07/12/2026
Twenty years ago, I watched Leonard Cohen perform at Hamilton Place.
He could draw an entire audience into the story, command the stage like a true storyteller, and make it feel as though it were only you and him in the room.
That concert changed my life.
Leonard Cohen is one of the reasons I write, the reason I fell in love with poetry, and one of the inspirations behind beginning music later in life, loosely learning the piano and discovering how words and melody could carry something deeper together.
Seeing Secret Chord: A Leonard Cohen Experience at the CAA Theatre in Toronto brought all of that back. Soulpepper created something extraordinary.
Cohen wrote about love, faith, power, suffering, longing, mortality, and the contradictions that live inside every one of us. He found beauty where most people saw brokenness, hope where others saw despair, and dignity in the places we spend our lives trying to hide.
He saw the fractures beneath the surface.
The search for God.
The systems we build.
The quiet corruption we learn to accept.
Songs like Everybody Knows were observations, warnings, and mirrors held up to politics, power, hypocrisy, greed, and the truths society rarely has the courage to name.
He had an extraordinary ability to look at the world with an awakened consciousness, notice the games of power, the suffering we carry, and the truths we avoid, and transform all of it into poetry rather than cynicism.
He seemed to understand that suffering was not simply something to endure.
It could deepen us.
Humble us.
Reveal us.
There are artists who entertain us, and there are the rare few who alter the architecture of our inner world.
Leonard Cohen did that for me.
He entered the darkest rooms of the human experience and returned with language that made those rooms feel less empty.
Few artists have ever written so honestly about the weight of being alive while still leaving us with the feeling that beauty was worth searching for.
Some artists leave behind songs.
Leonard Cohen left behind a way of seeing.
💄
07/01/2026