Sharon Robinson’s new tour, titled My Time With Leonard Cohen, blends together songs and memories from their long association. She toured with Cohen in the late ’70s and again toward the end of his career. In between, they began co-writing tunes, most notably 1988’s “Everybody Knows.” Her role as a principal collaborator on 2001’s ‘Ten New Songs’ earned Robinson a spot on the album cover. The Grammy-winning songwriter, record producer and vocalist joins Preston Frazier to look back in this exclusive Something Else! Sitdown:
PRESTON FRAZIER: I had the opportunity to see Leonard Cohen in May 2009 at the Chicago Theatre. The songs were simply amazing, of course, but the band was stellar. One moment I found profoundly moving was the song “Boogie Street.” You sang the lead vocal and ever since then, I’ve tried to grab everything that you’ve done – and of course, all of Mr. Cohen’s back catalog. So I was particularly enchanted by this tour. How’s it going?
SHARON ROBINSON: I’ve only done two dates. I’ve done New York and Los Angeles. Warming up in the biggest venues in the country! It’s going really well. People are really enjoying the stories and they wanna know more about Leonard and more about our partnership, our collaboration, and how it all came about and how it continued through so many years. So that’s basically what my show is about – and people are really loving it.
PRESTON FRAZIER: When did you decide to embark on this tour?
SHARON ROBINSON: I started writing this in 2017, and I’ve just been developing it slowly all this time. I was gonna tour it in the beginning of 2020, but needless to say the pandemic got in the way, so I just stayed home and kind of worked on it and tweaked it and dug up some more photographs. I’ve been working on it for a while.
PRESTON FRAZIER: You started working with Leonard Cohen in 1979?
SHARON ROBINSON: I had been working in L.A., and I was on a short list for backup singers for session work and backup-singer work on tour and whatnot. Someone gave my name to Jennifer Warnes, so I got a call from Jennifer and she auditioned me first. I guess she had been tasked with finding a singer to tour with Leonard.
They were gonna go to Europe. I got a call from Jennifer, and everything worked out.
PRESTON FRAZIER: Did you have to audition for Mr. Cohen at the time?
SHARON ROBINSON: Jennifer and I got along, and our voices sounded good together and I was a quick study. She could see I could handle the gig, so she brought me over to where Leonard was rehearsing with his band at the time. Roscoe Beck was Leonard’s M.D. at the time, his musical director, and Jennifer and I came over and we started singing and everything seemed to fall into place, as I say in my show.
PRESTON FRAZIER: Roscoe Beck was also my avenue to Jennifer Warnes, because he produced and played bass on her album Famous Blue Raincoat – which, of course, is also Leonard Cohen classic. So you took some time off from his band, and he took some time off from music, as well. I think you did the 1979-80 tour, and then you came back in the late 2000s.
SHARON ROBINSON: He had done some tours in between and some concerts and was using some other singers – and then in 2008, I was hired again to sing with him. But in the meantime, between those years, we had continued to write. We wrote “Everybody Knows,” and we wrote “Waiting for the Miracle” during those years – and so we had stayed in touch. We were also friends, family friends. He was my son’s godfather. We had stayed in touch and then he went up to Mount Baldy. He retreated to become a zen monk. When he came back, he pulled me aside at one of my son’s piano recitals and said, “I have a bunch of new material and I have a bunch of new poems, and I’d like for you to work on an album [Ten New Songs] with me.”
PRESTON FRAZIER: How did your writing partnership develop?
SHARON ROBINSON: In 1980, when I was on that Field Commander Cohen tour with him, Jennifer wasn’t there on the second half of the tour. I was the only backup singer. One day, I had a melody that I thought was really pretty but I didn’t have the words. So I went up to Leonard and I asked him if he wanted to hear it, and he said yes. We went over to a piano in the lobby of a hotel, and I played it for him. He immediately came up with the lyrics to “Summertime,” and we finished it when we got back to L.A. That was the beginning of our writing partnership. It continued sort of gradually after that. Then, as I said, the majority of the songs we wrote together were part of the project for Ten New Songs many years later. He seemed to want to continue the collaboration. When we would hang out as friends, he would always allude to it and seemed to always want my work as part of his body of work. So that was of course, very flattering to me.
PRESTON FRAZIER: I think it went a little bit beyond that, because if I recall the liner notes from Ten New Songs, it wasn’t just your co-writing. You also contributed to the arranging and the playing and the production. How did that develop, because that’s a total change from the album before and the album that came after it?
SHARON ROBINSON: Well, I had always been kind of a jack of all trades in the music business, which was how I’ve managed to be fortunate enough to make my living almost completely in music. Singing, writing, arranging, playing – I did all of that. So, when we started on Ten New Songs, I was able to deliver to Leonard my ideas in a very fleshed out form so that he could really hear what the record was gonna sound like.
PRESTON FRAZIER: Did your presentation go beyond melodic ideas? Did you already have a skeleton in terms of lyrics, or did it vary from song to song?
SHARON ROBINSON: No, he gave me the lyrics. The songs are all his lyrics. He presented me with the lyric first, and then I would bring the lyrics home and sit at my piano and try to figure out the melody that made sense for that lyric – and also a melody that Leonard could sing. I would also present the idea to him in a key. Fortunately, I have a pretty low voice. I can sing pretty low, so I was able to present it to him in a key that he could pretty easily relate to. That made it easy for him to get his head around. A lot of the stuff that I was presenting to him, we also talked about the direction beforehand when he presented me with the words. We would talk about whether it should be up tempo, or whether it should be a ballad, or whether it should be a blues, or we would kind of try to narrow down the basic direction of the song before I went to write it.
PRESTON FRAZIER: You mentioned that you wrote it in a key which you thought was sympathetic to his voice, and I just picked this up your album of demos, We Were Dreamers. One thing I note, beyond the fact that the compositions were wonderful, is that you sing in a different key.
SHARON ROBINSON: Yeah, I guess my voice over the years has gradually deepened – and also as a result of working with Leonard, I’ve cultivated this sort of lower register. I’ve gotten pretty comfortable in my alto register.
PRESTON FRAZIER: The last few tours of Leanord Cohen, you worked with the Webb Sisters. The blend was breathtaking. How did you come up with those parts?
SHARON ROBINSON: I had done some writing for their label, and when we were working on those songs our voices sounded nice together. Charlie has a very sort of high soprano, Hattie is more of a second soprano, and me, with my Alto contribution, the three of us had a blend that was kind of ideal in a way. I remembered our voices sounded nice together. I remembered them when I got the call from Roscoe and Leonard to come in for an upcoming tour. So I brought them in, just as Jennifer had done with me decades earlier. So it worked out. I tried to teach them the arrangements, the vocal arrangements as I knew them – and that was our basic jumping off point.
PRESTON FRAZIER: You would write out the music? Would you teach them around the keyboard? How did that happen?
SHARON ROBINSON: We were mostly at my dining room table. We sat there and we each took our own separate notes, because Hattie and Charlie are from England, and the terminology is a little different in different areas. Like if you’re in Nashville, they’re going to call a bridge the B section. If you’re in England, they’re gonna call it something else. In L.A., they call it something else. There’s different terminology and different ways of writing down or annotating, you know, which note you’re going to sing. Is it in relation to the melody? There are various ways of doing it.
So we each would just listen to Leonard’s recordings and make our own separate notes about which notes, who’s gonna sing what note. But the basic idea was that Charlie would take the top, Hattie would take the middle, and I would take the bottom. I was kind of given free rein and I was just able to express my musical point of view – and, of course I had I tried to keep it in a genre or an area that Leonard would relate to. I was very conscious of that. But there were also things that I knew Leonard would not like. So I had to stay stay within a five- or six-note range on the melodies. I had to stay within a certain key in a certain dynamic range, and whatnot. Also things like syncopation and all that, I couldn’t indulge in too much of that.
PRESTON FRAZIER: You’ve also written for other major artists – for example Patti LaBelle’s “New Attitude.” How did that come about?
SHARON ROBINSON: Well in those days, you tried to write the best song. You could write hopefully something that would be a hit, and then you try and find the avenue for it. That still goes on, but not so much for me. I had written the song, “New Attitude” – we actually wrote it for Thelma Houston. Thelma changed labels right around that time or something – something like that happened, I don’t exactly remember. But she ended up not recording the song. I had signed as an artist with some producers. I played the song for them, not for me, but just so they could hear it. They were in the middle of trying to find a song for the movie Beverly Hills Cop, and one of the producers at the time said, ‘I think I can get this into that movie.’ It’s a long story. He was on vacation, his wife told him no business – and he snuck away from the hotel to send this cassette tape into the label. Anyway, long story short, it got in and it got recorded by Patti.
PRESTON FRAZIER: Tell me about a few of the songs you wrote. How about “Boogie Street.” How did that come about?
SHARON ROBINSON: Leonard handed me a set of typed-out verses of poetry, and I would bring the poetry home and figure out, “Okay, which of these verses sounds like the chorus?” Because in songs, as I’m sure you know, it’s kind of a journey. You set up the story, you take it somewhere else in the bridge, you kind of blend it all together and drive in the nail of what the song is about. Then in the following verse, you think “I need to figure out exactly how to say what I’m trying to say.” A song is a story. So with “Boogie Street,” I would read through the lyrics several times, try to figure out what the story was and how it should be told – and what should be the chorus, which verses should be the setup, etc., etc. I did that with all of the lyrics that Leonard gave me, and he was very pleased with how sometimes I would move things around. Sometimes it wasn’t in the order that he gave it to me in, because a poem is different from a lyric – you know, it’s a different animal. I took on the responsibility of kind of converting the poetry into song lyrics.
PRESTON FRAZIER: Your 2015 release Caffeine had a song which I particularly love, “Strong For Me.” Do you recall how you composed that?
SHARON ROBINSON: My husband was having some health problems at the time, and I just wanted to share with him this idea that I was there for him – you know, through the ordeal. When I put it all together with the lyric idea, the title, the melody, I just felt like, “Okay, this is a strong song.” It was inspired by real life events. I was happy with that, and I still like the song.
PRESTON FRAZIER: How about the song from Leonard Cohen’s Thanks for the Dance, “It’s Torn.” Do you recall that one?
SHARON ROBINSON: Well, that was interesting. The version you’re hearing was produced by Adam Cohen, but my version of the song started out as kind of an experiment. Leonard said, “You know, let’s try writing music that is inspired by the spoken word.” That’s challenging. So I ended up doing this rich orchestral background version and trying to let Leonard’s spoken word inspire a sort of a flowing melody that would go with it. You know, we came up with something. It was interesting – and of course, it’s beautiful because of Leonard’s words.
PRESTON FRAZIER: Finally, what are you five favorite albums?
SHARON ROBINSON: Steely Dan’s Aja, Joni Mitchell’s Ladies of the Canyon, Simon and Garfunkel’s Sounds of Silence, Roberta Flack’s Killing Me Softly and Stan Getz’s Getz/Gilberto.
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