This is really where the races confront one another, where the classes, where the genders, where even the sexual orientations confront one another. That this is really where the experiment is unfolding. It’s a song of deep intimacy and affirmation of the experiment of democracy in this country. Because I think the irony of America is transcendent in the song. So it was these world events that occasioned the song. I think a lot of suffering will be the consequence of this wall coming down.’ But then I asked myself, ‘Where is democracy really coming?’ And it was the U.S.A…So while everyone was rejoicing, I thought it wasn’t going to be like that, euphoric, the honeymoon. And I said, ‘I don’t think it’s going to happen that way. “And I was like that gloomy fellow who always turns up at a party to ruin the orgy or something. This is borne out by the fact that, as he told American Songwriter’s Paul Zollo for the book Songwriters On Songwriting, it was the fall of the Berlin Wall, which took place in 1989, that was the impetus of “Democracy”, which wasn’t completed till three years later.Ĭohen’s initial reaction was a kind of hold-your-horses caution, as he explained to Zollo. In various interviews, Cohen is quoted as having written 50 or more verses for the song over a period of years.
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