5/29/2023 0 Comments Leonard cohen youngHe was a favoured child: “the oldest son of the oldest son”. It has the kind of weight that could save your life.Ĭohen was born in 1934, a tad older than Elvis, a bit younger than Philip Roth. A Leonard Cohen song is an anchor flung into a churning sea. Funny about himself but profoundly serious about his art, he liked to describe his songs as “investigations” into the hidden mechanics of love, sex, war, religion and death – the beautiful and terrifying truths of existence. And whenever he managed to painfully extract some nugget of wisdom, he would cut and polish it like a precious stone before resuming the search. He tried to flush them out with booze and drugs and seduce them with melodies. He searched for clues in bedrooms and warzones, in Jewish temples and Buddhist retreats, in Europe, Africa, Israel and Cuba. What gave his work its uncommon gravitas wasn’t that he knew the answers but that he never stopped looking. The truth was that Cohen felt as lost as anybody. The man knew things about life and if, you listened closely, you might learn something. The face suggested that he’d been around the block a few times the voice and words confirmed it. He was already 33 - ancient by 60s standards - when he gazed out from the sepia-tinted, photo-booth snapshot on the cover of 1967’s Songs of Leonard Cohen with his shirt, tie and smart side-parting. He was young once, of course, but the world never saw much of the modestly successful poet and novelist from Montreal. L eonard Cohen was always the grownup in the room.
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