Sitting at a small kitchen table, the 67-year-old composer of such songs as “Suzanne,” “Bird on a Wire,” “Famous Blue Raincoat,” “Chelsea Hotel,” “I’m Your Man” and “Democracy” plied me with pâté and gorgonzola, with red wine and aquavit. He drank strong coffee and smoked cigarettes. He looked less like a singer than an unusually cultivated business man of indefinite provenance — the face Jewish, the accent Canadian, the manner Old World and faintly elusive. A cosmopolite, but not quite at home anywhere. A Jew with a shrine to the Virgin Mary in his kitchen. A bohemian in a jacket and tie.

It was a pleasure to meet him. His hair is close-cropped and gray now, his smile wonderfully embattled. He makes you laugh. The man known as the most doleful singer in the world is really a kind of comedian, obsessed with hierarchies and judgments at a time when the world has been trying to forget that they exist.

 

Angst & Aquavit by Brendan Bernhard. LA Weekly: September 26, 2001. Photo by Pava – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0 it, Link

I am republishing selected posts from my former Leonard Cohen site, Cohencentric, here on AllanShowalter.com (these posts can be found at Leonard Cohen). This entry was originally posted Aug 26, 2018.