Music Can Light The Way: Leonard Cohen’s Famous “Anthem”
Music resembles alchemy at times.
It can provide us with clarity, meaning, and hope when faced with situations that leave us desperate, speechless. However, it takes a true magician to create such a healing soulful piece.
One of those musical alchemists was certainly Leonard Cohen. His legacy is outspoken and the beauty he shared with the world will be forever remembered and cherished.
Leonard Cohen Biography
Cohen’s music is poetic. His smooth baritone was the one to remember and the melody he brought into the world was iconic.
He was a writer and guitarist from an early age.
By the mid-1960s, Cohen began to compose and release folk-rock and pop songs. “Hallelujah,” a song released on 1984’s Various Positions, was one of his most popular songs.
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was enriched in 2008, as this was the year Cohen was inducted.
Although, Cohen didn’t expect that to happen.This is what he said regarding this quite unexpected event:
“I’m reminded of the prophetic statement by Jon Landau in the early 1970s. He said, ‘I’ve seen the future of rock and roll and it is not Leonard Cohen.’”
Two years later, he received the crown for his magnificent work — a Grammy Award for lifetime achievement in 2010.
“The Future” — Transcending Through Pain
On this album, Cohen references Hiroshima and World War II. “The Future” represents an attempt to provide the transcendence we need to interpret traumatic historical events.
A song from this album that helped many to find the light in the darkest of times is the “Anthem”. However, it took 10 years for this song to see the light of the day.
It was completed on the day a Berlin wall fell, while that same year was also a horrific massacre of students in Tiananmen Square (1989).
The Story Behind The “Anthem”
Even though Cohen wasn’t into explaining his music, there is a certain piece of a transcript that goes a bit deeper into the meaning of the Anthem.
“The future is no excuse for an abdication of your own personal responsibilities towards yourself and your job and your love. “Ring the bells that still can ring”: they’re few and far between but you can find them.
This situation does not admit of solution of perfection. This is not the place where you make things perfect, neither in your marriage, nor in your work, nor anything, nor your love of God, nor your love of family or country. The thing is imperfect.
And worse, there is a crack in everything that you can put together: Physical objects, mental objects, constructions of any kind. But that’s where the light gets in, and that’s where the resurrection is and that’s where the return, that’s where the repentance is. It is with the confrontation, with the brokenness of things.”
How “Anthem” Brought Hope To People
Rolling Stone reader’s poll “The Best 10 Leonard Cohen Songs” contains a short yet wonderful personal story of a famous journalist Andrew Sullivan.
Andrew Sullivan highlighted the deep meaning Cohen’s “Anthem” had in his life.
“[That line] that has always stayed with me,” he wrote in 2005. “It kept me going in a bleak moment in my life, when I thought, as we all sometimes do, that I couldn’t see how good could come out of the dreck I had turned my life into.”
“Forget your perfect offering/There is a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in.”
Ring The Bells That Still Can Ring
Living in a quest for perfection can rob us from experiencing life in its real beauty and power. All the emotions we feel, and experiences we deal with throughout our lives are here to be faced head on.
Pain, anger, sadness, hate, devastation — they all hold immense importance when it comes to understanding ourselves and transforming our lives.
Music can help us to translate those emotions, to filter them out, and finally to find that ray of hope.
Or, as Cohen said, to find those “bells that still can ring”:
The birds they sing, at the break of day
Start again, I heard them say.
Don’t dwell on what has passed away
Or what is yet to be.
Yes, the wars, they will be fought again
The holy dove she will be caught again
Bought, and soul, and bought again
The dove is never free.
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.
We asked for signs. The signs were sent
The birth betrayed. The marriage spent
Yeah, the widowhood of every government
Signs for all to see.
I can’t run no more, with that lawless crowd
While the killers in high places say their prayers out loud
But they’ve summoned, they’ve summoned up a thundercloud
They’re going to hear from me.
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.
You can add up the parts; you won’t have the sum
You can strike up the march, there is no drum
Every heart, every heart to love will come
But like a refugee.
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.
