Leonard Cohen spent the majority of the 1980s in the musical wilderness. He'd released quality albums and written many outstanding songs, but they passed by audiences and critics largely unnoticed, save for the thanks and praise from a few diehard devotees. His most famous song, Halleluiah, released on his 1984 album, Various Positions, would go largely unsung for almost a decade until covered by the artists John Cale and Jeff Buckley in the early 1990s.
Despite the lack of acclaim and success, Cohen continued to write and to record, albeit increasingly slowly. Four years passed between his albums, Various Positions, and its follow-up, I'm Your Man. In those four years, Cohen's voice changed markedly. It had become substantially deeper, and would continue to deepen as he continued to age. I'm Your Man was a critical and (by Cohen's standards) a commercial success. Musically, he'd moved away from the acoustic instrumentation he'd favoured early in his career to using a palate of synthesised and electronic sounds. As well as this, backing vocalists became an increasingly prominent presence, sometimes adding additional lyrical dimensions to the songs as well as the more-expected aural colour and texture.
Most notable was the streak of increasingly black humour that could now be found in Cohen's work. Always possessed of a dry wit and modest charm, he now allowed himself to be the punchline in many of his songs, and directed sharper lyrical barbs both at himself and others. His songs had become more theatrical, and their lyrical gaze now looked out at the world with the same passion and acuity that they'd previously looked inwards. The songs written and released in this 'middle' period of his career would prove to be the most lyrically complex and ambitious he would ever create.
This trend continued on the album that followed, The Future, released in 1993. Though its commercial success was lesser than its predecessor, it was greeted with even greater critical acclaim. This, largely, was driven by the perceived quality of five songs in particular: The Future, Democracy, Anthem, Light as the Breeze and Closing Time.
These songs were very different from one another. The Future and Democracy are highly charged works of socio-political comment, which was largely new territory for Cohen, who'd previously framed the overwhelming majority of his songs in the context of inter-personal intimacy. Light as the Breeze is more in keeping with his established themes of love, longing and regret, whilst Anthem could have more accurately been titled 'Hymn', such is its focus on a spiritual conception of reality.
The song sets its scene with a 'happening' bar, with the persona's female companion the centre of the attention. She is described as 'very sweet', but also as one who is 'rubbing half the world against her thigh', suggestive of flirtatious and unrestrained sexualised behaviour which doesn't seem to bother the persona in the slightest. As such, these early stages of the song are positioning the listener to accept a more liberated position on sex, with the freedom to express sexuality and desire taking precedence over the traditionalised virtue of monogamy. It's also notable that the song's persona, despite being singular, consistently speaks from a collective first person position, which helps create the sense of a bar that's full of people all (or most of them) feeling the same thing.
However, as the song develops, there comes the suggestion that this is not an attitude shared by all, because as the partying atmosphere becomes more and more debauched (blouses torn off etc.), and people move from partner to partner, the sense that there is 'hell to pay when the fiddler stops' suggests that such an atmosphere is likely to lead to infidelity, betrayal, and angry, broken hearts. Interestingly, though, the there isn't any sense that the persona is fearful of such a thing happening; he seems comfortably or indifferently detached from these goings-on. It is interesting to speculate as to why this is so. It doesn't seem to be a certainty in regard to the fidelity of his companion, which subsequently suggests it is either that their connection is a deeper, more accepting one, or his feeling in regard to her aren't deep enough to warrant such jealousies. When Cohen began his career, such notions of 'free love' were everywhere, but in the 1990s, the rise of AIDS changed that thinking markedly, or at the very least, made it a good deal more dangerous. So, under the seeming calm lies a potentially deadly storm.
The song favours the repetition of verses that effectively function as choruses, which might be designed to create the feeling of the events of the song repeating themselves in a kind of endless cycle; that these gatherings at pubs, bars and dances are a global inevitability, and arguably a global necessity to satiate the innate human desire for be with someone, and not to be alone.
The next verse is decidedly surreal, with the arrival of hallucinogenic cider, the Holy Spirit and a request for beef. The "Where's the beef?" line is/was a catchphrase in the United States and Canada, introduced as a slogan for the fast food chain, Wendy's, in 1984. It then became an all-purpose phrase questioning the substance of an idea, event, or product. It's decidedly ironic (and more than a little sacrilegious) for the disembodied Holy Spirit to be calling for beef. The absurdity this imagery gives to the situation may be designed to reflect the absurdity of trying to find love - if that is goal - within the drunken, lust-laden environment of a late night bar. And yet, the desire for some kind of fulfilment lingers in the 'mighty expectation of relief', but it seems more likely that if it's going to be anything, it's going to be drunken sex and little else.
And yet, the song rescues what might otherwise be seen as a rather empty, despairingly desperate situation by moving through a sequence of images that first lighten the mood, and by the end, almost sanctify it. The alliterative struggle and stagger happens down snakes and up ladders - imagery lifted from ubiquitous childhood board game - arguably adds a sense of innocent frivolity the occasion. But then, 'the blessed hours chime'. Whilst this might be little more than a highly stylised rendering of the bell call for last drinks, it can also be seen as something more akin to the tolling of John Donne's final bell that tolls for us all.
Such a reading lends a kind of definitive urgency to the quest for fulfilment expressed in the following and which can be viewed as a kind of duality; a fusion (or desired fusing) of the sacred and the profane, or, on another level, love and lust, and the endeavour might be the most important of all. When 'the gates of love ... [budge] an inch', it feels, despite the failure to open them that something of profound importance has been achieved, which is further underscored by the fact that 'nothing much has happened since'; a fact so important that Cohen repeats it.
Of course, the quest for love is coloured by the lure of lust, in that the persona struggles to differentiate between the beauty of the woman he desires, and the person behind the beauty. Not only that, be he doesn't really want to separate the two. And in the end, love endures despite circumstance, enduring beyond the relationship, perhaps suggesting that lust was a part of the love, or ultimately, an irrelevance. These lyrics comprise what is known conventionally as the song's 'middle eight', which gives them a pivotal prominence in the narrative development of the lyric.
The state that exists beyond active love (or love in the context of a current relationship) is described as something in between the states of freedom and death. In one sense, they can be argued as being the same thing. In his song, Murder Most Foul, Bob Dylan expressed a similar sentiment, observing that 'only dead men are free'. Regardless of this, a rather nihilistic despair overtakes the persona when he finds himself in a state bereft of love. He is free - and love can reasonably be described as one of freedom's many opposites - but it is a sufficiently empty state to leave him feeling dead inside. In the end, he finds himself between these perceptions, which are essentially two different ways of framing the reality of being (or feeling) alone.
From this point, the song takes on a tone simultaneously darker and more amusing. Firstly, the place is as 'dead as Heaven on a Saturday night'; a line that really only reveals its meaning in the context of details in the following verse. Meanwhile, the pursuit of love has become more desperate, which Cohen renders in the rather absurd (if somewhat ageist) image of the companion who's 'a hundred but she's wearing something tight'. Whether this is a metaphor, a revelation about the earlier companion or a newer companion remains unclear. Contrasted against - pointedly so, given the age of the companion - is the 'awful truth/that you can't reveal to the ears of youth', which is perhaps revealed throughout the song itself in the form of its many messages about love, lust and loss. Why might it not be 'worth a dime'? Perhaps because it inevitably leads to that freedom/death purgatory, and that its inherent worthlessness is why it is too awful to reveal. Cohen seems to be pitying the young; sparing them from the sense of futility and despair that confronts the persona.
The song reaches its climax in the line, "and it's once for the Devil and it's once for Christ" which distils the down the essence of the song, in that it fuses the revelry of the occasion into something both sacred and profane, where the desire for love is the former, and the drunken pull of lust, the latter. But by offering both, Cohen is arguably suggesting that they are inseparable, at least in practice, if not theory. The line in the previous stanza about Heaven being dead on a Saturday night furthers this reading, in that it suggests that Heaven is an expression of some of the human experience - the part frequently distilled and regarded as the best, or most pure - but not the more basal, primal and natural urges and desires that as fundamental to the human experiences as the more frequently valorised virtues.
Finally, the 'blinding lights' of closing time flood into the scene. The night has reached its end. The suggestion that people are 'busted' imparts the notion that despite the essentially equal footing between love and lust in the reality of the revelry, that this an attitude that doesn't really carry over to the 'real' world, where the more dominant attitude that places love above lust continues to prevail. But Cohen suspends time and reality by continuing to cycle through these realities and situations as verses are repeated. This makes sense in the context of the song's title, which can simultaneously be read as a precise point in time, and one that exists only in the present tense, and therefore, effectively for all time.
Closing Time is a both celebration and lament; a thematic (if surreal) blues fused to a barn dance for the modern age. It relies on a loose narrative that shifts constantly from describing events with a rather dispassionate wryness to offering truths and perspectives that almost place the listener or reader in the position of confidant or confessor. It's a rich and rewarding example of lyrical depth and complexity, and offers the listener a compelling case to place the song form on par with the poetic in regard to what it can convey. Closing Time offers the listener a view of love, refracted through a night of drunken celebration. It humanises love and the lust that so often accompanies it, whilst consistently reminding listeners of the sacred position that love can hold in our individual and collective lives. And give it seems to be a rather hedonistic, desperate and life-affirming fight against loneliness, it feels to this listener, in our COVID-ravaged age, socially-isolated age, all the more poignant. For better and for worse, we really do need each other.