A song so perfect Leonard Cohen thought it would be wrong to get rich from it: “Fortunately, the rights to it were stolen”
What do we make art for? Sure, a lot of people have made a lot of money from it. The biggest bands in history have made themselves rich. Figures like Andy Warhol spent a whole career contemplating that, making ‘business art’ to bring in the big bucks and have a conversation about exactly that: what do we make art for? Money or love? Can it ever be without the latter? Leonard Cohen would say no.
The relationship between Cohen, music and money is a fascinating one. For a long time, he never even considered being a musician, so it was besides the point. He was a poet and a novelist and he’d long accepted that there was no money there. But then when things got really tough, he knew he needed to try something.
“I couldn’t pay my rent,” he said, a statement that feels uniting of all artists. So many stories start exactly like this, with financial strain lighting a new fire under a person’s ass. In this modern age, music would in no way be an answer to that, as we know that making music is most likely only going to add to the debt. But back then, there was money in the business, and Cohen thought he could get it.
“In hindsight, it seems like a mad decision that I was going to rectify my economic situation by becoming a singer,” he joked later on, but explained, “I had been very interested in country music for a long time and I’d been writing songs for a long time, I thought I’d go down to Nashville and cut a country-western record and that would take care of everything.”
He never made it to Nashville in the end, as he landed in New York and got involved in the Greenwich Village folk scene and started making a name for himself there.
Now, let’s flash forward a bit. Fast forward through his powerful career as a folk star, a writer and general icon, and let’s land in the early 2000s when Cohen’s family began to suspect something was up. It turned out his manager, Kelley Lynch, had been stealing from him, selling his publishing rights behind his back and using his money to pay her bills. He sued her, claiming she’d taken $5million from his retirement fund, leaving the singer with only $150,000. Following some more lawsuits and a mess in court, the star was basically broke. He was back where he started.
That would devastate anyone. He’d lost what many would see as the spoils of his career when he lost that hard-earned cash. But Cohen, a man who spent a long time in a Buddhist monastery, had an appropriately zen reaction. He thought that money was never his anyway, and really, who was he to make money from art?
In particular, he thought it about ‘Suzanne’. Back to that initial venture for money that landed him in NYC, that’s where he first met Judy Collins, who would first sing ‘Suzanne’ and bring Cohen to public attention. He could come into a lot of money with that song, but it was also one sold behind his back. Cohen’s response? One of peace.
“It’s a song that people loved, and fortunately, the rights to it were stolen from me. So I felt that was perfectly justified because it would be wrong to write this song and get rich from it too,” he mused, managing to find a baffling silver lining. To him, this love song, inspired by one of his many muses, was never his to make money off. He brings up the question of whether art and money should ever be tied, as he found his own way to accept that in his career, the two had been untethered without his permission.
That same attitude was found in his fix. To recoup his funds, Cohen went on his first tour in 15 years. He found a positive spin there, too, stating that being “forced to go back on the road to repair the fortunes of my family and myself … [was] a most fortunate happenstance because I was able to connect…with living musicians. And I think it warmed some part of my heart that had taken on a chill.”
