The song Leonard Cohen wrote about a ménage à trois: “We all slept together”
Leonard Cohen was a poet before he was a musician.
If you have ever listened to his music and wondered how a man can convey a message so beautifully, just remember that the words came before anything else for him. He stumbled upon them naturally, as if they were scattered around his feet and he picked them up while he walked. His lyrics remain something to truly marvel at.
He felt a true connection with everything he wrote; the words were almost an extension of him. This connection clearly resonated, as people who listened to his music adored it, loving the intimacy of what he wrote and revelling in every second. However, that success also brought a range of problems Leonard Cohen’s way.
The poetic side of him made him a true romantic, not in the chocolate and roses sense, but deeper than that, in a way where he believed in fate and the right people finding his work no matter what. Unfortunately, record labels don’t think that way, and where there is a marketing budget, there will be a push for sales. When he started making music and was borderline forced to write songs and sell them, he began to lose touch with what he was writing.
“I’m no longer a free man; I’m an exploited man. Once, long ago, my songs were not sold; they found their way to people anyway,” said Cohen when discussing his music and the pressure that comes with being signed to a label. “Then people saw that profit could be made from them; then the profit interested me also. I have to fight too many people on too many levels to have to fight about money as well.”
The thing that he found most frustrating about being signed to a label was the fact that he could no longer come across his songs naturally. Cohen’s writing process was simple; he would live his life, and when something worth writing happened, he would pen it down. A lot of the time, the foundation for these songs was love, both the genuine and the lustful. For instance, consider the song ‘Sisters of Mercy’, which was about a passionate night with two strangers.
“I was alone,” he said, recalling the precursor to that night’s events, “And I had nowhere to stay that evening. I went with them back to their room and we all slept together. When I awoke I wrote a song about them. I called it ‘Sisters of Mercy’.”
Cohen found time and time again throughout his career that songs like this are the ones that people preferred. It wasn’t that people were drawn to the lustful message; rather, it was written by Cohen shortly after the moment it was about. The song was real, and his lyrics were a true reflection of the thing he was writing about. You will struggle to find music more honest than that, and the fact that it comes packaged in the poetic style of Leonard Cohen is a bonus.
“There is much to regret in the system of placing songs at the disposal of others,” Cohen concluded, “Now the record companies pressure me to force my songs because the stores want them to sell. I will not force my songs for them.”
