“One of the things that my father cared about most deeply, as the decades passed, was what he referred to as his songs being kept alive by the audience,” singer-songwriter Adam Cohen tells Kathimerini from his family home on Hydra. His father, Leonard Cohen, had fallen in love with the Greek island in the 1960s, when he first visited as a young writer trying his hand at poetry and literature. This was before he turned to music and songwriting, going on to create an unparalleled body of work. His wise, penetrating glance, his sensuality and spirituality found expression with lyrical mastery through such iconic songs as “Hallelujah,” “Dance Me to the End of Love,” “Bird on the Wire” and “So Long, Marianne,” among so many others cherished by generations of listeners.
‘I had people reaching out from all four corners of the world with their sympathies, and sometimes I wasn’t ready to receive it because it just was too painful, but it was also beautiful to see the way a man’s mind and heart left an imprint on the world’
This is why his death on November 7, 2016 – which he seems to have foretold just days earlier with the release of his last album, “You Want it Darker,” produced with his son, Adam, in their first collaboration together – was met with an outpouring of emotion.
“I had people reaching out from all four corners of the world with their sympathies, and sometimes I wasn’t ready to receive it because it just was too painful, but it was also beautiful to see the way a man’s mind and heart left an imprint on the world,” says Adam Cohen, looking back on those days.
“There’s very little that needs to happen from other people when that level of buoyancy, that level of resonance happens in someone’s work,” he says, commenting on how his father’s work will carry on through the generations to come.
“Μy job is to get out of the way and augment when I can, a pinch of salt here, watching the temperature a little bit. Οf course, anything I can do to celebrate him, especially at these time markings, like a 10th anniversary since his passing, is an honor for me,” adds Cohen, who is getting ready to embark on a tribute tour stretching from Canada to Europe in November.
Ahead of that, however, he will be in Athens on September 12 for a concert dedicated to Leonard Cohen as part of this year’s Park Life program at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center in Faliro. The free admission event will also feature a strong roster of Greek musicians, including Elli Paspala, Dimitra Galani, Konstantinos Vita and Nalyssa Green.
Three generations
“My 19-year-old son, Cassius Cohen, will be joining me on stage in Athens for the first time ever. Then in November we’ll embark on the Leonard Cohen Tribute Tour together, so sharing the stage with him, we will basically be having three generations of Cohen on stage every night,” says Cohen.
Like his own father before him, Adam Cohen would prefer his son to pursue a less precarious career. “I remember my father being extremely encouraging, extremely generous with his time and his advice. But also, I remember him begging me to become prime minister of Canada and abandon music,” he says.
Listening to Adam Cohen, it is impossible not to be struck by how much his voice resembles his father’s, and by the same introspective, measured manner and captivating grace that were so characteristic of Leonard Cohen. These are similarities of which he is well aware.
“Sometimes, especially in Greece, I wake up in the home where I was a baby, a house that is haunted by a whole life lived with my father who discovered this place for my family and for himself, to catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror and see that some characteristics are looking more and more like him,” he says. “Sometimes, as I wake up in the morning, I have my arm in front of me and I look at my hairy, very tanned arm and think of him. Sometimes when people are speaking to me, they feel like they might be having a channel to speak to someone they’ve always wanted to speak to. Even if they know my name is Adam, they will call me Leonard. And then, I went into the same line of work as my father. In fact, maybe it’s embarrassing to tell you, that there’s almost nothing that doesn’t remind me of my father.”
Adam Cohen was born in Montreal in 1973 and grew up living between Hydra, France, New York and Los Angeles. As a songwriter himself, he is certainly well equipped, but he also carries the burden of his legacy.
“With great artists, it comes down to two huge things. One is, what were they born with as idiosyncrasies, special talents and what did the gods have for them in terms of destiny? I think there’s an arrogance in comparing yourself to a historical figure. We are not all elected by fate and by our genetics to be great. But that doesn’t stop me from trying, and sometimes I have little victories, but like everybody else, I have many, many failures,” says Cohen.
Among Cohen’s notable solo projects is his 2014 album “We Go Home,” whose title track received frequent airplay on Greek alternative radio stations. “I can’t tell you how happy it made my entire family to know that there were Adam Cohen songs being played on the radio in Greece,” he says when we remind him of this. “Even my father would receive messages from his friends and sometimes his fans saying, ‘we were in Athens in a taverna,’ at an appliance store, or a hotel lobby where they would play Leonard Cohen and then they would play Adam Cohen. This is a very flattering reception. Greece has always been a magical place for my family.”
His affection for Greece is evident throughout our conversation. Although he somewhat sheepishly admits that he does not speak the language well – nor did his father – he confides that whenever they were in company and wanted to say something privately to each other, they would resort to their own version of Greek. “Of course, we couldn’t do that in Melbourne or in parts of New York; there’s too many Greeks,” he says, going on to describe other cherished rituals that bound him and his father to the country and each other.
“Even though my father pretended to not be a smoker, he would ask me to bring back Karelia [cigarettes] for him. We would then secretly smoke on his balcony in the sun, trying to get a tan, and we would think of Hydra in Greece. Also, every Friday night we would get together as a family and we would go to a Greek restaurant in Los Angeles. We were much more as a family like the Greek diaspora than anything,” he says.
Nostalgia
Returning to the subject of Hydra and his favorite Greek words, Cohen tells us that he carries a sensory memory that, “like an addict, I try to recreate every year of my life because I have never missed a summer in Greece. It’s one of the most beautiful Greek words, it’s called nostalgia. My favorite part of Hydra is almost like nostalgia and ‘harmolipi.’ It’s just being haunted by a lifetime of love for a place and all the memories, the heat of the summer and the attempt like a drug addict to recreate something that I love, as well as a sense of privilege that I get to come back.”
At the same time, he conveys a different perspective of life on the island since his father’s passing. “The house in Hydra is often mistaken for a museum and people from every part of the world come and make the pilgrimage all the way up to sing his songs outside the house. They knock on the door and take photos, which, if I’m honest, is extremely annoying, because my family lives there and his grandchildren live there. But in the same way, that’s a microcosm of the fact that people are teaching his songs in universities from Australia to Poland, and are singing his songs in venues from the North to the East to the West. And to think that all this happened just by a man blackening pages with his pen, playing a little simple nylon string guitar and just wanting to make the world more beautiful. It’s so rare that artists achieve that.”
The Leonard Cohen Tribute starts on Saturday, September 12, at 9 pm, at the Great Lawn of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center. Admission is free. For more information, visit snf.org.
