Intro II - Live

Finally one good enough to get me in the Guardian's top hundred songwriters of all time. I’m not bitter about that, you know, at all--(crowd laughs)--That kinda thing...

But one time I came from making a record, I forgot which one it was, but I was proud of it. You know? It happened so infrequently. And I was gonna watch television, and I watched the Making Of--MTV used to have these shows, the Making of This Record and That Record. And they had--and I was watchin, and I felt I could take it. So I watched Stevie Wonder, it was like Songs in the Key of Life. And I'm watching him and he says, "Well this is what I did," and he's got his synthesizer out and making that sound he always made. He put a layer down...and then he put another layer down. It was like watching Bach. And, you know, by the time I’d watched that I wanted to shoot myself. You know, I thought--(crowd laughs)--

And that's what everyone's been telling me, "Ah you're so great." So I look in the paper and it's like, "Leonard Cohen: the greatest songwriter of all time." There's lyrics by Dylan in the paper. Which is good, by the way. I forgot how good he was...sixty years ago (crowd claps). No, I'm just kidding. My God, it's so easy to talk bad about other people. Why do we do it? Does it make me any bigger?