(Credits: Far Out / Beck)
Behind every great artist is a great teacher, is a phrase that tends to be trotted out come the end of term time, but there is an element of truth in it.
Everybody needs that first spark of inspiration, and sometimes that comes from a teacher, and in other cases it comes from the life-affirming songwriting of a Canadian songwriter who speaks directly to your soul, Leonard Cohen.
Alt-rock titan Beck is among those countless musicians who owe their songwriting inspiration to Cohen, and, in a similar vein to Cohen, it was Beck’s relocation to New York City during the late 1980s that carved out the foundations of his subsequent music career.
Immersed in the grassroots freedom of the city’s anti-folk scene, the songwriter expanded upon his adoration of folk greatness, incorporating a vast wealth of influences which together culminated in the mainstream breakthrough of his 1993 single ‘Loser’.
That fateful release ended up launching Beck into the epicentre of American alternative music, with every subsequent album release building upon the success and songwriting mastery of the last. To say that the California-born songwriter has embraced a plethora of projects over the course of his multiple decades in music would be a gross understatement – in fact, it’s a wonder that he ever has time to sleep – but, throughout it all, he has always come back to his unshakable roots as a devotee of folk music, and particularly the work of Leonard Cohen.
To refer to Cohen solely as a folk artist seems needlessly reductive, in fact, given the breadth of sounds, emotions, and mediums with which he worked over the years. Like Beck, though, his roots were always in the honesty and emotional drive of folk music, and it was during his time in New York which inspired the Canadian songwriter to follow that path. Thank god he did, too, given just how many subsequent songwriters cite Cohen and his extensive discography as being a major influence upon them.
“His presence, his work, is meaningful to a lot of people,” Beck said of the songwriter during a 2019 chat with Hot Press. More than that, though, Cohen laid out a kind of blueprint for other artists to follow, making him a teacher for thousands, including Beck.
“He’s always been one of my favourite songwriters. And he taught me a lot about not just songwriting but ways to embody being an artist in a business that sells music,” he explained.
Despite Beck’s penchant for collaboration and the fact that he reportedly reached out to Cohen prior to the songwriter’s tragic passing in 2016, the pair never got the chance to work together. Nevertheless, their work did share some overlap in the form of the posthumous Cohen record, Thanks for the Dance.
Rather than being one of those ghastly tribute albums or a selection of off-cuts from failed side projects, as is so often the case with posthumous releases, Thanks for the Dance used collaborators like Beck to complete various unfinished tracks from Cohen’s final album, You Want It Darker – as Beck put it, “Who wouldn’t want one more Leonard Cohen album?”.
The anti-folk hero’s contributions can be heard on the track ‘The Night of Santiago’ from that album, acting as a fitting epitaph to Beck’s lifelong adoration of Leonard Cohen, without whom he might never have pursued the musical dream.
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