Writing, Knowing It Will be Imperfect

 Austin Kleon published Leonard Cohen on perfectionism on his blog. Now, I did not get any exposure to Cohen while living in Indiana; that took the Philadelphia radio during my 11 years in Fort Dix FCI. Smart guy, great writer, and I had to read Kleon's post. Which is short and sweet, and here is a taste:

I found that things got a lot easier when I no longer expected to win….

You understand that, you abandon your masterpiece, and you sink into the real masterpiece…

Understanding why to pay attention to this post by Kleon quoting Cohen, the Pitchfork's The Future examines Cohen's 1992 album. It says in part, 

In the early 1990s, Leonard Cohen occupied a quantum state in popular culture, a sort of Schrodinger’s singer-songwriter: simultaneously legendary and forgotten. There was no knowing on which of the two he might ultimately land. Twenty-five years earlier, the Montreal-born poet and novelist’s sensual yet unsentimental folk music had made him the urbane wallflower at psychedelic rock’s sweaty be-in, and an intimate of brilliant women from Judy Collins to Joni Mitchell to Janis Joplin. By the early ’80s, he was such a relic that the album containing what has become his most famous song was not initially issued in the United States. His 1988 comeback, I’m Your Man, a masterpiece of cinematic synths and bleakly comedic foreboding, was crucial to what Cohen liked to call his “resurrection.” But the status he achieved by the time of his actual death, in 2016, as a songwriting guru of incantatory power, was far from secure.

Released in late November 1992 as the follow-up to I’m Your Man, The Future was a quest for lasting truth in what he perceived as the schlocky, dehumanized ruins of late capitalism. When Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” and Michael Bolton’s Timeless: The Classics stood atop the U.S. charts, the 58-year-old Cohen’s ninth studio album offered an equally extravagant but more ambiguous soundtrack to post-Cold War triumphalism: lacquered keyboard-rock with strings, a choir, several producers, and hordes of session musicians, recorded in a dozen studios. Cohen’s husky voice sits at the center, growling lyrics that don’t so much blur the sacred and profane as dispassionately report their coexistence. Heaven is in the gutter, and vice versa—hallelujah, what’s it to ya? Its nine-song, hour-long runtime juxtaposes some of Cohen’s finest originals with two unlikely covers and an instrumental. I’m Your Man brought Cohen back to life. The Future showed he would continue to capture life, in all of its messy contradictions, prismatic with meaning.

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But songwriting was an agonizing, nonstop process for Cohen, leaving him “wrecked” and darkening thousands of notebook pages with revisions. He struggled with depression. He saw fires blaze through his neighborhood in the uprising after the Rodney King verdict. For four months, he paused all work while his son, the elder of two children from a previous relationship, recovered from a near-fatal car accident. The crash was the rare subject that Cohen found too painful to discuss on the promotional circuit. “If you’re a parent, you don’t have to explain these things,” he reasoned.

For Cohen, songs were living, breathing entities, open to almost Talmudic reinterpretation, all the way through his 2008 farewell tour. Many of the themes on The Future were already percolating on I’m Your Man: Both albums established Cohen as a gallows-humor prophet able to condense the sweep of sex, religion, and social ills into wry synth-rock, willing to write and sing from perspectives that reflect the worst of human nature. The two albums were also proof of concept for Cohen’s dawning conviction that his bitter, mordantly funny proclamations were best served with a syncopated backbeat—or, as he preferred to say, “a hot little dance track.” While The Future hasn’t been the consensus favorite, it’s the zaniest, the most overstuffed, and the most clairvoyant.

Anyone seeing Joss Whedon's Justice League has heard this Cohen song:

 

 

 sch 3/3