/ˈkōän/

noun

1. a paradoxical anecdote or riddle, used in Zen Buddhism to demonstrate the inadequacy of logical reasoning and to provoke enlightenment.

A poet who found music more than a musician looking for  poetry.

Not everyone is lucky enough to see the end coming as clearly as he did. As much as many of us want it sudden and unexpected there is something to seeing the arc. Astronauts speak of this humbling experience often; seeing the whole of creation juxtaposed with the infinite vacuum of space.

You Want it Darker and Thanks for the Dance awakened me to Cohen’s music. In truth as I delve into it, those albums are the ones I devour every morsel. There is a sliding scale as the music becomes more recent it becomes more relatable, more intriguing, more relative to me.

I will be attempting to work backward from the end. I want to start at the end, because at 57, I’ve lived most of the beginning.

The themes are often dark, very dark. But there is an underlying romance in it all- the poetry of life itself. The beauty of the joke. We are the Universe looking back on itself often pretending to be in control of it when we are clearly allowed only as much choice as it will afford.

Only the language lives on but even that is mortal; limited by its ability to move from one memory to the next like a virus. It's never static, like the moon its forever waxing or waning.

My starting point has been to learn the songs from all three of the last albums. It occurred to me that the songs from those albums were never performed live by the artist. I want to create a tribute project that would, at times,  aim to exactly replicate the music in a live setting. Taking the songs into different adaptations relatable to current trends and  apply my own musical bent on it all. This endeavor continues to get ever more exciting for me.I hope to due this weighty material justice!