Lean in close now. Leonard Cohen is speaking, and if you want to understand him, it might take a bit of work. It's not just that he talks, as he writes, in sometimes enigmatic pronouncements; he's also quiet as a lullaby.
You've just settled in across from him, making small talk, when his two publicists retreat into the next room. Suddenly he seems freed by their absence. "Come and have a coffee," he says in his familiar low baritone, getting up and crossing the room. "How do you take it?"
Cohen is playing servant here, but he was master last night. When he appeared on stage at the Beacon Theatre for his first stateside concert in 15 years, the crowd greeted him with waves of adoration, like a beloved and humble sovereign returning from exile, or maybe a new U.S. president: There was hope in the air. And Cohen seemed energized by the affection, jaunty even, so much so that when he departed the stage after each set and encore, he skipped off like a thieving scamp.
But 12 hours after he and his band bid adieu with a soothing rendition of Whither Thou Goest, he is seated wearily on a couch, wearing a bolo tie and a black three-piece suit cut smartly to his lithe frame, his trademark fedora atop his head, and he appears almost fragile. At one point, as he considers a question and his left hand drifts absently up to his mouth, his fingers seem to tremble slightly. You suddenly remember: He's a 74-year-old man.
One, to be sure, who's in greater demand than ever. Since launching his tour last May in Fredericton, Cohen has played 99 concerts, some in venues as large as London's O2 arena, which boasts a capacity of 20,000. This spring, he will do another 28 shows across North America, including 11 dates in Canadian cities that he bypassed last year, in support of a DVD and double-disc CD album of his London concert, coming out March 31. Reinforcing his cultural currency, he will even play the shaggy Coachella festival near Palm Springs on April 17, joining an outdoor lineup of much younger acts that includes Conor Oberst, The Black Keys, Girl Talk, and The Hold Steady.
"The response has been very, very, very hospitable, and it's been a generally very nourishing experience," Cohen begins, slowly. "We've been all over the world, and you know, one is never sure that it's going to work again. You're never sure from concert to concert, actually, because there's some part of it you don't command."
Cohen likes to feel the mood in a room and react, in a process he says is almost spiritual. Which is why, as his music director and bassist Roscoe Beck explained a couple of hours before the show, Cohen tries to leave himself open to momentary whims onstage. "It's heads-up at all times," said Beck, who has played with Cohen since 1979 and put together the band for the current tour. "We may land on a chord and he just may feel that it's not time to come in singing yet, just emotionally it's a nice moment, and he'll decide to extend that moment another bar. We have to be ready for that, we have to be ready for anything. A lyric change, an added bar, a different song."
Cohen is out on the road again to rebuild a multimillion-dollar nest egg he alleges was lost through the mismanagement of others. A series of lawsuits and counterclaims now seems to be behind him, but the sting remains.
"I was spending enormous amounts of time in lawyers' offices, tax specialists' offices, accountants' offices, detectives' offices. In fact, I was spending all my time in offices, and I had to say to myself at a certain point, 'If God wants to bore you to death, I guess that's His business.'
"It was an enormous — 'distraction' hardly begins to describe it, because what happened was, my own work became a distraction. I had to take care of the matters at hand, they were urgent, and the situation was dangerous at certain points."
His financial well-being was threatened, but Cohen has always been someone to extract wisdom from twists of fortune, be they shattered romances or corruption in society; some of his best songs are built upon sharp insights into human nature gained when on the ropes. So, you ask him, what have you learned about yourself from the ordeal?
