This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

I'm David Remnick.

Like a bird on the wire.

Like a drunken night choir

I have tried in my way

To be free

Last year I spent a few days with the songwriter Leonard Cohen

Cohen had been avoiding interviews for the past

four or five, six years, but once he agreed to talk, we talk for days and covered the length

and breadth of his career. And I'm grateful that I had the chance to visit when I did because

not long after, Leonard Cohen died at the age of 82.

Cohen once wrote a song called The Tower of Song, in which he compared himself really unfavorably to Hank Williams. But along with the other masters, Bob Dylan certainly,

Joni Mitchell, Kanye West, everybody's got their own list. Leonard Cohen is way up there

in the ranks of songwriters.

When I visited him in Los Angeles, he was suffering from a number of very serious illnesses,

although he was keeping that very, very private.

He was in deep pain, especially from compression fractures in his spine,

and he had to sit in a big blue medical chair. He was very thin,

maybe 110 pounds at the most. But I have to say that he was in an abullient mood somehow

for a man who knew where life was taking him, and it was going to take him there in a hurry.

He was the most gracious host, this side of my mother.

Would you like a few slices of cheese and olives?

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