We live in the days of the flood, says Leonard Cohen. "Most of my psychic landmarks have evaporated. I'm reluctant to apply the psychic realm to the social, but I know I'm not alone. A lot of my circle are in trouble too, and the mental hospitals are getting fuller. Society is resilient but we need tools to deal with this trouble, and humour is one of them."
"Cohen's Way" by Mat Snow, The Guardian, February 1988
QUOTE: Leonard Cohen by Pat Harbron, Beetle, December 1973
Beetle: How can you best classify your music? Some would have it as folk music.
Cohen: "Let's hope it becomes folk music."
Beetle: Why?
Cohen: "Well, I mean, I hope... It would be nice if it stuck around long enough to become folk music. But, that's as good a term as any."
Leonard Cohen by Pat Harbron, Beetle, December 1973
Cohen: "Let's hope it becomes folk music."
Beetle: Why?
Cohen: "Well, I mean, I hope... It would be nice if it stuck around long enough to become folk music. But, that's as good a term as any."
Leonard Cohen by Pat Harbron, Beetle, December 1973
NEWS: Leonard Cohen talks women, age and Hallelujah
New interview from The National Post
Leonard Cohen talks women, age and Hallelujah
Posted: March 20, 2009
By Jian Ghomeshi for National PostLeonard Cohen is an eternal paradox, which is to say that he is paradoxically eternal. Questions abound: Is the spry septuagenarian finally now old? Was the sage poet ever really young? How has he remained ceaselessly hip? Was there a time when his famous baritone exhibited impermanence? Does it matter? The mystery comes with the man. There is little new in suggesting Cohen is ageless, but it’s nevertheless quite something to be confronted with this actuality in person. To spend time with him is to realize that he is reassuringly human. To spend time with him asking questions is also to be reminded that he is enigmatic. He has made a career of contradiction. So at this stage, it follows that his prospective swan song also feels like a new beginning.
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QUOTE: Leonard Cohen on BBC Radio 1, transcipt by Andrew Norman from programme broadcast August 7, 1994. From Carter's Bird on a Wire website
Leonard Cohen --
I guess it's legitimate not to like someone's work, but somehow those descriptions of my work got into the computer, you know, there was "suicide", or "bedsit", or "gloom", "depressive", "melancholy", and every time they'd tap out my name those descriptions would come up. You know, as though seriousness had no place in song. The songs we love best are the sad songs.
Leonard Cohen on BBC Radio 1, transcipt by Andrew Norman from programme broadcast August 7, 1994. From Carter's Bird on a Wire website.
I guess it's legitimate not to like someone's work, but somehow those descriptions of my work got into the computer, you know, there was "suicide", or "bedsit", or "gloom", "depressive", "melancholy", and every time they'd tap out my name those descriptions would come up. You know, as though seriousness had no place in song. The songs we love best are the sad songs.
Leonard Cohen on BBC Radio 1, transcipt by Andrew Norman from programme broadcast August 7, 1994. From Carter's Bird on a Wire website.
QUOTE: Leonard Cohen by Kristine McKenna, Another Room Magazine, Spring 1985
Kristine McKenna: Do you prefer calm or chaos?
Leonard Cohen: I like the appropriate mixture. I prefer calm, but it's not for human beings to have it that way. As to which is better for me creatively, I never have a sense of any deluxe position as an artist. I always feel I'm operating with very little and never feel I'm standing in front of a banquet table from which I can choose calm or chaos or one subject or another. Things seem to present themselves urgently and I don't really have much choice in the matter. I write very slowly, one word at a time, so I don't have any sense of a grand operation
Leonard Cohen by Kristine McKenna, Another Room Magazine, Spring 1985
Leonard Cohen: I like the appropriate mixture. I prefer calm, but it's not for human beings to have it that way. As to which is better for me creatively, I never have a sense of any deluxe position as an artist. I always feel I'm operating with very little and never feel I'm standing in front of a banquet table from which I can choose calm or chaos or one subject or another. Things seem to present themselves urgently and I don't really have much choice in the matter. I write very slowly, one word at a time, so I don't have any sense of a grand operation
Leonard Cohen by Kristine McKenna, Another Room Magazine, Spring 1985
QUOTE: "The Obscure Case of Leonard Cohen and The Mysterious Mr. M." by Bruce Pollock, After Dark, February 1977
[The interviewer quotes from an obscure article Leonard had written in Books about his first performance onstage as a singer and the beauty of his utter failure. Leonard answers by way of an allegory.]
"A man visits a master who's living in a very pitiful terrain and the man says, 'How can you survive here?' The master says, 'If you think it's bad now, you should see what it's like in summer.' 'What happens in summer?' asks the man. The master says, 'In the summer I throw myself into a vat of boiling oil.' 'Isn't it worse then?' says the man. 'No,' says the master, 'pain cannot reach you there.'"
"That's really the way things are," Cohen continued... "If you throw yourself into a kind of effort, it's not better or worse. Like a chameleon, you take the color of the experience if it's intense enough, and the pain cannot reach you there."
"Performing is definitely the boiling oil. You can't really develop an intellectual perspective on it --I mean, you're in it. You realize the next moment could bring total humiliation --or you could actually be lifted up into the emotion that began the song. But you're already in the boiling oil by the time you've gotten that far."
The Obscure Case of Leonard Cohen and The Mysterious Mr. M. by Bruce Pollock, After Dark, February 1977
"A man visits a master who's living in a very pitiful terrain and the man says, 'How can you survive here?' The master says, 'If you think it's bad now, you should see what it's like in summer.' 'What happens in summer?' asks the man. The master says, 'In the summer I throw myself into a vat of boiling oil.' 'Isn't it worse then?' says the man. 'No,' says the master, 'pain cannot reach you there.'"
"That's really the way things are," Cohen continued... "If you throw yourself into a kind of effort, it's not better or worse. Like a chameleon, you take the color of the experience if it's intense enough, and the pain cannot reach you there."
"Performing is definitely the boiling oil. You can't really develop an intellectual perspective on it --I mean, you're in it. You realize the next moment could bring total humiliation --or you could actually be lifted up into the emotion that began the song. But you're already in the boiling oil by the time you've gotten that far."
The Obscure Case of Leonard Cohen and The Mysterious Mr. M. by Bruce Pollock, After Dark, February 1977
QUOTE: ABC Australia Radio, March 1980
Interviewer: Do you find though that it's a bit hard sometimes to live up to that image that you've created of yourself?
Leonard Cohen: I don't feel under any obligation to live up to it. That's just something that happens in the public world. I think in anybody's life they have versions of themselves that are not really themselves but that they have to deal with day to day.
ABC Australia Radio, transcript of a radio program broadcast in Sydney, Australia, March 1980.
Leonard Cohen: I don't feel under any obligation to live up to it. That's just something that happens in the public world. I think in anybody's life they have versions of themselves that are not really themselves but that they have to deal with day to day.
ABC Australia Radio, transcript of a radio program broadcast in Sydney, Australia, March 1980.
NEWS: CBC Stages Leonard Cohen Fest On Air and Online
From Media Caster Magazine
CBC Stages Leonard Cohen Fest On Air and Online
I’ve seen the future, brother, it’s……on CBC!
CBC will provide Leonard Cohen fans a glimpe of his media future, with an exclusive online and audio previews of his upcoming Live In London release.
A television and radio special capturing his July 2008 concert from London, England’s 02 Arena, and a one-hour Canadian television and radio premiere exclusive interview with the Canadian icon, will be aired.
The Cohen extravaganza begins March 24, CBC programmers announbced. The two-CD set and DVD are available in stores March 31, 2009.
From March 24 –30, fans can visit http://www.cbc.ca/spotlight for an exclusive audio preview of Cohen’s upcoming Live In London release. All tracks will be available for live audio streaming. CBC Radio 2 is the broadcast presenter of the Canadian leg of the Leonard Cohen World Tour 2009 and fans can also go online to find out about Cohen’s Canadian Tour dates.
LEONARD COHEN: LIVE IN LONDON, a one-hour television special airing Wednesday, April 1, at 8 p.m., and two-hour radio broadcast on Tuesday, March 31, at 8 p.m., on CBC Radio 2’s CANADA LIVE, captures Cohen’s July 2008 critically acclaimed concert from London, England’s 02 Arena. LEONARD COHEN: LIVE IN LONDON gives Canadians a front-row seat to this concert from his phenomenal world tour and includes performances of quintessential songs by the iconic Canadian, including Suzanne, Hallelujah, I’m Your Man, First We Take Manhattan, I Tried To Leave You, Dance Me To The End Of Love and Bird On The Wire.
From Cohen’s home in Montreal, Jian Ghomeshi, host of Q, Canada’s premiere arts and entertainment program, interviews Cohen in a Canadian television and radio premiere exclusive. In this candid one-on-one interview, Ghomeshi asked Cohen about the future. Cohen replied: “I would like to hear me at 82.” He also reflected on aging, mortality, love and financial loss. The one-hour interview airs Thursday, April 16, at 10 a.m., on Q, on CBC Radio One and Sirius Satellite 137. An encore presentation of the interview airs Thursday, April 23, at 5 p.m., on CBC Radio 2. After April 16, the full interview will be available as an audio and video podcast at http://www.cbc.ca/spotlight.
CBC NEWS: THE NATIONAL will air a sneak peak on Tuesday, April 14, at 10 p.m. (10:30 NT), on CBC Television, and 9 p.m. and 11 p.m. ET/PT, on CBC Newsworld.
Cohen is described as one of the most important and influential poets and singer/songwriters of our time, a figure whose body of work achieves greater depths of mystery and meaning as time goes on. Sex, spirituality, religion, power—he has relentlessly examined the largest issues in human lives, always with a full appreciation of how elusive answers can be to the vexing questions he raises.
LEONARD COHEN: LIVE IN LONDON special and interview details:
CBC Radio 2 exclusive online audio preview of Live In London CD March 24 – 30 on http://www.cbc.ca/spotlight.
LEONARD COHEN: LIVE IN LONDON
Tuesday, March 31, at 8 p.m., on CANADA LIVE on CBC Radio 2
LEONARD COHEN: LIVE IN LONDON
Wednesday, April 1, at 8 p.m., on CBC-TV
CBC NEWS: THE NATIONAL
20-minute preview of exclusive interview with Leonard Cohen and Jian Ghomeshi on Q
Tuesday, April 14, at 10 p.m. (10:30 NT), on CBC-TV, and 9 p.m. and 11 p.m. ET/PT, on CBC Newsworld.
One-hour interview with Leonard Cohen and Jian Ghomeshi
Thursday, April 16, at 10 a.m., on Q on CBC Radio One (airs again at 10 p.m. on evening edition of Q on CBC Radio One). Encore presentation of interview to air Thursday, April 23, at 5 p.m., on CBC Radio 2.
LEONARD COHEN: LIVE IN LONDON
Thursday, April 16, at 8 p.m., on bold
CBC/Radio-Canada is Canada’s national public broadcaster, with 28 services offered on Radio, Television, the Internet, satellite radio, digital audio, as well as through its record and music distribution service and wireless WAP and SMS messaging services.
QUOTE: Stolen Moments by Tom Schnabel, published by Acrobat Books, 1988
TS: Do you take it as a compliment that you're more popular in Europe than in America?
LC: I'm grateful to have an audience anywhere. The audience in Europe is wide. I seem to have struck deep into some of the countries. I have small pockets of listeners in America. I like singing in the United States because my language comes out of this language and people can follow the real meaning of the songs. I use the cadences and rhythms of the American language. I know that in Norway, for instance, or in Scandinavia where English is a second language, there still is some kind of translation process going on.
Stolen Moments by Tom Schnabel, published by Acrobat Books, 1988
LC: I'm grateful to have an audience anywhere. The audience in Europe is wide. I seem to have struck deep into some of the countries. I have small pockets of listeners in America. I like singing in the United States because my language comes out of this language and people can follow the real meaning of the songs. I use the cadences and rhythms of the American language. I know that in Norway, for instance, or in Scandinavia where English is a second language, there still is some kind of translation process going on.
Stolen Moments by Tom Schnabel, published by Acrobat Books, 1988
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