I'm hoping Cohen's current tour is miraculously extended to include the United States and a Tampa Bay date, for which I would wait in line all night for a ticket.

In the mean time, I'll have to settle with these awesome interviews he's giving and whatever I can find on YouTube.

From MacLean's.CA:

Q: Why did you need to drink?

A: I was very nervous. And I liked drinking. And I found this wine, it was Château Latour. Now very expensive. It was even expensive then. It’s curious with wine. The wine experts talk about the flavour and the bouquet and whether it has legs and the tannins and the fruit and the symphonies of tastes. But nobody talks about the high. Bordeaux is a wine that vintners have worked on for about 1,000 years. Each wine has a very specific high, which is never mentioned. Château Latour, I don’t know how I stumbled on it, but it went with the music, and it went with the concert. I tried to drink it after the tour was over, and I could hardly get a glass down. It had no resonance whatsoever. It needed the adrenaline of the concert and the music and the atmosphere, the kind of desperate atmosphere of touring—desperate because I was drinking so much! I had a good time with it for a while, but it did wreck my health, and I put on about 25 pounds.

Click here to read the rest of this backstage interview titled "Cohen wore earplugs to a Dylan show?"

Leonard Cohen performing his classic "Hallelujah," May 11, 2008.