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“Perhaps poetry can shed light where polling data failed,” wrote columnist Elizabeth Renzetti on the occasion of Leonard Cohen’s death. It has been a dark year for speech and democracy both in America and around the world. In these times, writer Neil Gaiman and his partner and musician Amanda Palmer “found solace in the work of Leonard Cohen”.

More specifically, the evocative Democracy from Cohen’s 1992 album The Future. Here, Gaiman recites the poem, with music composed by Palmer, and expressionist animation by their friends David Mack and Olga Nunes.

There isn’t much more that can be said about the work by the great singer-songwriter. The original song is both mournful – “And I’m neither left or right, I’m just staying home tonight, getting lost in that hopeless little screen...” – and hopeful – “It’s coming through a hole in the air, from those nights in Tiananmen Square”.

Gaiman’s soothing voice and the softly melodious track could indeed act as a salve for people trying to cope with the times.

Cohen spoke at length about the creation of the song, for which he originally composed 60 verses, in the book Songwriters on Songwriting:

“This was when the Berlin Wall came down and everyone was saying democracy is coming to the east. And I was like that gloomy fellow who always turns up at a party to ruin the orgy or something. And I said, ‘I don’t think it’s going to happen that way. I don’t think this is such a good idea. I think a lot of suffering will be the consequence of this wall coming down.’ But then I asked myself, ‘Where is democracy really coming?’ And it was the USA...

So while everyone was rejoicing, I thought it wasn’t going to be like that, euphoric, the honeymoon. So it was these world events that occasioned the song. And also the love of America. Because I think the irony of America is transcendent in the song. It’s not an ironic song. It’s a song of deep intimacy and affirmation of the experiment of democracy in this country. That this is really where the experiment is unfolding. This is really where the races confront one another, where the classes, where the genders, where even the sexual orientations confront one another. This is the real laboratory of democracy.

— Leonard Cohen in 'Songwriters on Songwriting'

Here’s the singer-songwriter’s original version.

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