“Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin”.

Photograph: Stuart Franklin/Magnum Photos

 

Suzanne

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Suzanne

Todd Alcott

 

Leonard Cohen: A Crack in Everything

Photograph: Michael Putland

Leonard Cohen will have a homecoming – of sorts – in Montreal. On 9 November, the Musée d’art Contemporain de Montréal (AKA the Mac) will open the doors to Leonard Cohen : une brèche en toute chose/A Crack in Everything, a tribute to the artist, poet, and musician, filled with multi-disciplinary works inspired by Cohen’s songs of life.
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So Long, Leonard

Cohen never talked up his own importance. He often said he was just making the most of the limited talents he had been given and hoping that whatever insights he had gleaned could be useful to the listener. Songwriting was his way of making sense of a bewildering world and dissolving the loneliness.
 In 1987, the writer Jon Wilde asked Cohen what he had set out to achieve. “How did I ever get into this racket?” Cohen laughed. “I don’t know! What am I exactly doing in it? I don’t know. I haven’t got a clue. I think it just comes down to nudging the guy next to you and saying, ‘That’s the way, isn’t it?’ They can either agree or not agree. One is continually trying to affirm something with the man in the next seat.”

Songwriter whose work inspired generations dies at 82.

 

So long, Marianne

Leonard Cohen penned a poignant final letter to his dying muse Marianne Ihlen, a longtime friend of hers revealed on Canadian radio. Ihlen, whom Cohen wrote about in So Long, Marianne and Bird on a Wire, died in Norway on 29 July, aged 81. Cohen met her on the Greek island Hydra in the 1960s and they became lovers. So Long, Marianne appeared on his 1967 album Songs of Leonard Cohen.
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