The Anti-Rock Star

Leonard Cohen's battle against shameless male egoism

- Stephen Metcalf

Leonard Cohen never liked touring. "It's like being dropped off in a desert," he once said. "You don't know where you live anymore." By the time he hit his late 50s, he hated it so much that, after supporting his 1992 record, The Future, he moved into a Zen monastery and all but retired from the music business. Even after he returned with More Best of Leonard Cohen (1997), a wonderful celebration of his mid-career prime, he refused to cash in with a fresh calendar of live shows. Then, in 2005, he discovered that his bank account had been nearly emptied by his business manager.

Cohen spent months in rehearsal with a band, fine-tuning his songs as he now wanted to play them more quietly, more elegantly than ever. In 2008, at 73, he went back out on the road. Other than at a book signing, he hadn't performed live in more than a decade. But something had happened in the interim.

His audience was larger-lines curving around blocks, scalpers demanding hundreds above face value.

More striking, though, was the depth of feeling. Leonard Cohen, master of a cool, ironic, deadpan remove, had come to signify something new that mystified the performers themselves. "I saw people in front of the stage shaking and crying," a backup singer noted after opening night. "You don't often see adults cry, and with such violence." The highlight of the tour came at the Glastonbury Festival, where Cohen played the main stage in front of listeners young and old. As the sun set and Cohen sang "Hallelujah," concertgoers "sang along, clutching each other's arms," an Australian journalist reported, "and many were openly weeping." Cohen hadn't been dropped off in a desert.

How to account for such emotion, felt across generational divides? Where does the widely perceived authenticity-hardly an untroubled term-of this music come from? And why has its power to move listeners sustained itself so forcefully, turning Cohen's afterlife into one long canonization?