LEONARD COHEN :

I never think of myself as a solitary poet. I don’t feel any conflicts in what I do. There are economic pressures, and there’s a desire too, as a musician would say, to “ keep your chops up, “ to keep singing and keep playing, just because that’s the thing you know how to do. So between that and the need to make a living, you find yourself putting a tour together. What the real high calling behind any life is is very difficult for me to determine. It goes all the way from thinking that nothing any of us do is terribly important to feeling that every person has a divine spark and is here to fulfil a special mission. So between those two positions, there’s lots of space. But I’ve put out a record and I know I have to go on a tour or nobody will know about the record and if nobody knows about the record, it defeats the idea of the song moving from lip to lip, and it also makes it impossible for me to support my family. So all these things conspire to place me on a stage and hopefully be able to entertain people for an evening.

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INT: It strikes me that there’s sometimes more irony in your songs than in your poems. I’m thinking of lines like “ He was just some Joseph looking for a manger. “ The inflections in your si ngi.ng voice convey a variety of different attitudes, and in some instances an attitude like irony comes through more clearly in the songs.

LC: Yeah, I see what you mean. I think of Bob Dylan, who gets the inflections of street talk, the inflections of conversation, and does that with such mastery … where you can hear a little tough guy talking. You can hear somebody praying. You can hear somebody asking. You can hear somebody coming onto you. When you’re composing that material and you know that it’s going to occupy aural space, you can compose it with those inflections in mind. And of course it does invite irony because that irony can be conveyed with the voice alone whereas on the page you generally have to have a larger construction around the irony for it to come through. You can’t just write, “ What’s it to ya? “ If you sing, “ What’s it to ya? “ to some nice chords it really does sound like, “ Well, what’s it to yah, baby? “ But.just to see it written, it would need a location.

Leonard Cohen as interviewed by Robert Sward

That interview took place in Montreal, Quebec – 1984.

INT: How much connection do you feel with Dylan’s music, or with others, like Joni Mitchell, for example? Whose music is closest to you now…?

LC: Well, like the Talmud says, there’s good wine in every generation. We have a particular feeling for the music of our own generation and usually the songs we courted to are the songs that stay with us all our life as being the heavy ones. The singers of my own period, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Ray Charles, all those singers have crossed over the generations. But we have a special kind of feeling for the singers that we use to make love to.