As one of the finest artists the world has ever known, Leonard Cohen has affected many people with the gravity of his poetry and the piercing nature of his music. One of the most prominent figures the Canadian indelibly influenced was another hailed as one of the finest musicians we’ve ever known, Nirvana leader Kurt Cobain.
The two are inextricably connected via the timeless line from Nirvana’s In Utero classic, ‘Pennyroyal Tea’: “Give me a Leonard Cohen afterworld / So I can sigh eternally”.
Speaking to Impact in 1993, when the intensity of fame and his heroin addiction were becoming increasingly prominent in his life, Cobain revealed how Leonard Cohen’s work was so intense that it made him feel worse when he was sick. Tragically, though, things wouldn’t get better for the frontman. He died by suicide in April 1994.
“That was my therapy, when I was depressed and sick,” Cobain told the publication. “I’d read things like Malloy Dies [sic] by Beckett, or listen to Leonard Cohen, which would actually make it worse.”
It seems that Cohen was aware of Cobain’s lyrics, and after the frontman’s death, he expressed deep regret that he couldn’t have conversed with him and tried to show him the way out of drug addiction. This echoes Neil Young’s sentiments, another man closely tied to the grunge pioneer.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t have spoken to the young man,” Cohen said. “I see a lot of people at the Zen Centre, who have gone through drugs and found a way out that is not just Sunday school. There are always alternatives, and I might have been able to lay something on him.”
Years later, when speaking to Rolling Stone in 1997, Cohen was asked how he felt about the Cobain line. In response, he recalled some Nirvana members going to one of his shows in 1993 and wished that Cobain had been there so he could have talked to him. Although he admitted doubt about changing the frontman’s circumstances, Cohen calls the possibility one of life’s “what ifs”.
He told the publication: “Several members of Nirvana came to my concert in Seattle in ’93. And when Kurt Cobain killed himself… I always wished he had come to the concert, wished I’d been able to talk to him. We get young people like him up at the monastery who’ve come to the end of the rope, and there are ways you can address them that are rather original –— not psychological. I probably wouldn’t have been able to affect anything. It’s just one of those big ‘what ifs.’”
