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World mourns the death of Leonard Cohen – as it happened

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Fri 11 Nov 2016 09.28 ESTFirst published on Thu 10 Nov 2016 21.11 EST

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And that’s it

Thank you for your company. To conclude, a lyric. But not one of those ones that are all deep about existence. Instead, let’s place Leonard Cohen with his peers among the great songwriters of the English language. He’s 100 floors up now, with Hank.

I said to Hank Williams: how lonely does it get? Hank Williams hasn’t answered yet
But I hear him coughing all night long
A hundred floors above me
In the Tower of Song.”

Hats off for Leonard Cohen Photograph: Diego Tuson/AFP/Getty Images
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Cohen covers – a Spotify playlist

So why didn’t we just do a Cohen playlist? Because if you love Leonard Cohen, you’re likely to be listening to those albums already. Because we wanted to show how much he meant to so many people of so many different musical outlooks. Because we wanted to celebrate not just the man, but his songs. So here are some of the songs you nominated – if it’s missing, it’s because I couldn’t find it on Spotify.

Key Cohen songs No 5

And to round his list off, Alexis Petridis has picked the title track of You Want It Darker.

The triumphant, rapturously-received live shows Cohen undertook between 2008 and 2013 might have been forced upon him by prosaic financial pressures, but the final trio of albums Cohen made were clearly the work of a man who’d realised he still had something to say: about life, about religion, about ageing and the experience of facing death. In his final public appearance to promote this year’s You Want It Darker, he seemed at pains to dismiss suggestions that it some kind of musical last will and testament: ‘I intend to live forever.’ But there’s a lovely sense of closure about its title track, on which, as his friend and biographer Sylvie Simmons put it, ‘he sang himself back home’, supported by the choir from the Montreal synagogue where he worshipped as a child and that his ancestors had built, offering up a characteristic mix of wracked despair and wry humour: ‘I wrestled with some demons,’ he shrugged at one point. ‘They were middle-class and tame.’ But the song’s most potent and affecting lines came in the chorus. ‘Hineni, hineni,’ Cohen sang, a Hebrew word meaning: ‘Here I am’, ‘I am ready, Lord.’”

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More tributes

Daryl from The Walking Dead is coping with his incarceration by evil Negan by consoling himself with Cohen.

#NowPlaying Famous Blue Raincoat by Leonard Cohen https://t.co/WrtmqtHz2K used to dedicate this so… https://t.co/EzctOAneCF

— norman reedus (@wwwbigbaldhead) November 11, 2016

And another actor …

#LeonardCohen - When the barbarians broke down the gates, you snuck out the back door. Good timing. RIP. I will miss your honest voice.

— TOBY STEPHENS (@TobyStephensInV) November 11, 2016

And the voice of bondage …

RIP Leonard Cohen :(

— E L James (@E_L_James) November 11, 2016

And Beck …

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Remembrance Day, and the day we learned of Leonard Cohen’s death. Something fitting then: Cohen reciting John McCrae’s In Flanders Fields.

Key Cohen songs No 4

As chosen by Alexis Petridis. This time it’s The Future.

Never a model of over-productive industry to start off with, Cohen’s musical output slowed considerably in the 90s and noughties: he released three albums in 20 years, one of them, Dear Heather, essentially a collection of outtakes from previous work. The title track of his 1992 album might be the pick of his material during this period. Audibly the work of a deeply troubled man – he later claimed to have been drinking three bottles of wine a night during the subsequent tour – it’s as dark and terrifying and potent as anything in his catalogue, an apocalyptic vision of a world in which ‘things are going to slide in all directions, won’t be nothing you can measure anymore’. Without wishing to overegg the pudding, a quarter of a century on, with talk of a ‘post-truth’ era abroad, there’s a definite hint of the grimly prophetic about it: a world without privacy, increasingly numb to horror, where what Cohen described as ‘mass culture’ has stamped out individual identity.”

The best-known short order chef in the world

Earlier this year, the Guardian ran extracts from the book My Old Man, in which people talked about their relationships with their fathers. One of the pieces came from Adam Cohen, talking about Leonard …

I’ve had a very normal relationship with my father, with the exception that he’s terribly well known and, so it’s said, one of the most important writers in his domain.

Like all sons, I have found the relationship has added layers to itself over time. These days, my relationship with him is just looking in a mirror and consulting with him. Hearing the timbre of his voice in my own. Body posture, mannerisms, ethics, morals, linguistics. All the deep imprintings that are there either from socio-genetics or, if you were to be cruel, parroting. Whatever the reason, I throw my arms around the lifestyle I was given.

My father made a remarkable effort – and one that I am much more impressed with now as a family man myself – to remain in his children’s lives despite a less-than-perfect breakup with my mother. I always saw him. He was always around. He always made gigantic efforts. There was even a time when he wasn’t allowed on the property; to circumnavigate that, he bought a trailer and put it at the T where the dirt road of our house in the south of France connected to the municipal road, and we would walk up the dirt road. A lot was imparted by that. From Los Angeles to the south of France was no small journey. We spent all our holidays with him. Every winter we would go to Montreal and every summer we would go to Greece.

There was always laughter. Despite his notoriety for, I quote, “having a voice like the bottom of an ashtray”, for being “the prince of darkness”, for being famed for his lugubriousness, he is one of the most quick-witted men, and he is generous with his humour. The guy is hilarious. I’ve gone into the family business, and we get a tremendous amount of laughter out of that. Hanging out with him is the best, whether it’s over a tuna sandwich or on the front stoop of his house. He doesn’t like to move much, having been a touring man his whole life. He does love being sedentary.

I’ve learned a lot from him on that stoop. The main inspiration that his life provides is a dedication to his craft. He has an old-world view of it. It’s not the notion of instantaneous success that exists in new generations. His whole life has been a demonstration of the opposite. I remember something he told me when I was 16 and starting to take songwriting seriously. He said there’s a moment when you’re blocked on a song, or on any work, and it’s only when you’re about to quit having put much, much more time than you planned into it that the work begins. That’s when you’ve crossed the threshold of being on the right track. But the nature of my dialogue with him is nearly always instruction. From the manner in which we should greet someone about whom we have reservations, to gender relationships, to the proper dosage of mustard and mayonnaise. We talk about women all the time, too, and, if I may, out of privacy, I’ll keep that princely wisdom to myself. It’s a long-running and possibly incomplete transmission.

We’ve never really fallen out. We’ve had a series of minor misunderstandings that were corrected, and actually served to provide better understanding in the long run. When you have someone in your family who is in such demand, and from whom you derive a sense of identity because of the nature of your relationship, you can start to become covetous of the amount of time spent with that person. There are times when, no question, I wish we had been able to spend more time together.

You want to know some secrets about Leonard Cohen? Here’s the dirt. He loves George Jones and Hank Williams. He travels with one small suitcase. Many of his impeccable suits are actually threadbare. He’s only about 5ft 8in, despite that giant baritone. He awakens at four in the morning and blackens pages every single day of his life. He cuts his own hair. He will find a patch of sun anywhere and sit in it, like a big cat, following that sliver wherever it goes. Although he no longer smokes, there is nothing he would rather do. He makes the best tuna salad I’ve ever had – he seems to have a knack for that. He loves making food for people, in fact. He spends a lot of time in the kitchen. He’s probably the best-known short-order chef in the world.”

The young Adam Cohen and his father.


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If there’s one voice you wanted to hear on the subject of Leonard Cohen, it would almost certainly be that of Louise Mensch. So what did she have to say via the medium of Twitter?

Louise Mensch, apparently failing to recognise that Cohen was Canadian. pic.twitter.com/M57nvLQCym

— Pedro (@sideshowbawbag) November 11, 2016

Because that was the whole point of Leonard Cohen’s life. To be a Canadian fighting the cold war.

A nice Facebook post from Beth Orton about Cohen …

Leonard Cohen dying this week is a grief I can process. His leaving makes perfect sense when so little else does. One last poetic statement. A full stop. He is our spiritual leader and one I can follow. In his death, he feels closer than ever. He embodies love and kindness, peace and power. His voice has always been the salve for my broken spirit. His final act of kindness was to be present by his passing this week when we need a voice of reason in the face of mounting insanity and confusion. To remind us of the beauty that exists alongside the imperfection in this world. I am eternally grateful for his existence and his music. He has always resonated on the astral and the earthly planes. Now more so than ever. Beautiful man … you will be deeply and endlessly missed and you will always be with us.”

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Key Cohen songs No 3

This time, Alexis Petridis has chosen Hallelujah.

The afterlife of Hallelujah is one of the more startling episodes in Leonard Cohen’s career. As he was given to wryly pointing out after it attained something approaching omnipresence – ‘at the end of every single drama, every single Idol’ as he put it – his American record label thought so little of the song, and indeed the rest of the material on 1984’s Various Positions, that they refused to release it; it wasn’t until a younger generation of artists, notably Jeff Buckley and Rufus Wainwright, began covering it that it started to outstrip the rest of Cohen’s 80s oeuvre. It wasn’t until its deeply improbable appearance, sung by John Cale, at the end of the animated film Shrek that it started to become ubiquitous. You could argue all night about whether it’s actually a better song than the other masterpieces with which Various Positions and I’m Your Man were liberally studded – Dance Me to the End of Love or First We Take Manhattan or Tower of Song – but Hallelujah certainly seemed symbolic of a kind of creative rebirth for its author, after his disastrous collaboration with Phil Spector on Death of a Ladies’ Man, and 1979’s undervalued Recent Songs. Perhaps its longevity has something to do with the song’s malleability, its openness to interpretation. He laboured so intensively over the lyric that, at one juncture, he literally ended up banging his head against the floor, but ended up with something that can be viewed as euphoric or despairing, solemnly religious or carnal, ambiguous or sincere. It’s even survived an unprovoked assault by ghastly operatic man-band Il Divo, the mauling compounded by that fact that, brilliantly, someone in their Simon Cowell-helmed operation took it upon themselves to change the lyrics.”

Cohen on depression

You may well have read Dorian Lysnkey’s beautiful tribute, which we published earlier. He also encountered Cohen four years ago, and wrote about it at the time.

‘When I speak of depression,’ he says carefully, ‘I speak of a clinical depression that is the background of your entire life, a background of anguish and anxiety, a sense that nothing goes well, that pleasure is unavailable and all your strategies collapse. I’m happy to report that, by imperceptible degrees and by the grace of good teachers and good luck, that depression slowly dissolved and has never returned with the same ferocity that prevailed for most of my life.’ He thinks it might just be down to old age. ‘I read somewhere that as you grow older certain brain cells die that are associated with anxiety so it doesn’t really matter how much you apply yourself to the disciplines. You’re going to start feeling a lot better or a lot worse depending on the condition of your neurons.’”

Read the full piece here.

Leonard Cohen … Photographed in 1992. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer

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