In addition to “Happens to the Heart,” they include “Moving On,” “Thanks for the Dance,” and “The Hills.” They do not include “The Goal,” but you can stream three different versions on the Nowness site. I remember that I quoted a few famous lines from “Bird on the Wire” - “Like a bird on the wire/ Like a drunk in a midnight choir/ I have tried, in my way, to be free”, and said, “Put simply, if I could write like that, I would.Four of those short films are available on YouTube, and you can watch them here. My job that evening was to present Leonard Cohen with his award. Then we went out to meet the audience and the ceremonies began. That’s unimportant, I’m just here to celebrate you, let bygones be bygones. “Yeah,” Chuck Berry mused, “but we had a problem.”Īgain Keith very generously reassured him. Old story, water under the bridge, and so on. After Keith greeted him in the green room and congratulated him, Mr Berry, with furrowed brow, asked, “Hey… did we have a problem?” Chuck, who was 85, seemed to have a poor memory of the past. The two had famously fallen out during the making of the film Hail, Hail, Rock ‘n’ Roll, and hadn’t seen each other since, so Keith’s appearance was a nice olive branch. Keith Richards showed up to support and applaud Chuck Berry.

Kennedy Library in Boston, introduced by Caroline Kennedy, and almost everybody came (Bono and Smokey couldn’t make it). The award event took place at the John F. we settled on Chuck Berry and Leonard Cohen as the first recipients.

In that first year, after much discussion. We decided, to lend drama to the event, that instead of giving out one award a year we would give out two every two years.

This was the jury, convened by music industry good guy extraordinaire Bill Flanagan, author, journalist, ex-MTV and VH1 exec, radio host, etc etc: Bono, Rosanne Cash, Elvis Costello, Smokey Robinson, Paul Simon, the poet Paul Muldoon, and me. In the end, the goal was achieved after my presidency ended, by PEN’s New England branch in Boston, and a jury was convened. When I was president of PEN America, I argued that we lived in a great age of lyrics writing - Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Holland-Dozier-Holland of Motown fame, as well as several of the folks pictured above - and we should expand the definition of literary excellence to include this work. Geils Band, Shawn Colvin, Paul Simon, Leonard Cohen, Chuck Berry, Keith Richards, Bill Flanagan (L to R): Tom Perrotta, me, Elvis Costello, Peter Wolf of the J.

The goal leonard cohen lyrics