Diamonds in the Lines : Leonard Cohen in his own live words

Boogie Street (2001-)

Interview Magazine "Mojo", November 2001

About the verse "It is in love that we are made, in love we disappear".

That's just a journalistic reportage of the process. We are made in love and in love we disappear. But that love is not the romantic love, it's the impersonal, benign activity that governs creation and destruction.

Interview Magazine "Mc Lean's", 2001

There is an actual Boogie Street in the world. It's in Singapore. I don't know if it's still there. I was coming home from a tour of Australia many years ago and during the day Boogie Street is a scene of intense commercial activity. In fact, there's a lot of little stalls where bootleg records are sold. This was at a time when it was hard to find my records in the Western world. And they weren't displayed. But I asked the man if they had any Leonard Cohen, and he went into the tent where he kept his inventory, and he brought an entire box of all my cassettes for a dollar apiece. There was that kind of bazaar feeling. And at night, it was a scene of intense and alarming sexual exchange. Prostitution, and . . . everything seemed to be available. I don't even know if it was prostitution. It just seemed to be mutual availability.Boogie Street to me was that street of work and desire, the ordinary life and also the place we live in most of the time that is relieved by the embrace of your children, or the kiss of your beloved, or the peak experience in which you yourself are dissolved, and there is no one to experience it so you feel the refreshment when you come back from those moments. As my old teacher said: "Paradise is a good place to visit, but you can't live there because there are no toilets or restaurants." So we all hope for those heavenly moments, which we get in those embraces and those sudden perceptions of beauty and sensations of pleasure, but we're immediately returned to Boogie Street.

Interview Magazine "Chorus", 2002

What is that “Boogie Street” evocated in both “A 1000 kisses deep” and “Boogie Street” ?

It’s an image to evoke the deception, the “lost illusions boulevard”, an image of the everyday life, with its tentations, its disillusions. In fact there is actually a “Boogie Street” in Singapore. A very attractive street, where you can find illegal records. I remember having been there after a Tour in Australia. I was almost offended not to find my records. I asked the seller and he went back with a box containing the entire collection of my records - what you could never find anywhere else, furthermore at one dollar each record. By night, this same street becomes the hottest one of the area. It’s a street of working ans sex, and of all the deceptions these activities can bring, deceptions more cruel as you get older, like I do.

Release October 2001

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