In Various Positions: A Life of Leonard Cohen, biographer Ira Nadel includes a very important quotation from Leonard Cohen about his practice as a writer: ‘The published songs or poems are “just the Beacon, the designation – somehow the signal for an investigation of the entire work. […] The archive is the mountain, and the published work the volcano”’ (1996, p. 3). Cohen’s residence at the Zen Centre at Mount Baldy, in the San Gabriel Mountains of Los Angeles, during the mid‑1990s to late-1990s was a highly creative period for him. In Armelle Brusq’s 1997 documentary Leonard Cohen: Spring 1996, we see Cohen writing and reading poems, many of which would find their way into the 2006 publication Book of Longing. Not to detract from the seriousness of his twenty-five-year interest in Zen Buddhism, nor from his twenty-five-year connection with Zen master Sasaki Roshi, in the 2022 documentary film Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song, Cohen’s close friend Nancy Bacal declares with some amusement that Leonard told her that while he was in the meditation hall at Mount Baldy he was composing poems and songs in his head. Cohen also took the time to produce a ‘finding guide’ for his notebooks while he was at Mount Baldy: 243 notebooks, effectively his library of work, now reside in the Leonard Cohen archive holdings in Los Angeles.
One of the songs that Cohen is seen performing in Leonard Cohen: Spring 1996, with just his Technics keyboard, is ‘Thousand Kisses Deep’. An early draft of the work already appears in a 1994 notebook. Throughout the next few years, Cohen would continue to work on drafts of this song/poem, and from the floppy disks from his early Mac computer we have in the archive, together with ten or more CD‑R data disks, there are more than thirty versions of ‘Thousand Kisses Deep’. With the assistance of musician and close friend Sharon Robinson, the piece would be musically reimagined for the 2001 album Ten New Songs. The audio archives also contain earlier studio versions of the song recorded for that album, and various additional drafts appear in the later notebooks. In 2006, two of the variations on the drafts of the lyrics/poem were included in the publication Book of Longing. And throughout the renaissance of Cohen’s performance career during the 2008–2013 world tours, ‘Thousand Kisses Deep’ became a remarkable centrepiece in the concert. He recited the poem for audiences of twenty thousand or more, with a single-note accompaniment from keyboard player Neil Larson. These recitations of ‘Thousand Kisses Deep’ are included in the audio and DVD releases of both Live in London (2009) and Live in Dublin (2014).
This essay will attempt to map Cohen’s creative journey with ‘Thousand Kisses Deep’ through an examination of the textual and some of the audio variants. While it is clear that this particular piece was of importance to Cohen, the extensive redrafting and editing of his work is typical of many of the texts found in the ‘mountain’ of notebooks and loose manuscripts in his archive. In Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song, for example, Cohen discusses with Larry Sloman the more than eighty potential verses written for the song ‘Hallelujah’ before its inclusion on the 1984 album Various Positions. Cohen obsessively kept copies of these drafts, dating most of them, and his practice as a writer was to return to earlier drafts in the process of what he calls, in the 2001 album version of ‘Thousand Kisses Deep’, ‘slip[ping] into the masterpiece’.
Now that we have the luxury of surveying the ‘mountain’ of the Cohen archive rather than simply contemplating the ‘volcanic’ published work, it is possible to engage in further detailed analysis of Cohen’s creative process. The textual history of ‘Thousand Kisses Deep’ also sheds light on another very important aspect of his work: in an interview for ABC Radio National during his 1980 tour of Australia, Cohen said he always heard ‘an invisible guitar’ behind everything he wrote, and went on to describe how for him there was really very little difference between writing a ‘poem’ or a ‘song’. From the earliest CBC television interviews with him in the mid‑1960s, Cohen was adamant that calling him a ‘poet’ was a verdict for others to decide on, and that he preferred to think of himself as a ‘writer’. Indeed, in the Cohen canon there are many examples of poems that later became songs – ‘Suzanne’ and ‘Death of a Lady’s Man’ are notable examples – and this essay will also try to map the importance of performance in Cohen’s creative process. There is a very discernible continuum between poetry and song in his work. On 25 March 2023, at a one-day symposium on Cohen’s archive at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, Cohen’s friend Professor Bob Faggen (who began digitising Cohen’s notebooks while he was alive) observed that ‘Leonard tends to think in verse’.
While the digitisation and transcription of Cohen’s notebooks and loose manuscripts is not yet complete, at the time of writing this essay, it seems that the first versions of ‘Thousand Kisses Deep’ appear in Notebook 4–35 (Cohen’s own numbering system), written in 1994 during a visit to the Bodhi Mandala Zen Centre in Jemez, New Mexico. Cohen had recently completed the 1992 tour to promote the album The Future, and on his own admission, was in ‘bad shape’ from drinking heavily throughout the tour. On the second page of Notebook 4–35, he is already documenting a degree of self-disgust:
I aged rapidlyI became fat in the faceand soft in the gutand I forgot that I’d ever loved youI was oldand I had no focus, no missionI wandering around eating and buyingbigger clothes
Commencing on page 3r of Notebook 4–35, Cohen writes the date ‘Friday 18 November’ then the first verses of a yet-unnamed poem/song:
Don’t ask me why the road is longdon’t ask my why its steep [sic]Don’t ask me why the moon is goneand the darkness is completeDon’t ask me why, I can’t replyI don’t know how to speakMy lips are sealed with sufferinga thousand kisses deepDon’t ask me why the children die
you’ve heard that life is cheapDon’t ask me why the banners flyabove the bloody streetDon’t ask me why I can’t replyI’m frightened
now, I’m weak NowMy lips are sealed with sufferinga thousand kisses deepDon’t ask me why the heart forgotwhich promises to keepDon’t ask me if it’s true or notI’ve seen you lie and cheatDon’t ask me why I ever thoughtthat you and I would meetMy lips are sealed with sufferinga thousand kisses deep
The mood of this first draft gives voice to a sense of personal despair and echoes the sensibility of the song ‘The Future’: ‘I’ve seen the future, baby, it is murder’. The tone is anxious, hostile, almost aggressive. This isn’t the first time that Cohen would adopt the stance of what Stephen Scobie has called the ‘anti-poet’ (1978, p. 29). For instance, Cohen’s 1972 volume The Energy of Slaves abounds with self-deprecating lines such as ‘I have no talent left / I can’t write a poem anymore’ (p. 112). In the period just prior to his decision to take up full-time residence at the Mount Baldy Zen Centre, the writings in the notebooks and elsewhere echo the sentiment ‘I don’t know how to speak’.
It’s not clear at what point Cohen decided to turn ‘Thousand Kisses Deep’ into a song, but the first performance appears two years after this 1994 notebook draft, in the Brusq documentary Leonard Cohen: Spring 1996. Cohen is sitting at his Technics KN3000 electric keyboard in his cabin at Mount Baldy and sings two verses of the song:
Don’t matter if the road is long,don’t matter if it’s steep.Don’t matter if the moon is goneand the darkness is completeDon’t matter if we lose our way,it’s written that we’ll meet –At least that’s what I heard you saya thousand kisses deep. [repeated twice]
[Instrumental break]
I loved you when you openedlike a lily to the heat.You see, I’m just another snowmanstanding in the rain and sleet,who loved you with his frozen loveand his second-hand physique –with all he is, and all he wasa thousand kisses deep. [repeated twice]
The electronic drumbeats behind Cohen’s keyboard and the passionate vocals create a much more upbeat mood than the bleaker Notebook 4–35 draft quoted above. In contrast to ‘Don’t ask me why I ever thought / that you and I would meet’, the song version posits a much more optimistic sentiment: ‘Don’t matter if we lose our way, / it’s written that we’ll meet’. During the next decade, Cohen would continue to work on the text of the poem: the archive contains around thirty textual variants, mostly from 1998 and 1999 – both handwritten versions in the notebooks and others found on various floppy disks and CD‑Rs. These digital assets are from Cohen’s Mac computer, which he would also use for writing drafts (he also used tablets to create artwork, much of which would appear in Book of Longing). The poem would not become a song again until the early 2000s, when Cohen collaborated with Robinson on the version that appears on the album Ten New Songs, released on 9 October 2001, his first album in nearly a decade. Incidentally, the second verse of the song version from 1996 – ‘I loved you when you opened / Like a lily to the heat’ – remains largely unchanged in the various drafts in the ten years that follow, though it does not appear in the version released on Ten New Songs. Cohen would continue to tinker with the text, penning many new verses, many of which were abandoned for published versions.
The poem/song is not the product of a young man’s sensibility – Cohen was in his sixties at this point – but the archive also illustrates that he worked on the poem repeatedly in the period around his birthdays, in fact writing half a dozen drafts on his actual sixty-fourth birthday in 1998. The central motif of a ‘thousand kisses deep’ speaks to a depth of experience and a certain ennui about ageing. By the time Cohen was performing the poem as a ‘recitation’ during the 2008–2013 world tours, the lines ‘been working out, but it’s too late / Been too late for years’ were guaranteed to trigger some laughter from audiences enjoying his self-deprecating wit. Some of the 1998 computer files finish with the sign‑off ‘Jikan [Cohen’s Zen Buddhist name] the Unconvincing’.
Notebook 13–35, mostly written in 1996, also contains various verses for ‘Thousand Kisses Deep’ which probably informed the performance of the song filmed by Brusq in the spring of 1996. The first verse appears on page 10r of the notebook, immediately underneath lyrics for the song ‘I Was Never Any Good’ (which appears on the 1997 album More Best of Leonard Cohen):
Don’t matter if you lie to medon’t matter if you cheatDon’t matter if you die for mewith wounded hands and feetI’d get the hell away from youto somewhere warm and cheapBut it’s strange what you forget to doa thousand kisses deep
Some twenty pages later in the notebook, probably dating from August 1996, Cohen tries out another series of verses:
I watched the world of brightnessfrom the dark side of a street
There’s a rental room that’s mineon the dark side of the street
I occupy this basementon the dark side of the street
I’d drive to see your mountainsacross the fields of [???]I’d throw fortunes in your fountain
I built my house too solidon the dark side of the street
And I hear the names of other menyou whisper in your sleep
I’ll find you
whenwhere you’ve fallenfrom the heights of Failure PeakI’ll lift you from the midstof your invincible defeatWe’veWe’ll go to someplace seedyon the dark side of the streetbut we’ll bewe’ll live in someplace seedyon the dark side of the streetbut we’ll meet together secretly1000 kisses deep
Over the next ten pages of Notebook 13–35, a series of variations on this verse are drafted. According to Cohen’s notes, the following were written on 2 December 1996, in Roshi’s cabin:
I work the hungry simple pleasuresand my service is discreetI’d like to quit the businessbut I’m nervous and I’m weakThe thought of you is fragrantand the loss of you completeIt stays awhileand then it’s gonea thousand kisses deep
…
It just a shadow on the crossand a hustler in the streetunless you do it all to mea thousand kisses deep
but Christ is realand so’s the deala thousand kisses deep
Don’t matter if you lie to medon’t matter if you cheatyou sell me down the riverI pretend to be asleepI’d leave you in a secondbut I’ve got a neat surprise for youthey say revenge is sweetbut it strange what you forget to do
I’ve
bougot the poisonfor your wineand theand the razor for your cheekbutI’ve gotathis bullet aimed at youand a razor for your cheekbut it’s strangewhat you forget to doa thousand kisses deep
These late 1996 versions of the poem again seem to turn away from the lighter mood of the song performed in Brusq’s documentary and return to the darker mood of the original 1994 entries in Notebook 4–35. The tonal language of ‘revenge’ and the use of the words ‘poison’, ‘bullet’ and ‘razor’ create a darker, more violent emotional mood that is reminiscent of the poems in the 1978 collection Death of a Lady’s Man. The ‘thousand kisses deep’ seem to trigger angst and bitterness about events of the past. By 2:30 p.m. that same day, we have the lines ‘There’s nothing but a scratch or two / a thousand kisses deep’.
Cohen worked extensively on the poem again throughout 1998, beginning 19 January. By this time, the dark mood that characterised the 1996 verses seems to have dissipated. The first two verses are unchanged from the 1996 song version that appears in Brusq’s film, but from there a whole new set of verses appear that set the stage for Cohen’s reworking of both the poem and the song version on Ten New Songs:
I know you had to lie to meI know you had to cheatYou learned it on your father’s kneeand at your mother’s feetBut did you have to burn your wayacross the fields of wheatwhen all our vital interests laya thousand kisses deep
Don’t matter if you’re rich and strongdon’t matter if you’re weakDon’t matter if you write a songthe nightengales [sic] repeatDon’t matter if you’re nine-to-fiveor timeless and uniqueYou ditch your life to stay alivea thousand kisses deep
I’m turning tricks I’m getting fixedI’m back on Boogie Street.I’d like to quit the businessbut I’m in it so to speak.The thought of you is peacefuland the file on you complete –except what we forgot to doa thousand kisses deep
I looked beyond our victory sexour limits of the seaI saw there were no oceans leftfor scavengers like me.And standing on the forward deckI blessed our remnant fleetand then consented to be wreckeda thousand kisses deep.
The ponies run, the wheels are spunThe odds are what you beatYou win a while, and then it’s done –your little winning streak.And summoned now to dealwith your invincible defeat,You live your life as if it’s reala thousand kisses deep.
I lift another glass of wineI hear my shoulder creakThe band is playing ‘Auld Lang Syne’but the heart will not retreatThe boys and girls go rushing past –the nightengale’s [sic] asleep –and me, I’m back at work at lasta thousand kisses deep
This version includes many of the key ideas and phrases that Cohen would explore in the text for the next few years – ‘I know you had to lie to me’; ‘back on Boogie Street’; ‘I saw there were no oceans left’; ‘the ponies run’ – but there is more self-reflection in this early draft about the act of writing, the craft of ‘blackening pages’, a perennial theme in his work. The notion that the poet is writing a work that potentially ‘the nightengales [sic] repeat’, that’s ‘timeless and unique’, echoes both the ennui of John Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and prefigures Cohen’s later poem ‘Nightingale’, published in Book of Longing and as a song on the Anjani Thomas album Blue Alert (2006). While the poet acknowledges that in lifting his glass of wine he hears his ‘shoulder creak’, the conclusion ‘I’m back at work at last’ is significantly more optimistic that the line in the 1994 Notebook 4–35, ‘I don’t know how to speak’.
Two weeks later, Cohen was back redrafting the text in a floppy disk file optimistically called ‘A Thousand Kisses Deep final 31 January 1998’. This version rearranges the order of the verses, and there are some significant word changes throughout the text. It also introduces a literary allusion that will permanently remain in the published poem and song: ‘Don’t matter I had miles to go / and promises to keep’. Cohen’s reference here is to the final stanza of Robert Frost’s well-known poem ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’:
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,But I have promises to keep,And miles to go before I sleep,And miles to go before I sleep.
Indeed, in later drafts of the poem, Cohen adds further musical and literary allusions to both Dante and seventeenth-century love poet John Donne. Some of the poems in Cohen’s 1961 volume The Spice-Box of Earth – notably ‘As the Mist Leaves No Scar’, later reworked as ‘True Love Leaves No Traces’ for the 1977 album Death of a Ladies’ Man – allude to Donne’s poetry, but Cohen actually namechecks him in later 1998 drafts of ‘Thousand Kisses Deep’. Notably, this 31 January draft contains the following verse, which survives, without textual alteration, in the 2001 song for Ten New Songs and the publication of the poem in Book of Longing in 2006:
The ponies run, the girls are young,the odds are there to beat.You win a while, and then it’s done –your little winning streak.And summoned now to dealwith your invincible defeat,You live your life as if it’s reala thousand kisses deep.
Cohen returned to a new draft of the poem on 9 March 1998, and the final verse contains another literary allusion:
I hear their voices in the winewho ‘sometimes did me seek’The band is playing ‘Auld Lang Syne’,but the heart will not retreatThere’s no forsaking what you love,no existential leap –as witnessed here in time and blooda thousand kisses deep.
The second line in this final stanza alludes again to a seventeenth-century poet, in this case, Sir Thomas Wyatt’s poem ‘They Flee From Me’:
They flee from me that sometime did me seekWith naked foot, stalking in my chamber.I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,That now are wild and do not rememberThat sometime they put themself in dangerTo take bread at my hand; and now they range,Busily seeking with a continual change.
The theme of Wyatt’s poem – an older man pondering on the fickleness of love and a lover who has abandoned him ‘to use newfangleness’ – fits well with Cohen’s ‘Thousand Kisses Deep’ and his lament in the 9 March version:
I know you had to lie to me,I know you had to cheat:You learned it on your father’s kneeand at your mother’s feet.But did you have to fight your wayacross the burning street?when all our vital interests laya thousand kisses deep.
While this verse undergoes many changes throughout 1998, and the literary allusion to Wyatt’s poem disappears entirely in versions after a 22‑April draft, the sentiment that the imagined lover of ‘Thousand Kisses Deep’ has been deceitful to the poet survives as a motif in the later published and performed versions.
Cohen worked and reworked the text of ‘Thousand Kisses Deep’ repeatedly throughout the remainder of 1998, 1999, 2000, and 2001. In 1998 alone, the floppy disk files from his Mac computer contain twenty-six numbered versions, each with textual variants, and two file versions from 2001 (called ‘A THOUSAND KISSES many verses’ and ‘1000 XXXXXXXs verses’) collate all the extant verses, some incomplete, laid out in two columns across some six or seven pages, presumably to facilitate the ability to editorially review most of the available material to date. We know that Cohen wrote more than eighty verses for the song ‘Hallelujah’, and in 1990, he described to CBC’s Adrienne Clarkson the pages and pages of translation work he did to transform Gabriel Garcia Lorca’s poem ‘Pequeño Vals Vienés’ into his song ‘Take This Waltz’. It thus seems reasonable to assume that a work that demanded this level of attention from Cohen was deemed to be particularly important.
A version from 22 July 1998 seems to be the first to introduce this ‘aside’ to the main verses:
(I ran with Diz and Dante(I never had their sweep)But once or twice they let me playa thousand kisses deep.)
‘Diz’ is presumably a reference to American jazz trumpeter ‘Dizzy’ Gillespie, and the reference to Dante persists in most of the drafts from mid‑1998 on, and even appears in the published text in Book of Longing in 2006. Sometimes ‘I’ is substituted with ‘You’, and ‘ran’ is replaced by ‘jammed’, which foreshadows the verbal change to ‘Diz and Ray’ in the recitations of ‘Thousand Kisses Deep’ during the 2008–2013 world tours, presumably a reference to Ray Charles. In Notebook 14–35, there is a further handwritten variation in 2001: ‘I ran with (better men) B Diz and Will’. The ‘B’ is crossed out, but it is interesting to speculate whether Cohen might have been considering using ‘Bob and Will’: Cohen’s notebooks frequently contain references to Bob Dylan, and given the earlier references to Dante, the Will is likely William Shakespeare. Cohen undoubtedly would have known Dylan’s lines from ‘Memphis Blues Again’: ‘Well Shakespeare he’s in the alley / With his pointed shoes and his bells / Speaking to some French girl / Who says she knows me well’. In a draft which appears to be from October 2005, where the text is imbedded with artwork being prepared for Book of Longing, Cohen makes a late change to substitute ‘Donne’ for ‘Dante’:
I ran with Diz and Donne, okay —I never had their sweep —But once or twice, they let me playA thousand kisses deep.
But the final text published in Book of Longing reverts to ‘Danté’:
I ran with Diz and DantéI never had their sweepBut once or twice they let me playA thousand kisses deep
In the later part of 1998, from a file labelled ‘a thousand kisses final #15’, Cohen begins to periodically number the stanzas, suggesting that the text was already being prepared as a potential future song. Various texts from late December 1999 are filed under the names ‘A Thousand Sharon’s Tune’ or ‘THOUSAND KISSES sharon’s tune’, and these drafts all have numbered stanzas in preparation for performance. The existing audio archives of various studio takes of ‘Thousand Kisses Deep’ include many of the variations quoted above. In a rough mix recorded at Cohen and Robinson’s studios in Los Angeles (Still Life Studios and Small Mercies Studio) dated 18 November 1999, Cohen is still singing lyrics from the late 1999 drafts of the poem and the line about Dante is still included. He also sings the four-line aside from draft #7 (and other later drafts) that disappears from the final lyrics for the song:
(And what about this Inner Lightthat’s boundless and unique?I’m slouching through another nighta thousand kisses deep.)
Reviewing the musical versions in the archives, some fifteen audio files, with alternate musical arrangements within the individual files, it is clear that Cohen struggled to find the right musical sound and mood for ‘Thousand Kisses Deep’ as much as he struggled with the text. Unfortunately, it is difficult to date the takes exactly, and some are clearly incorrectly labelled, as they postdate the album’s release, but musically the song goes through a wide range of interpretative styles. An early version that is incorrectly labelled as 9 October 2001 (it’s more likely to be 1999 or 2000) has a rather Greek feel to it, akin to the arrangement for ‘Dance Me to the End of Love’ from the album Various Positions. In later sessions – possibly 1 January 2001 – there are at least three different musical arrangements experimented with, one of which is very slow and bluesy. This version also includes the early 1998 lines referencing Keats, mentioned above: ‘Don’t matter if you write a song / the nightengales [sic] repeat’. It appears that Cohen and Robinson continued to experiment with various musical arrangements before settling on the one recorded on 9 August 2001, which is close to the album master, although in one variation of this arrangement, Cohen is effectively ‘speaking’ the lyrics while Robinson sings. In an even earlier version – labelled ‘Still into That’ – they experiment with a doubling of Cohen’s vocals, similar to the technique used in ‘Joan of Arc’ on the album Songs of Love and Hate (1971).
As noted earlier, it is interesting to speculate – given the themes of ‘Thousand Kisses Deep’ – why Cohen seems to have spent a large amount of time revising the text immediately before his sixty-fourth birthday and several times on his actual birthday. This can be explained, in part, because he’d promised a draft of the poem to Jarkko Arjatsalo, the webmaster for leonardcohenfiles.com, a site that Cohen had a lot of respect for and had contributed to on a number of occasions. Incidentally, it also appears from the existing file versions in the archive that it was one of the drafts produced on Cohen’s sixty-fourth birthday that was sent to Dylan, via fax, on 13 January 1999. As researcher Ann Margaret Daniel has discovered, Dylan would often use the reverse side of faxes for drafts of his own work, so unfortunately only the fourth and final page exists in the Dylan’s archive. From Cohen’s own account (he tells the story in the 2022 film Hallelujah), we know that he and Dylan met in Paris in the mid‑1980s to ‘talk shop’ about writing song lyrics, but there is no context for why he might have sent this fax to Dylan in January of 1999. The version sent to Dylan has a variant ending to the poem which appears in the file called ‘#9’, written on 21 September 1998, as well as a series of numbered verses that first appear in file ‘#17’, also written on 21 September:
And maybe I had miles to drive,And promises to keep —You ditch it all to stay aliveA thousand kisses deep.
11. And now you are the Angel DeathAnd now the Paraclete.And now you are the Savior’s BreathAnd now the Belsen heap.No turning from the threat of love,No acrobatic leap –As witnessed here in time and bloodA thousand kisses deep.
September 21, 1998
Version ‘#9’ has a word change in the third-to-last line: ‘No transcendental leap’ instead of ‘No acrobatic leap’. Except for this wording change, the draft faxed to Dylan is identical to the above, and this final stanza only appears in these versions written on or around Cohen’s sixty-fourth birthday. In the absence of any further evidence, Cohen was presumably seeking Dylan’s opinion of the poem, but the numbering of the stanzas from ‘#17’ onwards (although this is not consistent) suggests that Cohen was moving back to the notion that the poem should transition to a song, so he may have been seeking Dylan’s views on that. To date, no reply to Cohen’s fax has been uncovered.
The numerous drafts written on 21 September 1998 are also filed as various numbered versions entitled ‘A THOUSAND KISSES ALMOST’. These versions of the poem include verses that are very close to the 2001 song version:
Confined to sex, and pressed againstThe limits of the sea:I saw there were no oceans leftFor scavengers like me.And standing on the forward deckI blessed our remnant fleet—And then consented to be wreckedA thousand kisses deep.
I’m turning tricks, I’m getting fixed,I’m back on Boogie Street.I guess you can’t exchange the giftThat you were meant to keep.But sometimes when the night is slow,The wretched and the meek,We gather up our hearts and goA thousand kisses deep.
Cohen himself seems to have found amusement in the endless drafts he was producing, and at the head of draft ‘#16 Final’ on 21 September, which simply contains last-minute revisions, he apologises to Arjatsalo: ‘Dear Jarkko, / This may go on for a long time. / Sorry’. In a note sent to accompany the draft (and reproduced on the leonardcohenfiles.com website),1 Cohen wrote: ‘I have been working on this song for a long time. It seemed to come together a few days ago. I want to dedicate it to those very kind people (more like my family) who greeted me on my birthday, and who, so generously, have embraced my work. Leonard Cohen; September 24, 1998’.
This is getting pretty close. […] The process has become rather comic. But I think we’ve got it now. It took the crisis of posting it to your site to force a clarification of the text (after three years of secret tinkering). There is an apparent violation of the metre in some verses (e.g. #4) but the old poets would have justified them with devices such as th’Holy Spirit, or th’Means. And these curiosities actually correspond to the accents of the poem when it is sung. This version represents a distillation of many, many verses, all of them tottering over the final line, A thousand kisses deep. I hope this is an end to it for a while. Leonard Cohen; September 26, 1998.
Of course, typically, it was not the ‘end’ of the process for Cohen, who continued to revise the work in preparation for the song version collaboratively produced with Robinson for the 2001 album, and for the variant publications in 2006 for Book of Longing. The text was further revised and modified for the recitation on the world tours, begun in 2008.
Apparently as a result of Cohen’s performance of ‘Thousand Kisses Deep’ as a recitation during the world tours, he was approached by Sony in 2011 for permission to use a reading of the poem for a sixty-second ad for a new Sony Bravia 3D television. Cohen recorded a new version on 30 July 2011, which is in our audio archive, and the ad was screened publicly later that year. Perhaps it is not surprising that Cohen reworked the text one last time:
Don’t matter if the road is longDon’t matter if it’s steepDon’t matter if the page is goneIt’s written that we’ll meetI loved you when you openedLike a lily to the heatAnd I’ll love you when it closesA thousand kisses deepI know you had to lie to meI know you had to cheatYou learned it on your father’s kneeAnd at your mother’s feetBut did you have to fight your wayAcross the burning street?When all our vital interests layA thousand kisses deep
The text of ‘Thousand Kisses Deep’ is an excellent example of the light that might be shed on Cohen’s creative process, and suggests the ways in which preserved and digitised archives can shed light on published texts. For Cohen, too, this piece was a fascinating example of the continuum between verse, song and performance, which is a strong feature of his command of various art forms. The archival record of ‘Thousand Kisses Deep’ manifests Cohen’s characteristic, almost obsessive revision process, but the quality of the completed ‘volcanic’ work is always a testament to his genius.