Sat, Nov 12, 2016 page7

• Legendary singer Leonard Cohen dies at 82

  • AP, LOS ANGELES
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  Leonard Cohen, the baritone-voiced Canadian singer-songwriter who seamlessly blended spirituality and sexuality in songs like Hallelujah, Suzanne and Bird on the Wire, has died at age 82, his son said on Thursday.

  “My father passed away peacefully at his home in Los Angeles,” Adam Cohen said in a statement. “He was writing up until his last moments with his unique brand of humor.”

  Leonard Cohen, also renowned as a poet, novelist and aspiring Zen monk, blended folk music with a darker, sexual edge that won him fans around the world and among fellow musicians like Bob Dylan and REM.

  

  A woman places a candle in front of the home of legendary singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen in Montreal on Thursday.

  Photo: The Canadian Press via AP

  He remained wildly popular into his 80s, when his deep voice plunged to seriously gravelly depths. He toured as recently as earlier this year and released a new album, You Want it Darker, just last month.

  Adam Cohen said his father died with the knowledge that he had made one of his greatest records.

  Hallelujah went from cult hit to modern standard, now an unending staple on movies, TV shows, YouTube videos, reality shows and high-school choir concerts.

  Leonard Cohen, who once said he got into music because he could not make a living as a poet, rose to prominence during the folk music revival of the 1960s. During those years, he traveled the folk circuit with younger artists like Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez and others.

  Contemporary Kris Kristofferson once said that he wanted the opening lines to Cohen’s Bird on the Wire, on his tombstone.

  They would be a perfect epitaph for Leonard Cohen himself: “Like a bird on a wire, like a drunk in a midnight choir, I have tried in my way to be free.”

  Hamilton star and creator Lin-Manuel Miranda quoted those lines on Twitter on Thursday night as one of many paying tribute to Cohen.

  However, Montreal-born Leonard Cohen never seemed quite as comfortable on stage and he chalked it up in part to being the old man among the group.

  “I was at least 10 years older than the rest of them,” he told Magazine, a supplement to Spanish newspaper El Mundo, in 2001.

  Judy Collins, who had a hit with Leonard Cohen’s song Suzanne, once recalled he was so shy that he quit halfway through his first public performance of it and she had to coax him back onstage.

  Like Dylan, his voice lacked polish, but rang with emotion.

  This year, Dylan told the New Yorker that Cohen’s best work was “deep and truthful, “multidimensional” and “surprisingly melodic.”

  “When people talk about Leonard, they fail to mention his melodies, which to me, along with his lyrics, are his greatest genius,” Dylan said.

  “Even the counterpoint lines — they give a celestial character and melodic lift to every one of his songs. As far as I know, no one else comes close to this in modern music,” Dylan added.

  It was Dylan who first recognized the potential of 1984’s Hallelujah, performing it twice in concert during the mid-1980s, once in Leonard Cohen’s native Canada.

  It had gone unnoticed when it came out on an independent label album that had been rejected by Leonard Cohen’s label.

  He had filled a notebook with about 80 verses before recording the song, which he said, despite its religious references to David and Samson, was an attempt to give a nonreligious context to hallelujah, an expression of praise.

  Leonard Cohen recorded four verses, but he sent several more to John Cale, a founding Velvet Underground member who recorded Hallelujah for a 1991 tribute album.

  It is the Cale version that has become the standard and was used by its most celebrated singer, the late Jeff Buckley, whose 1994 recording really began the launch of the song as cultural phenomenon.

  Cohen was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008, telling the audience: “This is a very unlikely occasion for me. It is not a distinction that I coveted or even dared dream about.”
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