Leonard Cohen & Marianne Ihlen in Greece

When Leonard Cohen was living on the Greek isle Hydra in the 1960s with his lover Marianne Ihlen, he was bothered by installation of electricity, particularly the telephone pole and power line visible from the window of his little bungalow. As he told Marianne they would need to move to a more rustic place, a bird alighted on the wire. She told him, “If the bird can get used to it, Leonard, so can you.” That’s the story of his well-known song “Bird on a Wire.”

This great story comes from Judy Scott, a writer who spent many summers in Greece in the early 1960s hanging out with an eclectic community of artists which included the iconic Leonard Cohen. Scott recounted those years in a book, Leonard, Marianne, and Me.