“We didn’t nail it”: The song Leonard Cohen initially couldn’t stand
If I were staring down the barrel of a gun, a threatening hand holding it, and a winking eye behind the sight, ready to pull the trigger, faced with only one way to save my skin, there’s a good chance I could wangle my way out. If my only salvation was to provide the definitive choice of my favourite Leonard Cohen line, I don’t think I’d make it out alive.
Shoot me, I’d beg. The idea of eternal nothingness weighs less on my shoulders than the sheerly impossible task of choosing the best Cohen work.
Everything the Canadian bard ever wrote hummed with a golden brilliance, encased in the sweetness of being both a universal truth and an utterly personal confession; this is the wondrous duality of Leonard Cohen. He said it better than I ever could: “Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.”
Or how about another verse, one that captured so elegantly the breathless movement at the heart of his writing?: “Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin / Dance me through the panic ’til I’m gathered safely in / Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove / Dance me to the end of love.”
It’s pretty hard to believe that a man with that level of skill might struggle to make something click. But part of writing from the heart and unearthing the violence and vulnerability of your own core is admitting your own faults and flaws. Stay humble, as they say. And Cohen had no problem doing that.
In conversation with Rolling Stone just over a decade ago, the singer-songwriter opened up about the details of his 13th studio album, Popular Problems, including what worked – and what didn’t. He shared that he found it easy to tell when a song was working: “You can pretty well tell. We play it for select people, like my daughter – there’s a few people who aren’t afraid to tell you that it isn’t working.”
He continued, “We had another song on the album, which was called ‘Happens to the Heart’, which will be on the next album. It’s a very good lyric, a very good tune, but we didn’t nail it. So we didn’t put each other on about it, not for more than a week or two. ‘You know, this song really doesn’t make it.’ ‘Thank God you said that, Pat, because I can’t stand it.'”
Sure as hell, Cohen didn’t disappoint, and his posthumously released 2019 album, Thanks for the Dance, opened with that very tune. The opening verse is as Cohen as ever, as he speaks-sings, “I was always workin’ steady but I never called it art / I got my shit together meeting Christ and reading Marx / It failed my little fire but it spread a dying spark / Go tell the young Messiah what happens to the heart.”
All the more tragic due to his death in 2016, the song that he originally “couldn’t stand” has transformed through the prisms of rework, legacy, and context into a shimmering reflection on disillusionment, betrayal, and pain. A simple tickle on the piano throughout and some bending guitar licks give it an air of finality that will take your breath away. Or perhaps, renew your lease on life. Put that gun to my head and I might know what to say, after all.
