By Jakob Lusensky

To Redeem the Day

Leonard Cohen on songwriting, self-respect and standing up at 4:30.

Back in 1992 poet, songwriter and prophet, Leonard Cohen sat down with journalist Paul Zollo to talk about his creative writing process in his house in LA. Surrounded by poetry volumes, novels, and hundreds of notebooks filled with decades of song revisions, Cohen reveals intimate details about his painstaking writing process. How some songs need more than sixty different versions or a decade to finish.

At the time of this interview, Cohen had recently released his masterpiece album The Future. An album dealing with the state of the turbulent present, the fall of the Berlin wall, and the future of democracy.

The album has a pulsating ominous groove driven onward by a steady electronic rhythm of the keyboard, backed by gospel choir and at times a violin against Cohen’s deep dark voice steering the ship. A soundtrack for the future that is our, where Cohen’s prophesize how things are gonna slide, slide in all directions and, the blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold and overturned the order of the soul.

There’s so many highlights in this unique interview with a brilliant, humble, humorous and truly hardworking soul. Here’s but one example as Cohen shares his morning routine.

Cohen: I get up at 4:30. My alarm is set for 4:30. Sometimes I sleep through it. But when I’m being good to myself, I get up at 4:30, get dressed, go down to a zendo not far from here. And while the others, I suppose, are moving towards enlightenment, I’m working on a song while I’m sitting there. At a certain moment I can bring what I’ve learned at the zendo, the capacity to concentrate, I can bring it to bear on the lines that are eluding me.

Then I come back to the house after two hours, it’s about 6:30 now, quarter to seven. I brew an enormous pot of coffee and sit down in a very deliberate way, at the kitchen table or at the computer, and begin, first of all, to put down the lines that have come to me so that I don’t forget them. And then play the song over and over again, try to find some form.

Those are wonderful hours. Before the phone starts ringing, before your civilian life returns to you with all its bewildering complexities. It’s a simple time in the morning. A wonderful, invigorating time.

The interviewer then asks Cohen about his writing process and this is best listened through audio to capture fully, how he is redeeming his day.

Rollo: Do you generally start with the lyrical idea ... to begin a song?

Cohen: Sometimes it’ll just be a chord change- Hmm that will occasion it. It starts with an appetite to discover my self-respect. You know, to redeem the day.. You know, so the day does not go down in debt. It begins with that kind of appetite.

At a time when the ground seems to slip and slide in so many directions, there is something comforting about Cohen’s deep, dark voice. A man singing about a world coming apart, while patiently trying to put a song together at his kitchen table. To redeem the day, so that it does not go down in debt.

Sources

Full interview in text to read.

First part of interview as audio.

Leonard Cohen - The future album from 1992.