Singer-Songwriters

If Cohen’s first musical formation was folk, he joined it as its viability as a commercial music genre was already in decline. One of his first major gigs was to appear at the singer-songwriter afternoon of the Newport Folk festival, along with Joni Mitchell, an event that pointed away from the traditional folk music the festival had long favored. By 1970, singer-songwriters such as Mitchell and James Taylor were now reclassified as occupying a niche of their own, and Cohen fit that niche. Cohen’s autobiographical songs were actually closer to the confessional mode of the singer-songwriters than they were to traditional folk. Where folk had claimed to be public, political music, the singer-songwriters were singing about private struggles and mental anguish. The singer-songwriters were defined by the sense of direct address to the listener, seeming to reveal their very souls in the details of their misdeeds. Called “confessional” because of perceived similarities with the poetry of Lowell, Plath, and Sexton, singer-songwriter music is often self-therapeutic, but unlike the poetry it does not usually use self-exposure as cultural criticism. This chapter reads Cohen’s songs in relation to the singer-songwriter movement, exploring the similarities and differences between his recordings and those of other figures central to the formation. Cohen’s poetry, while not usually associated with the confessional movement, bears some similarity to it, and his songs sometimes invite a broadly cultural reading.