By Stuart Mitchner

There’s a crack in everything — that’s how the light gets in. — Leonard Cohen (1934-2016)

A famous singer songwriter dies, someone you never found time to appreciate, so you go back and start listening and recognize the distant music you heard long ago walking through the fairgrounds of rock, a snatch of song coming from over there, not far, just a whisper away if you’d taken another turn somewhere between Van Morrison and David Bowie.

There was a time when my idea of the expanding rock universe was based on the early issues of Rolling Stone, FM radio, and anthologies like Greil Marcus’s Rock and Roll Will Stand (1969), in which Marcus, a Berkeley graduate student at the time, imagined “an effortless metaphorical consciousness” shared by a world of listeners who believed, hoped, lived for the idea that “if we could only hear enough and remember all we hear, the answers would be there on the thousands of rock’n’roll records that have brought us to the present.”

Assuming the “answers” relate to various hypothetical human issues, from the need for a mate or a religion to life after death or how to survive catastrophic elections, what did I miss by missing out on Leonard Cohen? Easy to say not so much, life goes on, but here we are in another century and look what just happened in the second week of November when Cohen’s death at 82 was followed by an event that left much of the nation in shock. Three days later, “live from New York,” Hillary Clinton sang “Hallelujah.” It didn’t matter that the person singing her heart out was actually a 32-year-old Saturday Night Live comedienne named Kate McKinnon. Until that moment, for me, Leonard Cohen had been somewhere on the other side of the room at a long noisy party, drifting in and out of reach just when you thought he was coming over to whisper an important message in your ear, and now here he was doing just that as the undaunted losing candidate sang, “I did my best … it wasn’t much …. I couldn’t feel so I tried to touch …. I didn’t come to fool you … and even though it all went wrong, I stand before the lord of song with nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah.”

A Song To Live In

Given Cohen’s account of his epic five-year struggle to write “Hallelujah,” living and dying through 80 verses while “banging his head against the floor,” he must have sensed that he was putting in play a piece of music that would take on a life of its own, to be covered many times over by other musicians who would sometimes be inspired to add their own verses, or words, or interpretations. Quoted in David Remnick’s recent New Yorker profile only weeks before Cohen died, Bob Dylan, who was among the first to cover “Hallelujah,” refers to “a beautifully constructed melody that steps up, evolves, and slips back, all in quick time,” with “a connective chorus, which when it comes in has a power all of its own. The ‘secret chord’ and the point-blank I-know-you-better-than-you-know-yourself aspect of the song has plenty of resonance for me.”

Not to mention a nation of listeners still and always looking for answers.

A Rare Writer

In his 1998 poem “Sleeve Notes,” Paul Muldoon places Cohen’s “I’m Your Man” in a listener’s present: “When I turn up the rickety old gramophone/the wow and flutter from a scratched LP/summons up white walls, the table, the single bed.” In a post-mortem tribute, Muldoon locates Cohen in “a rare category of writer insofar as his collected songs and his poems were indivisible. I have no hesitation in saying he was one of the great poets of the era …. Songs From a Room was a constant when I was young. It was on repeat, as they say. He was brilliant then and ever since. And that voice. People say that he couldn’t sing, but I never know what that means. He wasn’t Plácido Domingo and he wasn’t trying to be. The voice serves the lyrics wonderfully.”

“That’s My Movie”

When I saw Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller in the early seventies, all I knew of Leonard Cohen was his novel Beautiful Losers and “Suzanne,” a song that had been played to death on FM radio. Because of my aversion to one off-puttingly precious line (“For you’ve touched her perfect body with your mind”), I figured his first album would be more of the same. I should have known better after finding myself deeply mindlessly responsive to songs from the record whose music was giving Altman’s quirky western its mood, its spirit, its ambience, its everything.

“That first Leonard Cohen album had come out,” Robert Altman told an interviewer, “and I was just crazy about it … we’d put that record on so often we wore out two copies!” Years later, after shooting McCabe and Mrs. Miller, he was looking for the right score; one day he heard the album playing and thought “that’s my movie!” Back in the cutting room “we put those songs on the picture and they fitted like a glove. I think the reason they worked was because those lyrics were etched in my subconscious, so when I shot the scenes I fitted them to the songs, as if they were written for them.”

“Curling Up Like Smoke”

The other night I watched McCabe and Mrs. Miller again. I’d forgotten the plot, such as it was, the acting, the visuals, everything but Warren Beatty and Julie Christie and the music. The first hour was pure cinema, with Cohen’s songs creating the mood for the rough jaunty ambience of the mining town; the interplay of forms and movement and voices achieved a kind of melodic balance, like a combination of extended music video and tone poem featuring “The Stranger Song,” “Winter Lady,” and “Sisters of Mercy.” Then came the second hour, as three hitmen are dispatched to kill McCabe after he whimsically rejects an offer from the corporate enterprise looking to buy him out. From that point on there was little room for the music. Yet that was what I remembered, not the standard western’s deadly denouement. What amazes me is how I could have forgotten the last shot of Julie Christie bedded down with her opium pipe, Cohen singing “Winter Lady” on the soundtrack, as if a fire and six killings had never happened, all reduced to a dream “curling up like smoke” above the Stranger’s shoulder. Aglow in the haze, Christie’s lovely, mellow, sublimely opium-radiant face becomes all that matters, the camera moving us closer, closer, until we disappear with the film into the pupil of her eye.

What strikes me now, after a much too superficial tour of Cohen’s music, is the way that last moment of union, audience and image, listener and song, illuminates that shared “effortless metaphorical consciousness.” By the time of You Want It Darker, the album released shortly before Cohen’s death, something no less intimate happens. Particularly when listening to the title song, we move closer and closer to “that voice,” until we seem to disappear into the depths of it. This bigger deeper voice that becomes more pronounced in songs like “I’m Your Man,” and the amazing “Tower of Song” evokes at the same time the sort of sinister, existential, last-gasp, noir-rich mood characteristic of the various cable series my wife and I have been becoming addicted to, like The Fall, the Belfast noir we’re watching now, fascinated by the intimacy evolving between Gillian Anderson’s D.I. supervisor and Jamie Doran’s inventive serial killer. Cohen’s goodbye voice was made for these darker and darker television films that catch the mood of the time much as McCabe and Mrs. Miller caught the mood of the early seventies. So it was no surprise, really, that the voice accompanying one of the most lurid scenes in BBC 2’s Birmingham crime drama Peaky Blinders belongs to Leonard Cohen singing “You Want It Darker.”

The Essentials

Since I had only days to make up for decades of unheard melodies, my only recourse was to check out the new music online while keeping the 2-CD set The Essential Leonard Cohen “on repeat.” I find I can’t get enough of “Sisters of Mercy,” one of the most beguiling melodies this side of Schubert. Listening to tracks like “First We Take Manhattan,” “Dance Me to the End of Love,” and “Take This Waltz,” I’m aware of a range of associations evoking cabaret, decadent Berlin, Euro pop, even big-voiced singers like Johnny Cash and Frankie Laine, not to mention You Want It Darker’s resemblance to the Bob Dylan of Modern Times and Love and Theft, and David Bowie’s Blackstar.

Listening to his songs from the 1990s, you can almost believe Cohen was foreshadowing election day 2016. It’s not just the “Hallelujah” moment on Saturday Night Live but the post-election unrest reflected in “Democracy,” which is “coming to the U.S.A.” where “the lonely say/that the heart has got to open in a fundamental way,” and in “Everybody Knows,” where “the war is over … the good guys lost … the fight was fixed … the poor stay poor … the rich get rich … that’s how it goes.” Darkest of all is “The Future” from 1992 with all too fitting lines like, “Things are going to slide, slide in all directions” “the world has crossed the threshold,” “the breaking of the ancient western code,” “the nations rise and fall,” “the devil’s riding crop,” and the chorus, “Get ready for the future: It is murder.”

The good news is that while Leonard Cohen may be gone, his songs are with us and always will be. “That’s how the light gets in.” We need him now more than ever.