Leonard Cohen: Beautiful Stranger

      It was almost fifty years ago in Dec. 1967 that a novelist and poet, little known in America but on the rise in his home country of Canada, released his debut album.  His name was Leonard Cohen and the album was Songs of Leonard Cohen.  However unassuming the title and the stark, sepia toned cover photo of a demure Cohen seemed, those grooves contained songs full of mystery, atmosphere and immense poetic power.  From the first bare notes of "Suzanne," the listener is gently ushered into a strange world that somehow feels familiar.  The song seems to emanate from another, higher realm of sensation: a snowy, ethereal world of half-remembered dreams and memories of lost love.  Like the title character, the half crazed, beatific Suzanne, the song itself remains beautifully elusive, giving only faint impressions of a "divine" love which is unattainable.  Every song on the album is likewise charged with palpable mystery.  Songs like "The Master Song" and "The Stranger Song" are enigmatic gems of curiosity.  This is a testament to Cohen's poetic ability which, when paired with the bare instrumentation of the songs, casts an enchantment over the listener which linger in the brain long afterwards.  His debut, released when he was 33, was the start of a long and ultimately prosperous career, which over the years earned Cohen millions of loyal fans.  It's my opinion that his appeal lies partly in his seamless blending of apparently opposing themes: his work always strives to bring together the disparate threads of spirituality and sexuality, piety and passion.  In all these elements he seems to be able to draw out a universal concept; the theme of longing.  His best songs ache with the burden of longing which all humans carry, whether for physical satisfaction or something more ethereal, beyond the earthly.  His body of work speaks to so many people because it strives for inclusion rather than exclusion.  Everyone can see themselves in the band of wounded souls that his songs give voice to.  Cohen seems to have us pinned at every point in our life: in victory, in defeat, in ecstasy, in the clutches of despair, in the spring of hope and the winter of disillusionment.  He shows time and again that this earthly life is not perfectable; try as we might we can not shape it to our will.  The harder we try the more we suffer, but it is our suffering which gives us our ragged beauty.  We are angels howling in misery at the bottom of the pit of life.  Perhaps what makes "Hallelujah," his most cherished song is that it expresses this concept perfectly.  We are all fighting an inner battle, a spiritual struggle within ourselves, one in which the only victory is surrender.  Once we realize that "perfect" victory is unattainable and that even love is "not a victory march," but rather a melting of oneself into something larger, it becomes clear that we are all singing a broken "hallelujah," with a holiness all its own.  This is where the power of his songs emanates from; the collective realm of suffering and salvation that makes up life.  Cohen himself is a beautiful stranger in the world of music.  He seems to have slipped in quietly and unobtrusively when no one was watching the door and has been there ever since, secretly feeding our lives with wisdom from another place.  Like all great visionaries, literary or musical, I see Cohen as a man of two worlds: he lives among us, embracing the fullness of the world rather than shunning it, but he ultimately answers to a higher calling.  As evident in First We Take Manhattan when he writes, "I'm guided by a signal in the heavens," Cohen's gaze rests on a distant horizon that is hidden from most of the world.  Who or what supplies this signal is unclear, even to Cohen himself, but that's exactly the point.  Cohen chooses to live in the mystery of existence, marveling at it's boundless manifestations and trying in his humble way, to pay tribute to the curious emanations of beauty he witnesses everyday in our world.  I think I speak for all his fans when I say I'm lucky to be alive at the same time as Leonard Cohen.