Rhett Miller
“So what is the prophet Cohen telling us? And why do we listen so intently?” Liel Leibovitz asks at the outset of A Broken Hallelujah, his moving portrait of the songwriter and poet Leonard Cohen. The author pursues the answers to these questions with the diligence and reverence of a religious scholar. Thank God. But Leibovitz recognizes that Cohen deserves more than mere rock biography, and so he structures A Broken Hallelujah around the premise that his subject is, indeed, a modern-day prophet. I was lucky enough to know Elliott Smith a little. We both lived in LA for a while and spent many nights at the oldLargo nightclub in Hollywood. At the very end of the ’90s, Largo’s owner, Mark Flanagan, asked me to participate in a charity song swap to benefit St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. I was to sit on a stage with Jon Brion, Fiona Apple, and Elliott. In the greenroom before the gig, Elliott, whom I had just met, was nervously mumbling about how lousy he was, that he didn’t belong on a stage with such great performers, 