Songstress Judy Collins used to tell the story of that first show, when he bolted offstage halfway through his opening song to sob “I can’t do it, I can’t go back” on her shoulder. This was April 30, 1967, at an anti-Vietnam concert in New York’s Town Hall. “But you will,” she replied, and he walked back under the lights to finish singing “Suzanne.” In the months prior, Cohen had been getting attention as a songwriter for penning it and “Dress Rehearsal Rag,” both of which Collins had recorded for her 1966 album In My Life. But here was the world finally introduced to Leonard Cohen, the performing singer abreast the reclusive songwriter.

Cohen went on to craft and record a discography that earned him an induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this March for his place in the “highest and most influential echelon of songwriters.” In January, he announced his first tour in over 15 years and the upcoming release of his third album since a self-imposed 15-year exile in a Zen colony on Mount Baldy ended in 2004.

I’ve been thinking about Leonard Cohen lately for related, if less newsworthy reasons. In the shop where I work, I often play 1974’s New Skin for an Old Ceremony when it’s just me left until closing time. For almost a year, no one said anything about it, not even when Cohen would sing “giving me head/on the unmade bed” in “Chelsea Hotel No. 2,” his lover’s lament to Janis Joplin—a line I’m constantly braced to deflect if an angry parent questions my store’s propriety. But in recent weeks, three different female customers (two in their mid-30s, one well over 50) have stopped to talk about the music, to relate that they hadn’t heard Cohen since they were in college. None could pin down the exact reason she had stopped listening; they had simply all loved him then but were no longer quite so interested.

Maybe Leonard Cohen is best appreciated by the early 20s set, us fly-by-night hedonists that can connect with his tales of love’s ever-changing avatars, wry entendres lofting from a haunting sheath of baritone vocal registers and austere acoustic arrangements. It’s possible that for all Cohen’s Old Testament ruminations and practiced poetics (he was a successful author before beginning to write songs), he connects best with a more naïve listenership—or at least with past selves the middle-aged remember from a time gone by.

But I see Leonard Cohen as a simple, if tenuous, balancing act: he hypostatizes ‘singer-songwriter’ to such a degree that the phrase’s colloquial use in musical nomenclature slips away. His embodiment of the figure, however, along with his influence on its evolution, has altered his reception in a curious way, driving away listeners with the same sonic gestures that brought them to him.

A contentious point in singer-songwriter musicology: who is the “I”—the singer, the songwriter or a created character separate from either one? The fragility of such boundaries has long been a hallmark of the genre’s songs, which capitalize on the figure of the writer as much as they do on the performance. Cohen haunts these divides to a point of potential discomfort. His “you”s are famously referential—Janis Joplin is just one, but his Norweigan Marianne, met on the Greek island of Hydra, as well as his Suzanne, now homeless in Venice Beach, establish a kind of bizarrely secure corporeal foundation for the listener. And his “I”s are unmistakenly Leonard Cohen; if not Leonard writing songs in a room, then at least a poeticized version of this man. There’s another side to this, however. Cohen’s flair for the figurative—and his employment of Biblical tropes—make these characters impossible to trace in any exacting way. The songs are not mired in self-obsession, but accessible for a listener to latch onto; all is figured from something real but not required to remain attached to it.

This is a scary and difficult proposition for music appreciation. It seems that attributable feelings, ones that might be applied to localizable situations, are the sorts of things singer-songwriters are expected to operate with. And Cohen can feel overbearingly ghostly and miserable. His bouts with depression—he wrote “Bird on a Wire” after Marianne handed him a guitar to help pull him out of a frightful ennui—are hard to ignore in the music.

But such flat emotions gets more complicated with Cohen. He has been covered over a thousand times, by musicians who employ a similar aesthetic as well as by those completely different. “Hallelujah,” a song off 1985’s Various Positions, was recorded by John Cale in 1991 and by Jeff Buckley in 1994, a version that Q Magazine dubbed “the most perfect song ever.” Since then, the list has only expanded to include such singers as Rufus Wainwright and, a few weeks ago, a contestant on American Idol.

What gets me about “Hallelujah,” however, is the last verse of Cohen’s original:

I did my best, it wasn’t much

I couldn’t feel, so I tried to touch

I’ve told the truth, I didn’t come to fool you

And even though it all went wrong

I’ll stand before the Lord of Song

With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah

This verse has been left out by every major cover, which end with the line “it’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah.” The differences are not unfounded; Cohen wrote over 15 verses for the original and used only six, and when Cale asked for the lyrics so he could play it Cohen sent him them all. But it’s what is missing when the last verse is left out that strikes me as the difference between Cohen and so many other singer-songwriters. Without it, the song is a one of basic heartbreak, enormously useable for soundtracks—as have been Cale’s, Wainwright’s, Buckley’s and others—in its somewhat linear emotional trajectory. But this is a vacuous take on Cohen, whose own melancholia comes tempered with unexpected triumph: “even though it all went wrong” he goes on and on.

Now Cohen is 73 years old. And it seems to me that what I should have said to the women in the store is that we expect too little from our singer-songwriters, and we hear only that much in the ones who could give us more. There is rejoicing to be had, even and especially in a despondent Leonard Cohen song; there is a balance to be struck that makes sense to me—the kind of vacillation he voices in his debut album’s “So Long Marianne”: “it’s time that we began to laugh and cry and cry and laugh about it all again.”
To boil that fine equilibrium down to the inanity of a background is to ignore all the tones, over- and under-, that we could get from Cohen—which would be, to me, a terribly sad way to live.

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Hey, HENRY FREEDLAND B’08, that’s no way to say goodbye.