Leonard Cohen has yet to conquer the struggle of songwriting, and he doesn't expect to anytime soon. "If I knew where the good songs came from, I'd go there more often," he said last night, receiving laughs at a private preview of his 13th studio album, Popular Problems, at the Canadian Consulate in Los Angeles. "Being a songwriter is like being a nun: You're married to a mystery. It's not a particularly generous mystery, but other people have that experience with matrimony anyway."
Elegantly dressed in a black suit, with a fedora resting on his knee, Cohen sat with Grammy Museum executive director Bob Santelli to discuss the new nine-song collection, out September 23rd, days after his 80th birthday. The song he struggled with the longest, he said, was "Born in Chains," an understated gospel meditation that he's worked on for decades.
"That's been kicking around for 40 years," he said with a smile. "I've rewritten the lyric many times to accommodate the changes in my theological position, which is very insecure."
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