‘Take This Longing’: Leonard Cohen’s most romantic lyric
Unrequited love is perhaps the most savage of it all. It’s perhaps the most selfless, too, as nothing comes from what you give away, and there is nothing to gain from it. Instead, it is just loving repeatedly and being grateful for any mere moment of connection that is a scrap to the starving mouth of the adoring. Leonard Cohen knew that well.
Leonard Cohen’s reputation as a ladies’ man all comes down to his ability to write romance like no one else could. The way he wrote about the women he loved is so intoxicating that you can almost feel and hear his desire on tape. He would take his time with them, with tracks like the begging ‘Hallelujah’ taking close to a decade to perfect, or his song ‘A Thousand Kisses Deep’ being redrafted and recrafted over and over from a poem. It was important to him to find the exact right words for love, seeing songwriting as a practice to work at every day, like a religion or like a relationship.
His love songs especially have an almost spiritual air, as if the songwriter recognised that there is no feeling grander or closer to God than that of love and desire, even if it’s not reciprocated.
He learnt that well when he met Nico, the German singer brought to fame with The Velvet Underground.. “When I first came to New York — I guess it was around 1966 — Nico was singing at The Dom, which was an Andy Warhol club at the time on 8th Street. I just stumbled in there one night, and I didn’t know any of these people,” he remembered to Q magazine. But upon seeing the singer, he knew he wanted to know her. “I just walked up and stood in front of her until people pushed me aside,” admitting romantically, “I started writing songs for her then.”
‘Take This Longing’ is the best of them, not only of the songs written for this momentary muse but of all of Cohen’s love songs. As he said he was “perplexed by her conversation and paralysed by her beauty,” the track perfectly captures this staggering adoration and this desperate desire to be close to her, regardless of whether she rejected his advances. It captures the feeling of just wanting to be there, and the person you love can claim almost total control over you through their tiny actions when you’re deep in the depths of infatuation.
“Everything depends upon how near you sleep to me,” Cohen sings, capturing that completely in what is arguably his most romantic lyric. It’s subtle and unassuming. It doesn’t need a big, grand, obvious sentiment. Instead, it deals with the minor ways that love impacts us and how major it feels, analysing the simple stuff like how close to you the person you want is and the scraps of affection they give you when it’s all you want.
It’s a simple line but an effective one. Later, Morrissey would reference it in his own strange take on a love song, ‘Hand In Glove’. “Everything depends upon how near you stand to me,” he sings in his own track, dealing in the same lonely, desperate infatuation as Cohen’s own, as proof of the subtle line’s impact.
