"When Leonard Cohen speaks, the elevated cadences of language are strewn with poetic images so precisely articulated in a rumbling bass-baritone voice that they all but erase the distinction between his song lyrics and personal conversation.
Each word is carefully chosen and pronounced with oratorical flourish. Even when his sepulchral drone isn't bending itself around a melody, its sound is musical. Here is one sample of his conversational style, from Lian Lunson's wonderful documentary portrait, "Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man." Reflecting on the inspiration for his song "The Traitor," he muses that it is about "failing or betraying some mission you were mandated to fulfill and being unable to fulfill it and then coming to understand that the real mandate was not to fulfill it but to stand guiltless in the predicament in which you found yourself."
If a strain of gallows humor didn't underlie many of Mr. Cohen's pronouncements, such observations might sound insufferably pretentious. But he continually undercuts his own solemnity. Here he is on his own mystique as a silver-tongued Casanova: "My reputation as a ladies' man was a joke. It caused me to laugh bitterly the 10,000 nights I spent alone."
I know the feeling...
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