“There was something about it”: The two legendary songs Leonard Cohen couldn’t finish
For Leonard Cohen, writing was his greatest love of all time. It may accentuate some of life’s more frustrating inflictions and immerse you in a whirlwind of semantic-driven anguish from time to time, but, above all, it was Cohen’s calling from the moment he knew how to observe. From then on, his perfectionism, attention to detail, and desire to get something exactly right became his ultimate guiding principle.
Throughout his career, Cohen proved he was more susceptible to painstaking revisions than anybody else, usually due to his frustrations when scathing away to match up his writing and music to his mental visions, but often also because of his knack for fact-checking, which constantly wrestled with his own essence and artistic meticulousness.
For most musicians, being an artist is one of the greatest privileges, one that can be strenuous one moment and easy and enjoyable the next. For Cohen, however, his extremities meant that he approached musical creativity headily as if it were something like working in a factory, where every piece had to be placed just right; otherwise, it wasn’t going to work.
For Cohen, creativity wasn’t just a lighthearted practice; it took months, even years, of hacking away, and even then, he was never truly sure his laborious sculpturing paid off. This is why, in several instances, music that others would (and did) deem flawless was anything but perfect in his eyes, which faced him with other questions about whether even to release it at all.
He reflected on this trait in several interviews, attempting to explain his perspective and uttering remarks like: “Why shouldn’t my work be hard? Almost everybody’s work is hard. One is distracted by this notion that there is such a thing as inspiration, that it comes fast and easy. And some people are graced by that style. I’m not. So I have to work as hard as any stiff, to come up with my payload.”
Although this was applied across many songs in his discography, two experienced the toll of his aggressive perfectionism more than most, one of which was his coveted classic ‘Hallelujah’. Although a masterpiece in the eyes of many, the song took Cohen over four years to complete and endured between 80 and 180 drafts as he agonised daily about the words, verses, rhythms, and anything else he felt wasn’t good enough.
However, this self-inflicted torment meant that when Cohen finally did approach the studio with the song, he was incredibly efficient and knew exactly how he wanted everything to pan out. As his producer reflected: “I think it was as it was,” he told Rolling Stone. “There was no ‘Should we do this verse?’ – I don’t think there was even a question of the order of verses, any ‘Which should come first?’ And had he had a question about it, I think he would’ve resolved it himself.”
This also plagued ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’, the infamous love triangle narrative from his third album, Songs of Love and Hate. After putting the song out there, Cohen repeatedly reflected on his uncertainty with it, once saying, “There was something about [it] that was unclear.” This ambivalence played on his mind and made him feel like the song was never truly finished, much less the best possible version of what it could be.
As he explained: “That was one I thought was never finished. And I thought that Jennifer Warnes’ version in a sense was better because I worked on a different version for her, and I thought it was somewhat more coherent.”
He added: “I always thought that that was a song you could see the carpentry in a bit. Secretly, I always felt that there was a certain incoherence that prevented it from being a great song.”
