A touchstone for troubled times, Leonard Cohen’s Anthem took its own sweet time to happen

2020/07/03 Leave a comment

Of all the Cohen songs, Anthem spoke to me the most, whether during my cancer treatments, dealing with professional issues for the current pandemic:

Embroiled in a civil rights case connected to violence in the Indian village of Koregaon Bhima, the journalist and human-rights activist Gautam Navlakha had his bail plea rejected by India’s Supreme Court this past March. Afterward, he issued a public statement that ended with a plea to listen to Leonard Cohen’s Anthem, with special attention paid to the song’s chorus:

Ring the bell which still can ringForget your perfect offeringThere is a crack, a crack in everythingThat’s how the light gets in

Released as the beacon centrepiece to Cohen’s The Future in 1992, Anthem is particularly alive in 2020. In a shattered, calamitous time, the song’s spoken-word solace serves as go-to quote material for social-media philosophers and embattled social-rights activists alike. Swelling and almost optimistic, the redemptive hymn from the Poet of Brokenness resonates universally.

The Future was birthed in an especially turbulent time. The album’s Democracyreferenced Tiananmen Square and was “occasioned,” according to Cohen, by fall of the Berlin Wall. Closer to home, when the Los Angeles-based Cohen looked out his window, he noticed riots and earthquakes. “I’ve seen the future, brother,” he foretold on the title track. “It is murder.”

Oddly, early reviews of The Future often failed to even mention Anthem. The album’s unlikely hit ended up being Closing Time, with its boozy swing. Anthem eventually earned an iconic status, but its progress came in fits.

Inspired by Kabbalistic mysticism, the song preaches the acceptance of imperfection. Yet, after an earlier version of Anthem was mistakenly erased in the studio in 1983, Cohen reworked it laboriously. “Anthem took a decade to write,” Cohen told author and musician Paul Zollo in 1992. “And I’ve recorded it three times. More.”

In the end? “There’s not a line in it that I couldn’t defend,” Cohen said in another interview.

In tribute to the song, The Globe and Mail has collaborated with arts organizations across the country on a video of dance pieces set to an original arrangement of Anthem by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra.

What follows below is an oral history of the song, culled from Cohen’s own words and from the recollections of those who spoke to The Globe. In short, a breakdown of how the light finally got in.

What became Anthem first appeared during the recording of Cohen’s 1984 album Various Positions. Leanne Ungar was the engineer for those sessions, and for the recording of The Future at Village Recorders and Capital Studios in Los Angeles.

Leanne Ungar: “I don’t think it was originally called Anthem when we recorded it for Various Positions. It may have been called Ring the Bell, but I’m not sure. The intro was erased in error by a studio technician. Of course I was devastated and wanted to repair it. But Leonard said, “No, it’s a sign. It’s not meant to be. I’m going to put it away and look at it later.”

Leonard Cohen, in 1992: “I listened to it … there was a lie somewhere in there, there was a disclosure that I was refusing to make. There was a solemnity that I hadn’t achieved. There was something wrong with the damn thing. All I knew is that I couldn’t sing it. You could hear it in the vocal, that the guy was putting you on.”

Producer Yoav Goren specializes in soundtracks for film and television. In the early 1990s, he was working in a small music shop in Santa Monica when a famous songwriter walked in.

Yoav Goren: “Leonard was shopping for a keyboard. He was fond of a certain kind made by Technics, a less-sophisticated version of a synthesizer. Leonard loved that kind of stuff. He bought one and asked me to deliver it to his house.”

Behind Cohen’s house in Los Angeles was a smaller two-story building used as a home studio for song ideas. Unable to grasp the nuances of the computer-recording software, Cohen asked Goren to help lay down the demos for The Future.

Goren: “I remember asking him [if] he would mind me taking a shot at arranging Anthem for him. He said, ‘Go for it.’ I came up with a medley and an arrangement. Ultimately none [of] it was used.”

Credited as the song’s co-producer is actor Rebecca De Mornay, Cohen’s companion at the time. Her role in Anthem was cited in Sylvie Simmons’s biography I’m Your Man.

Cohen: “I had played many versions of Anthem to her – fully completed versions and overdubs, and none of them seemed to nail it – and while I was revising it for the 100th time, at a certain point she stopped me and said, ‘That’s the one.’ It was quite late at night and we managed to find a studio … we produced the session that night. The basic track and the basic vocal.”

The new version was different than the discarded one from years earlier.

Ungar: “The verses were similar and the chorus still began with, ‘Ring the bell.’ But the line about the light getting in was new.”

In charge of the song’s string section and the L.A. Mass Choir was David Campbell, the Winnipeg-born arranger (and father of musician Beck), who has his credits listed on hundreds of gold and platinum albums.

David Campbell: “It could be frustrating. Producer Steve Lindsey would try to get Leonard to forget about the stuff he did on the keyboard and start again. Leonard’s tendency was to strip things down. You kind of had to because he had such a low voice. You needed to make room for it.”

The people who helped Cohen create Anthem were struck by its wisdom and gravitas.

Back-up singer Julie Christensen: “I was about four years into recovery at the time. The reprieve in Anthem wasn’t lost on me. I could have been lost to the world. But there I was in the studio, singing that song.”

Campbell: “It had an optimism, but in a tarnished way. It seemed like the most realistic view.”

The last word goes to the songwriter himself.

Cohen: “I think it is one of the best songs I have written, maybe the best,” the songwriter told music critic Robert Hilburn in 1995. “I knew that song was everything that my whole work and life had somehow gathered around. It is absolutely true to me.”

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Pico Iyer on the meaning of home, in a post-Trump world

2016/12/12 Leave a comment

Interviews with Pico Iyer always are interesting:

Q: Perhaps that’s why you’ve been such an admirer of Canada for so long, since before your paean in The Global Soul?

A: One thing that has long hit me about Canada, ever since I started making annual visits there in 1994, is that people in the cities there are constantly—some would say obsessively—talking and thinking, every day, about diversity and refugees and the future and how to turn a culture made of many disparate parts into something greater than their sum.

The other countries I know—from Britain to the U.S.—have all backed into multiculturalism; it’s taken them by surprise and they’ve tried to adapt or stretch their current society into something that will accommodate new visitors. Only in Canada has there been a strong sense of vision about creating an entirely new kind of society to match the age of movement. And Canada has been addressing that issue for half a century—ever since Pierre Trudeau hung a sign that said “World Citizen” outside his door at Harvard and began travelling the world.

Of course, those who live in Canada are keenly aware of everything that’s going wrong and moments when optimism has been unfounded. But my impression is that the more people travel—whether it’s Salman Rushdie or the spokesperson for the UN High Commission on Refugees—the more they admire Canada, and see something coming to light there that we don’t find so often in Australia or South Africa, in Singapore or Hong Kong.

Whenever my friends there say that their country is no utopia, I agree—but ask them if they really want to move to Dubai or L.A.

Q: You love the inclusive, cosmopolitan vibrancy of Toronto, and you wrote that in Toronto, “the average resident today is what used to be called a foreigner, somebody born in a very different country.” In late 2016, it’s top of mind for many: what does finding home mean in a less immigrant-friendly world?

A: From the beginning, I’ve stressed that home is something internal, invisible, portable, especially for those of us with roots in many physical places; we have to root ourselves in our passions, our values and our deepest friends. My home, I’ve always felt, lies in the songs and novels that I love, in the wife and mother that I’m never far away from, in the monastery to which I’ve been returning for 25 years. Precisely because I don’t belong entirely to Britain or the U.S. or India or Japan, I build my foundations in some way deeper than mere passports, and more in the light of where I’m going than of “where I come from.”

Of course, the Brexit vote, the victory of Mr. Trump, what’s happening around the world represents a backlash against precisely people such as myself, blessed with many homes. But I don’t think that changes the fact—the inarguable reality—that for many in Toronto, say, “home” means a question they’ll always be refining and adding to (and may never answer), while home also means a place like Toronto, where they’re surrounded by people entertaining just the same questions.

We may be joined these days more by the questions we have in common than by the answers we share.

Some people will always ground themselves very strongly in a piece of soil, a grandmother’s property, a tiny plot of land, and that’s great. But in the Age of Movement, there’s no question that the number of people who don’t—or can’t—is growing exponentially.

And on Leonard Cohen:

Q: How did Cohen embody Canada’s best qualities, the homely qualities that make it one of your favourite countries?

A: Somehow Leonard could only have come from Canada, I feel, and it’s no surprise that he held it so firmly in his heart till his dying day.

One of his sovereign graces was always to mix a sense of irony with a sense of passionate quest, to sound as if he never took himself too seriously, yet took many other things (and other people) very seriously indeed. That mix of an Old World sense of drollness and respect for tradition with a New World hunger for something better and fascination with the horizon is, to me, the illuminating beauty of Canada: it never pursues the future as if it can deny every kind of past.

Leonard was really Montreal incarnate, in so many ways, as one who mixed the worldliness and elegance of France with the hopefulness and sincerity of North America.

Source: Pico Iyer on the meaning of home, in a post-Trump world – Macleans.ca

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Leonard Cohen RIP

2016/11/12 1 Comment

Expected but still sad. During my cancer treatments and recovery, his words and music provided one of the anchors that keep me going, particularly these words from Anthem:

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

Later, as I adapted to my “new normal,” Come Healing became another anchor:

O let the heavens hear it
The penitential hymn
Come healing of the spirit
Come healing of the limb

 

Source: Leonard Cohen’s death strikes chord around the world – Montreal – CBC News

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Leonard Cohen and the Art of Stillness: Pico Iyer on How to Fall in Love with the World | Brain Pickings

2014/11/20 Leave a comment

For a change.

Some good observations about stepping back from the world in order to understand it:

Not many years ago, it was access to information and movement that seemed our greatest luxury; nowadays it’s often freedom from information, the chance to sit still, that feels like the ultimate prize. Stillness is not just an indulgence for those with enough resources — it’s a necessity for anyone who wishes to gather less visible resources. Going nowhere, as Cohen had shown me, is not about austerity so much as about coming closer to one’s senses.

…Going nowhere … isn’t about turning your back on the world; it’s about stepping away now and then so that you can see the world more clearly and love it more deeply.

Leonard Cohen and the Art of Stillness: Pico Iyer on How to Fall in Love with the World | Brain Pickings.

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Liam Lacey’s TIFF diary: Jon Stewart rises above Gaza tensions in directorial debut

2014/09/10 Leave a comment

Nice discussion between Jon Stewart and Maziar Bahari at TIFF on their upcoming film, Rosewater, on Bahari’s imprisonment in Iran following his coverage of the Green Revolution and on the importance of storytelling:

Stewart is Jewish, and his occasionally critical views on Israel have earned him admiration among youth in the Arab world. Bahari was born in Tehran and educated in Montreal. His first documentary, The Voyage of St. Louis, is considered the first film by a Muslim about the Holocaust. On Sunday morning, as church bells were ringing outside, I asked them to talk about cultural bridge-building. They laughed.

“That’s where we met – right in the middle!” said Bahari with a laugh.

“In the middle of the Venn diagram where no one likes you,” Stewart added.

“It was never like: ‘Oh, I want to build cultural bridges. I want to change the world,’” Bahari reflected. “That was the beauty of working with Jon. He wasn’t some activist filmmaker. He has a sense of humour [and] saw it as a good story about family and family love. And then you had this important, political, historical, journalistic background.”

“I think that a good story, well-told, accomplishes those things without that being the goal of it,” Stewart said. “One of the biggest problems with activist work is that it values the activism above the art, and it can get in the way … You can’t create work with a goal in mind in regard to peoples’ reaction. The goal is to tell this really compelling story as best we can.”

Liam Lacey’s TIFF diary: Jon Stewart rises above Gaza tensions in directorial debut – The Globe and Mail.

From my no longer active lymphoma blog, my mini-review of Bahari’s book:

I read And Then They Came for Me, Maziar Bahari’s recounting, as a Newsweek journalist, of Iran’s Green Revolution and his subsequent imprisonment.  Not as sophisticated as Haleh Esfandiari’s My Prison My Home, but lots of common insights into Iran, the interrogation process, courage and ways to keep one’s sanity, and the importance to international pressure to get them released. And with some wonderful asides on Leonard Cohen (his strongest Canadian connection), both his cynical side (Everybody Knows as Bahari realizes the election results will be fixed) and on the romantic or hopeful side (Sisters of Mercy which comes to him while in prison). Another strong, powerful and depressing account of today’s Iran.

 

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Leonard Cohen on Creativity, Hard Work, and Why You Should Never Quit Before You Know What It Is You’re Quitting

2014/07/16 Leave a comment

For something lighter and yet deeper today, and for the Leonard Cohen fans among us, a nice selection of Cohen quotes on the creative process:

I’m writing all the time. And as the songs begin to coalesce, I’m not doing anything else but writing. I wish I were one of those people who wrote songs quickly. But I’m not. So it takes me a great deal of time to find out what the song is. So I’m working most of the time.[…]

To find a song that I can sing, to engage my interest, to penetrate my boredom with myself and my disinterest in my own opinions, to penetrate those barriers, the song has to speak to me with a certain urgency.

To be able to find that song that I can be interested in takes many versions and it takes a lot of uncovering.

Leonard Cohen on Creativity, Hard Work, and Why You Should Never Quit Before You Know What It Is You’re Quitting | Brain Pickings.

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