What Taylor Swift Can Learn from Leonard Cohen

“As legend has it, you are quite the pyro / You light the match to watch it blow…”

—Taylor Swift, “The Fate of Ophelia”

“You want it darker, we kill the flame…Hineni, hineni, I’m ready, my Lord.”

—Leonard Cohen, “You Want It Darker”

 

Fire imagery in pop songs can present a paradox: It beckons yet burns, flares then fizzles. Leonard Cohen and Taylor Swift may arise from two vastly different traditions—she from country and pop Americana, he from Canadian folk-rock—but in each of their works, the pull of transcendent, all-consuming love clashes with the yearning for freedom, autonomy and self-preservation. For many critics and fans, it is this very tension that electrifies their best work, to the point that renouncing the conflict or brandishing a solution gives rise to confusion, indignation and even backlash.

Swift’s newest record-breaking album, The Life of a Showgirl, came together in what she describes as “the most infectiously joyful, wild, dramatic” span of her life, riding high from her highly successful Eras Tour and her engagement to football star Travis Kelce. In “The Fate of Ophelia,” which opens the album, Swift declares: “Keep it one-hundred on the land, the sea, the sky / pledge allegiance to your hand, your team, your vibes.” (For those not versed in her lexicon, “one-hundred” combines her lucky number, 13, with the one on Kelce’s football jersey, 87.) 

Has she finally filled the “blank space” in her life? This month, some fans who paid for signed CDs balked at finding both Kelce and Swift’s signatures on the disc, as though they were a package deal, which suggests they may not have wanted the fairy-tale ending to come so soon.

For Swift, this union may feel triumphant, fulfilling her dream of “a driveway with a basketball hoop” (from the track “Wi$h Li$t”). For Cohen, seeking a partner had a more spiritual urgency. On the one hand, Cohen, grandson of a Talmudic scholar and preoccupied with Kabbalistic legend, aspired to find his proverbial better half. In 1972, he abruptly halted a concert in Jerusalem, explaining to fans: “It says in the Kabbalah… that unless Adam and Eve face each other, God does not sit on his throne. And somehow, the male and female parts of me refuse to encounter one another tonight, and God does not sit on his throne.” 

In Cohen’s final interview with The New Yorker in 2016, he explained: “[God’s] creation is a catastrophe. There are pieces of him or her or it that are everywhere. And the specific task of the Jew is to repair the face of God.” 

But when it came to both women and religion, Cohen vacillated between the bond and the breach, the lure and the fear of commitment, the “holy and the broken Hallelujah” that falls short of harmony. 

“As a committed Jew, Cohen struggled with his obligation to sustain this bond with the transcendent,” says Marcia Pally, author of From This Broken Hill I Sing to You: God, Sex and Politics in the Work of Leonard Cohen. “He is painfully aware of how easy it is to fall out of it. He feels the same ‘double bind’ with women. We have the responsibility to sustain intimate, committed relationships; and yet, it’s all too easy to leave.”

Cohen embraced yet itched to escape from his muses, women he tended to fetishize and feminize nearly to the point of fear. He never married, walked out on the mother of his two children, and often agonized over how “the hunter” became “the hunted.” Breaking up with a lover in “So Long Marianne,” he sings:

“I’m standing on a ledge and your fine spider web

Is fastening my ankle to a stone…

I’m cold as a new razor blade

You left when I told you I was curious

I never said that I was brave.”

 

This tension has also tormented Swift for most of her career. Compare the gushing hooks on “Ophelia” to the anguished bridge of “champagne problems,” on Swift’s 2020 album evermore:

Sometimes you just don’t know the answer

Till someone’s on their knees and asks you;

‘She would’ve made such a lovely bride, What a shame she’s f***ked in the head,’ they said…

 

Or “The Archer,” on 2019’s Lover:

“Who could ever leave me, darling? But who could stay?”

 

Or “Midnight Rain,” on 2022’s Midnights:

“He was sunshine, I was midnight rain

He wanted it comfortable, I wanted that pain

He wanted a bride, I was making my own name

Chasing that fame, he stayed the same.”

 

As Tyler Foggatt wrote in The New Yorker this year, Swift’s exes “haven’t just been her boyfriends; they’ve been her muses,” inspiring haunting melody and nuanced emotion that some find conspicuously absent on Showgirl. 

It was only in his seventies, when he began dating a woman named Anjani Thomas, that Cohen seemed to accept that women are people, not just portals. “Thanks for the Dance,” on which the couple collaborated, declares a united front grounded in particularity and realism:

“We’re joined in the spirit

Joined at the hip

Joined in the panic…

I was so I

And you were so you

The crisis was light as a feather”

Released just weeks before Cohen’s death, “You Want it Darker” is a collaboration with Gideon Zelermyer, who serves as cantor of Cohen’s Montreal synagogue. It is also the only song in Cohen’s repertoire featuring a choral chant in Hebrew: “Hineni (here I am).” Echoing Abraham’s answer to G-d when asked to sacrifice his son, “Hineni” attests to how we often live in shadow, navigating ordeals without a playbook, let alone a songbook.

“Although we are made for intimate connection—with women, with G-d—the struggle to sustain commitments and the urge to bolt from intimacy is built into human nature,” says author Pally. In his later years, Cohen accepted this paradox instead of chafing against it. “I gave you this body, and I gave you this trial,” he sang in 2001. This is how Cohen prepares to meet his maker. 

Swift recently announced she will pause her career to focus on her marriage. Thrilling to visions of suburbia, she has cast off the “tortured poetry” of her previous album—“aka Female Rage: The Musical!” as she posted on Instagram. At first blush, the opening tracks of Showgirl shade female rage into the femme fatale—Ophelia, “Elizabeth Taylor,” and lyrics that compare the “habit of missing lovers past” with “eating out of the trash (“Opalite”). But these tracks all resolve into redemptive, happy endings. 

Some Swifties who know their Aleph Bet spot the letter yud in the twinkling lighter she holds on the cover of Midnights—the tenth letter a nod to her tenth album. The challenge for Swift is whether she can remain incandescent in full sunshine. Otherwise, she, too, may want to turn back the clock.