “counterpoint lines”, which gave “a celestial character and melodic lift to every one of his songs”. Prayers occupy a significant layer of Cohen’s writing, whether to find solace or entertaining peculiarities. Although the singer would have probably preferred his work to have been described as poking at “that curious thing”, the most notable example of prayer-writing is his song ‘If It Be Your Will’.
According to Sylvie Simmons in I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen, much like Book of Mercy, ‘If It Be Your Will’ is a prayer for mercy about “conciliation and unity”. The resignation that Cohen details in the song has a religious undertone that often pulls from strong imagery to satisfy his point: “Let your mercy spill,” he sings, “On all these burning hearts in hell if it be your will to make us well”. There may be an element of surprise to what Cohen is insinuating, but the sweetness and honesty of his voice and the arrangements urge you to feel nothing but comfort.
The simplicity of the song made it challenging to compose, however, as Cohen admitted in Leonard Cohen: The Music and The Mystique. “If there were a false step it would really collapse the structure; it would dissolve and be left hanging,” he said, which probably explains the immense pride he felt about being the writer of such a masterpiece. In 1984, when asked which song he wished he had written, the singer famously quipped, “‘If It Be Your Will’, and I wrote it.”
“It’s about surrendering,” Cohen explained, but it’s also about the beauty of acceptance. Although it was originally a rewrite of an older prayer that Cohen once stumbled across, ‘If It Be Your Will’ may seem Biblical on paper, but the ghostly love that dances in the shadows throughout the ballad beckons surrender, inviting nothing but the spirituality of shedding reality. ‘If It Be Your Will’ is a place where concerns are no more, and fulfilment takes its place.
