Leonard Cohen’s ‘New Skin for the Old Ceremony’ Remains Its Divided Self at 50

A 39-year-old Leonard Cohen, wearing a cargo shirt and smart trousers, fixes the viewer with a gimlet eye from across a kitchen table. Clean-shaven, chiseled, dark, and broodingly handsome, Cohen is everything that you would expect from an elegant and dark night-of-the-soul poet: arresting and intense, cool and afflicted. The photo, taken by the Canadian photographer John Rowlands at Cohen’s home in Montreal, was part of the promotional shoot that day for Cohen’s upcoming European tour in September 1974, the month in which he turned 40. It marked the birth of his daughter Lorca, named after the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, and his firstborn, Adam, turned two. Lastly, his fourth studio album, New Skin for the Old Ceremony, was a month old.

Despite Cohen having four wisdom teeth extracted that morning, he and Rowlands had homegrown corn on the cob for lunch, an amiableness you would never have discerned from having solely espied the black-and-white photo. That’s the point: Cohen wore the mask of a serious poet, used smoke and mirrors, and played a role—even if it wasn’t as conspicuous as, say, Bob Dylan, who changed his name and accent and spun double over with laughter yarns that made you not care if he was or wasn’t raised in Gallup, New Mexico, as if the Duluth, Minnesota-born Robert Zimmerman is your friend and you are both in on the joke.

Like Dylan, Leonard Cohen was every bit contradictory and ceaselessly reinvented himself: a tortured poet, a postmodernist novelist, a folk singer-songwriter, a wide-eyed ladies’ man, a synth-laden balladeer, a Buddhist, a fedora-garbed elder statesman. While these were archetypes that either Cohen inhabited or inhabited him, his disposition was equally malleable. He had the ability to oscillate between frivolity and solemnity, between the ridiculous and the sublime, between the small and the large. Put differently, Cohen courted the light as much as the dark—a duality at the heart of his existence and New Skin for the Old Ceremony.

On “Please Don’t Pass Me By (A Disgrace)”—from Live Songs (1973), Cohen’s first live album with recordings from the European tours of 1970 and 1972, except for the Tennessee-cabin recording of “Queen Victoria”—there is a harrowing moment. Cohen fiendishly howls, “I can’t stand who I am.” It is striking because Cohen exposes the intensity of his self-loathing—so much so you think he is exorcising a demon from his soul—not least because he does not attempt to obscure the fact. Yet at the core of this lamentation is a desire for change—now. Unsurprisingly, then, on the header on the sleeve notes of Live Songs is the word: transfiguration. Interestingly, the self-chastising words—“I can’t stand who I am”—foreshadow New Skin for the Old Ceremony, as its central focus is transformation or shedding skin, hence the title.

The state of anguish came to a head when, in 1973, Cohen went through an intense period of depression upon his return to Hydra, a Greek island in the Aegean Sea, where he had lived with Marianne Ihlen—his Norwegian girlfriend and the subject of the 1967 track, “So Long, Marianne”—in the 1960s. Living with his partner Suzanne Elrod (whom he met in 1969 at a Scientology Center where both took lessons) and their son Adam, Cohen felt hemmed in by domesticity. He sublimated his suffering into a book of prose he had started in Montreal. But the pain remained. Like dead weight. Beset by a spiritual malaise, Cohen, wherever he turned, saw the whitewashed houses and the cypress trees, the crooked stone paths and the mules, the harbor and the clear blue skies, the sun and the emptiness. Life.

The lack of communication between Leonard Cohen and Elrod aggravated his feelings, and shortly thereafter, the poet scribbled down: “I live here with a woman and a child / The situation makes me kind of nervous.” Of course, those words ended up on “There Is a War”. But this wasn’t the turning point or the road to recovery for Cohen—the Yom Kippur War was. On 6 October 1973, Egypt and Syria launched an attack on Israel, which began the war. Paradoxically, it saved Cohen.

Leaving Elrod and Adam in Hydra the following day, Cohen flew from Athens to Tel Aviv to enlist in the Israeli army. Of course, Cohen had a profound personal attachment to his Jewish roots and Israel, not to mention his general interest in war. However, as Sylvie Simmons posits in her excellent book I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen (2012), it was partly to escape a stifling house. Examples of this can be found in the poem “This Marriage”, later published in the collection of prose poems Death of a Lady’s Man (1978), in which Cohen writes, ”I said, Because it is so horrible between us I will go and stop Egypt’s bullet.”

For Cohen, dying for a noble cause had an appeal of heroism. Perhaps not unlike the other Jewish singer-songwriter Dylan, who said: “I thought about going to military school… I could always envision myself dying in some heroic battle,” as Clinton Heylin writes in his 2021 book The Double Life of Bob Dylan Vol. 1: A Restless Hungry Feeling: 1941-1966. It must be noted that Cohen’s 1970s band was called the Army.

At a café in Tel Aviv, Leonard Cohen was approached by Oshik Levi, who, having put together a military musical group to perform before the Israeli army, offered the singer-songwriter to join. Although at first hesitant, Cohen ended up traveling around Israel for the next few weeks singing and playing up to eight times a day for soldiers everywhere: from field hospitals to encampments, from barracks to aircraft hangers. Matti Caspi, one of the musicians, remembers Cohen writing “Lover Lover Lover“ on stage during their second performance together and extemporizing lyrics with each new performance.

As if inspired by the French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud, Cohen flew to Ethiopia. Staying at the Imperial Hotel in Asmara, Cohen continued working on “Lover Lover Lover“ and amended “I saw my brothers fighting in the desert” to “I asked my father… change my name.” There, he also finished “Take This Longing”, a track he had written years before for the German chanteuse Nico and which Buffy Sainte-Marie had recorded as “The Bells”, as well as making final edits to “Chelsea Hotel #2″. Also there, he penned “Field Commander Cohen”, a self-mythopoetic track about his time in Cuba in 1961. In an interview a year later, Cohen commented, “The real truth is I wanted to kill or be killed.” Like the self-reflexive poems of Hafez, the Persian poet of the 14th century, Cohen places himself in “Field Commander Cohen”, as he had on 1971’s “Famous Blue Raincoat” and would on 2012’s “Going Home”.

On a biographical level, New Skin for the Old Ceremony depicts Leonard Cohen’s struggle with domesticity, coupled with war-like themes. Unlike other songwriters such as Dylan, Paul McCartney, and Bruce Springsteen, who, in their early stages of raising—or about to—a family, produced somewhat domestic-bliss records: New Morning, Ram, Human Touch, respectively, Cohen never did—if anything, he was more anxious, more perturbed than ever.

Yet, New Skin for the Old Ceremony should not be taken directly. It is like saying Paul Cézanne’s still-life The Basket of Apples is purely a depiction of apples when, as everybody knows, the objects are subordinate to the plurality of perspectives, effectively giving birth to modernism in art. Put simply, it is not what you see but how you see. Thus, the crisis in a relationship on New Skin For the Old Ceremony becomes the metaphor for the division between men and women—or, deeper still, the Self and the Other.

Cohen’s pressing need for change in New Skin for the Old Ceremony is not the dialectic between past and present; rather, it’s a dialogue between the spirit and the corporeal. Ironically, the same old Cohen. As with other album titles, such as Old Ideas (2012) and Popular Problems (2014), Cohen astutely realizes that there isn’t anything new or different in what he is saying personally or culturally. In a 1967 interview for his second published novel, Beautiful Losers, Leonard Cohen said, “In that book, I tried to wrestle with all the deities that are extant now—the idea of saintliness, purity, pop, McLuhanism (a Canadian academic who enjoyed international cult status as a media guru in the 1960s), evil, the irrational—all the gods we set up for ourselves.”

Despite the seven years separating the publication of Beautiful Losers from the release of New Skin For the Old Ceremony, Cohen could have been describing the latter: a record comprised of the same motifs. Or, as Simmons writes, “Beautiful Losers is a prayer—at times a hysterically funny, filthy prayer—for the unity of the self and a hymn to the loss of self through sainthood and transfiguration.”

Cohen seemingly belonged to an ancient world where he contemplated spiritual matters; on the other, he was like an erotic-crazed Philip Roth without the incessant references to onanism, except Beautiful Losers. If sex was not alluded to, something appeared amiss, even worryingly wrong. But, of course, you cannot have one without the other. Perhaps there would be no challenge to leading a religious life without the existence of temptation. As Cohen sings in 2016’s “On the Level”, “A man like me don’t like to see / Temptation caving in.”

Conversely, in Cohen’s work, sex, an act that can be viewed as reconnecting to our atavistic selves and transcending the mundane, appears as a kind of substitute for religion. The two major themes in Cohen’s oeuvre—religion and sex—are equally potent and inform the other: sensual scenes take place within biblical narratives, and erotic love acts as a metaphor for a relationship with faith—not unlike the bawdy English, metaphysical poet John Donne. Therefore, with the two coalescing, Cohen renders the contradiction obsolete.

Leonard Cohen’s first three studio albums—Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967), Songs From a Room (1968), and Songs of Love and Hate (1971)—can be considered, to a certain extent, austere. Thus, New Skin for the Old Ceremony, when released, came as a bit of a shock with its ornate arrangements and multifarious instrumentation—banjo, mandolin, banjo, bass, guitar, and a Jew’s harp played by Cohen—even drums, a rarity on a Cohen LP at this point. Therefore, New Skin for the Old Ceremony is seemingly a quasi-singer-songwriter expanding his palette. Yet it is far from clear cut: Cohen had planned his debut record to be minimal. But when the original producer, John Hammond, legendary Columbia A&R Man and Vanderbilt, fell ill, he was replaced by John Simon, who endowed Songs of Leonard Cohen with florid orchestration. Thus, perhaps Cohen, unconsciously or consciously, attempted to rectify the past.

As established, New Skin for the Old Ceremony is outwardly different: Eastern-flavoured production with a sophistication, even a finesse, not heard or scarcely hinted at in a previous Leonard Cohen record. But this is neither the prettified and lush strings of Jimmy Webb, the dust-laden strings of Aaron Copland, nor the chamber pop of Scott Walker. Instead, it is klezmer-ish, chamber music, and, unsurprisingly (given where Cohen re-wrote some of the lyrics in that country), Ethiopian. If you think that the embellished production renders the lyrics ebullient and lithe—even perhaps signaling a sanguine change on Cohen’s part—think again: Cohen is not pretending it’s daytime when, in fact, it’s nighttime.

New Skin for the Old Ceremony is as pessimistic as his others—perhaps more so. The expansive sound cannot conceal the emptiness, just as how the pealing of church bells cannot conceal the silence of the world. Therefore, the doomed and mordant poet whom you have come to know and love from the previous three albums is what you get: bedroom kaddishes, boudoir sonnets, suicidal dirges, and koans.

The larger production is partly due to a new producer: the 25-year-old and Yale-educated John Lissauer, whom Cohen handpicked. The pair met at a concert of Lewis Furey’s (Lissauer was playing in his band), the Montreal-born composer, whom Cohen had known since 16; they spoke about recording, and Cohen promised to keep in contact. A few months later, Cohen, in New York, rang Lissauer unannounced and, a few hours later, turned up at his Manhattan loft, where they went through songs on a piano.

The perspicacious Hammond and Cohen’s manager, Marty Machat, were unsure about his choice of producer. For 14 June 1974, Hammond booked a “trial” session at Columbia Studio E, the sixth floor of the former CBS radio building on East 52nd Street, where he had partly recorded Songs of Leonard Cohen seven years previously. Cohen entered the studio with Lissauer, along with four musicians. After they recorded demos of “Lover Lover Lover”, “There Is a War”, and “Why Don’t You Try”, Hammond gave his approval. The first thing Lissauer did was to move to an intimate studio called Studio Ideas. With a background in jazz and classical music, Lissauer was perhaps the right person to push Cohen musically in a new direction: he added strings and brass from the New York Philharmonic while he played woodwinds and piano; he even called upon Furey, who ended up playing viola.

Likely influenced by Carl Jung, Leonard Cohen deals with the concept of the union of opposites on New Skin for the Old Ceremony, revealing that the contradictory poles of existence—good vs evil, pleasure and pain, masculine and feminine, beauty and terror, sacred and profane—are dependent on one another and, ultimately, form a unified whole. This is best exemplified in “There Is a War”, with its opening verse: “There is a war between the rich and poor / A war between the man and the woman / There is a war between the ones who say there is a war / And the ones who say that there isn’t.”

Jung’s influence can also be seen on the cover of New Skin for the Old Ceremony: winged and crowned beings coupling above the clouds—a woodcut depicting the coniunctio spirituum, or the holy union of the male-female principle, from Rosarium philosophorum, the 16th-century alchemical treatise that engrossed Jung who brought it to wider attention through his 1946 book, The Psychology of the Transference. The same image would also be used on the original cover of Cohen’s book Death of a Lady’s Man (1978). “I don’t know Jung’s work that well, but I’ve kept his books as references throughout the years. I know the general Jungian principles,” Cohen said in an interview in the 1980s. “I more or less came to Jung through oriental studies. He’d written some prefaces to the I Ching and also The Secret of the Golden Flower. As a Western scientist, his appreciation of the Oriental psychology and Oriental psychical anatomy—mysticism, whatever that means—dissolved the Western view that their psychology was mystical.”

In the opening track, “Is This What You Wanted”, Leonard Cohen deals with opposites: a dirty-minded narrator and a pure lover, sully and innocent; licentiousness and chastity—a ying and yang. Even Jung’s erstwhile teacher, Sigmund Freud, gets namechecked. Yet it is the vocal that grabs your attention: fraught with tension, Cohen’s nasally voice is cruelly bleak and brittle, haunting and haunted; by the end, the guttural and existential moans seem to possess the narrator, along with the ghosts of his and his lover’s past.

Beauty plagues Cohen’s characters, who see it as a form of oppression, as found in “Chelsea Hotel #2” in which he sings, “Who are oppressed by the figures of beauty.” Cohen was equally engrossed with its opposite: ugliness or, accurately, degradation. Many of his male personages are subservient to the beauty of the female form. Thus, they feel humiliated and excited, disgusted and aroused, belittled and pleased in the presence of beauty. It’s a kind of masochism that, despite or because of exalting the female body, can be viewed—for some—as the prurient curiosity of a male poet promulgating titillated versification. This seems to miss the mark, as the aforementioned “Who are oppressed by the figures of beauty” is applied to both the male and female characters in “Chelsea Hotel #2″. Therefore, Cohen does not restrict beauty to women or beauty to being.

For several years, Leonard Cohen performed “Chelsea Hotel #2″, which famously opens with the narrator receiving fellatio at the Hotel Chelsea. In concert, Cohen explicitly expressed that the subject was Janis Joplin. Later, he regretted it and apologized. Musically, Cohen had written “Chelsea Hotel #2” with Ron Cornelius while on a flight from Nashville to Ireland.

In “A Singer Must Die”, Cohen evinces, “A singer must die for the lie in his voice”—ironic as, metatextually, the song would cease to exist without a singer. More interestingly, perfidy is at the heart of any performance: literally, the word hypocrite is rooted in the Greek word hypokrites—meaning an actor or a stage player; and, in Greek drama, the performer wore masks and played multiple roles. What Cohen suggests is that performance is a pretense, a lie, an act, doubles, shadows—a mask. Despite disguises, art is filled with eternal truths, and thus, through performance, sincerity can be attained. Or, as Dylan says in Martin Scorsese’s 2019 Pseudo-documentary Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story, “When somebody’s wearing a mask, he’s gonna tell you the truth. When he’s not wearing a mask, it’s highly unlikely.”

Moreover, the singer entreats for mercy from a judge in a courtroom. Perhaps it returns to the Old Testament inhabited by courts and kings, but there is a Kafkaesque and biblical paradox, not unlike Dylan’s “Drifter’s Escape.” While “I Tried to Leave You” is an ambivalent valedictory, complete with a barroom piano, “Who by Fire” is directly inspired by Unetanneh Tokef, a Hebrew prayer—neither to be found in the Bible nor the Talmud—that is chanted on High Holidays before the Kedushah prayer. According to Simmons, Cohen heard Unetanneh Tokef in a synagogue, aged five.

There is a single word that encapsulates Cohen’s corpus: longing (it seemed long overdue when Cohen named his 2006 poetry collection, Book of Longing). If there ever is a song as direct about the subject matter of longing, it would be “Take This Longing”. In short, a narrator tries to inveigle the subject into having sex with him after having watched her lover leave. Like Jacques Lacan, Cohen understands that desire can never be fulfilled and, importantly, it stems outside of ourselves, in the Other. Moreover, it is rooted in wanting to be recognized. The narrator of “Take This Longing” wants to be seen by her impassioned and distant gaze. Despite the forcefulness of the narrator, he is in service to this unattainable, beautiful woman.

Given that Leonard Cohen was effectively a liturgical writer, sexual masochism perhaps doubles as the self-abasement that can be found in religion. Moreover, perhaps it is similar to the mortification Nick Cave explored in the 1980s. Unlike other singer-songwriters, Cohen wasn’t circumspect about probing into the innermost regions of the unconscious to reveal the darkness and shadows encroaching within. In other words, Cohen went further than most and returned to tell us about what he had found through his self-examination without eschewing the cold, hard truth that, as humans, we are nuanced, complicated, and damn right messy.

“Take This Longing” aptly flows into the renaissance-inflected “Leaving Green Sleeves”, a 16th-century English folk ballad Cohen recorded with the band live in the studio. Singing like a bard or a trouvère, Cohen, by the end, starts growling with ugly intensity, existential despair, and self-loathing, as he did in 1967’s “One of Us Cannot Be Wrong”.

After New Skin for the Old Ceremony, Leonard Cohen and Lissauer’s relationship continued to the abandoned 1975 album Songs for Rebecca, with the latter at the recording helm. Speaking to Morgan Enos of Tidal, Lissauer said, “So, he gave me seven or eight, we went to California and wrote together. We got them pretty polished, and then he disappeared.” But that is not where their story ends: they worked together one last time in Various Positions (1984). Overall, Cohen, who would have turned 90 this September, prudently limns life as an everlasting ceremony that we, the actors, attend briefly.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cohen, Leonard. Death of a Lady’s Man. McClelland & Stewart. 1978.

Enos, Morgan. “Leonard Cohen’s ‘New Skin for the Old Ceremony’ at 45”. Tidal. 11 August 2019.

Heylin, Clinton. The Double Life of Bob Dylan Vol. 1: A Restless Hungry Feeling: 1941-1966. Vintage. 2021.

Simmons, Sylvie. I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen. Ecco. 2012.