The songwriter Lou Reed said he was “lucky” to witness
Some of the best songwriters only come once every generation. For all the people who think they will create the next epic poem every time they sit down to write a track, how many of them actually walk away, managing to pull it off? Lou Reed may have been one of those few who happened to make gripping music every time he wrote a piece, but he considered Leonard Cohen the true master of lyrics.
When Reed first started, rock and roll was no longer meant to be a throwaway thing. Sure, some bands were taking the ethos of the genre and doing absolutely nothing with it, but Reed knew that he wanted to go beyond just songs about surfing, cars, and having fun. His music needed to mean something, and The Velvet Underground were practically the antithesis of what proper music was supposed to be.
Around the same time, a humble songwriter from Canada had already been making waves on the scene. Artists like Joni Mitchell may have been making sublime tone poems every time they made records, but what Cohen delivered felt like watching an old romantic drama from yesteryear on tracks like ‘Suzanne’.
Compared to Reed, Cohen’s words may as well have been pulled from a Victorian poem half the time. Reed was always focused on the guttural side of rock and roll, whereas Cohen had a softer touch, almost lulling you in with his softspoken demeanour before dropping a lyrical gem that could stick with you for years.
When inducting Cohen into The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Reed counted himself among the few to have the privilege of being around to hear Cohen, saying, “You get to really appreciate somebody’s songs when you sing them. (Quoting ‘One Of Us Cannot Be Wrong): ‘I showed my heart to the doctor/He said I’d just have to quit/Then he wrote himself a prescription/ And your name was mentioned in it’. He could have stopped there. [And] he just gets better. We’re so lucky to be alive at the same time Leonard Cohen is.”
Even though Reed usually had his niche of art-school musicians looking to combine poetry and rock and roll together, he did have one thing in common with Cohen: the need to never be satisfied. Looking at how their careers panned out, it was always about trying to push themselves to write the next good song, whether it was Reed transforming into a glam rocker on Transformer or Cohen gifting the public with ‘Hallelujah’ nearly two decades into his career.
Towards the end of both their lives, they hadn’t lost that hunger one bit. Reed was still making wild genre experiments with Metallica on Lulu and contributing to songs by Gorillaz, while Cohen’s You Want It Darker might deserve a spot next to David Bowie’s Blackstar for how openly honest it is about dealing with death.
If anything, both Reed and Cohen were two of the few artists who could never be separated from their work. As much as they may have been ordinary people every time they walked offstage, whenever you hear their work either on a jukebox or quoted by someone else, you’re hearing a long history of their lives.
