Curator

August 2025

By the time Leonard Cohen recorded his debut album in 1967, he was already a well-established poet and novelist. His first poetry collection, Let Us Compare Mythologies, appeared in 1956, and would be followed over the next ten years by three more poetry books and two novels. He would run into the Beat poets during his travels in the 1950s and befriend some of them, but Cohen was never really a part of any literary movement.

Similarly, his music is not easy to peg. He made his mark in a time when popular music, especially rock ’n’ roll, was growing in both sales and esteem, but he was never a rock star—though he was undeniably a star. He was sometimes described as a folk musician because his early music was acoustic-guitar-based, but that designation doesn’t entirely fit either.

Cohen led an unusually eventful life that included living and writing on a Greek island and performing in Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. He was elegant in attire and manner, literate and nuanced in thought and expression. He wasn’t prolific. He often took several years between albums and recorded only 15 albums in 40 years. However, he made his last four recordings at what was for him a quick pace—one every other year or so—and they took as their subjects age, mortality, spirituality, and much more.

Leonard Norman Cohen was born on September 21, 1934, in the Royal Victoria Hospital in Westmount, Quebec, an enclave of Montreal. His mother, Marsha Cohen, née Klonitsky, came to Canada in 1927 from Lithuania. Her father was a Talmudic scholar and rabbi. Cohen’s father, Nathan, was a successful clothier. Nathan’s grandfather, Lazarus, came to Canada from Lithuania in 1860 and two years later sent for his wife and son, Lyon, Nathan’s father.

Lazarus and Lyon were scholarly, active in their synagogues, and committed to helping Jewish refugees who came to Canada. Both were also successful businessmen. Lyon’s sons, Nathan and Horace, attended McGill University and served in the Canadian army during World War I. When Lyon died in 1937, his sons continued to run a successful clothing-manufacturing business their father had taken ownership of in 1906.

According to Sylvie Simmons’s I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen, “after his return from the war, Nathan suffered recurring periods of ill health, which left him increasingly invalid.” Nathan died in 1944, when Leonard was nine. “I didn’t feel a profound sense of loss,” he said in a 1991 interview, which Simmons quotes in her book. “Maybe because he was very ill throughout my entire childhood. It seemed natural that he died.” Nathan Cohen died aged 51.

Leonard Cohen grew up attending schools in Montreal. The first was Roslyn Elementary School, then Herzliah High School, a Jewish day school, for grades 7 through 9. He graduated from Westmount High School, where he was active in the arts club, the current-events club, and the menorah club, which strove to integrate Hebrew and Jewish culture into the school’s curriculum. Cohen was popular enough that he became the student-council president.

When Cohen was 15, he found a copy of The Collected Poems of Federico García Lorca at a used bookshop. He told an interviewer in 1990 that García Lorca “was the first poet who really touched me. I remember coming upon a book of his when I was fifteen or sixteen, and the universe he revealed and the lands he inhabited seemed very familiar. I think that’s what you look for when you read poetry; you look for someone to illuminate a landscape that you thought you alone walked on. Lorca did that for me.” García Lorca, born in Spain and assassinated in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War, wrote startling poems full of surrealist imagery and complex symbolism.

García Lorca’s Theory and Play Of The Duende describes the mysterious dimensions of artistic inspiration, its difficulties and ecstasies, and its necessity in creating transcendent art. The essay is itself an exercise in poetic flights, and to plumb its depths would require more space than I can give it here; however, it is as good a place as any to get an idea of what García Lorca was trying to achieve and the enigmatic nature of his poems.

Cohen soon began writing poetry. He also taught himself how to play the guitar after he found an acoustic guitar in a pawn shop. He attended a summer camp in 1950 where he happened upon The People’s Songbook, a collection of folk songs one of the camp counsellors had brought with him. Cohen learned the songs in the book and, according to Simmons’s biography, could still remember and play them 50 years later.

Cohen continued to practice those folk songs after he got home from camp, but he also took a few lessons from a flamenco guitarist in Montreal. When he won the Princess of Asturias Award in Spain in 2011, he said in his acceptance speech that “it was that guitar pattern that has been the basis of all my songs, and of all my music.”

Cohen’s mother had remarried in 1950, but his stepfather would, like his father, develop a serious illness that required her care. Leonard spent time reading, writing poetry, and wandering around Montreal with his best friend, hoping to meet girls. The pursuit of women and the mysteries of sex are recurring themes in Cohen’s work.

Biographies of Cohen, including Simmons’s and Ira B. Nadel’s Various Positions: A Life of Leonard Cohen (1996), speak at some length about his fascination—obsession, perhaps—with the female form. His first published novel, 1963’s The Favourite Game, includes a story of the narrator’s attempt to hypnotize the family maid in order to get her to disrobe. Both biographies claim the story is based on an event in Cohen’s life.

In the fall of 1951, Cohen entered McGill University as a freshman at 17. Attending McGill meant Cohen would still be in Montreal, but now at a prestigious university. Notable McGill graduates include Canadian prime ministers, Nobel Prize winners in science, presidents and leaders of countries throughout the world, and a remarkable number of alumni who went on to lead universities in the US. Just a few years before Cohen entered McGill, Burt Bacharach studied music there, and the school’s many contributions to the arts and entertainment include actors William Shatner and Hume Cronyn.

Cohen was a liberal-arts major and an undistinguished student, but he was president of the debating club and began publishing poems in the college’s literary magazine. He and his friends were known for being sharply dressed, a habit he adopted in high school and would carry with him for the rest of his life.

Cohen’s interests, both in high school and college, did not include studying. “He was always writing and drawing, even in his teens,” his friend Arnold Steinberg told Simmons. “And he never went anywhere without a notepad. He would draw sketches endlessly, but mostly he wrote. He would have ideas and he wrote them down, and he would write poems. Writing was his passion and so much a part of him.”

Cohen’s grandfather, Rabbi Solomon Klonitzki-Kline, had moved into his daughter’s house. According to Simmons’s biography, he would spend time with Leonard reading and discussing the book of Isaiah, “which the rabbi knew by heart and which Leonard came to love for its poetry, imagery and prophecy.” His grandfather was pleased that Leonard was a writer. “He was known as Sar HaDikduki, the Prince of Grammarians,” Cohen told an interviewer. “And he wrote a thesaurus of Talmudic interpretation and a dictionary of synonyms and homonyms.”

While poetry was Cohen’s primary interest in college, he continued to play guitar and sing. He started a country-and-western trio with two college classmates; the Buckskin Boys played at square dances held at high schools and churches. Cohen also played guitar and sang at parties on campus and spent time practicing in his dorm room or at the frat house.

“We used to listen to music a lot,” Morton Rosengarten, one of Cohen’s oldest friends, told Simmons. “Leonard, even before he started to write his own stuff, was relentless. He would play a song, whether it was ‘Home on the Range’ or whatever, over and over and over all day, play it on his guitar and sing it. When he was learning a song he would play it thousands of times, all day, for days and days and weeks, the same song, over and over, fast and slow, faster, this and that. It would drive you crazy.”

Cohen admired many of his professors at McGill, several of whom were writers and poets. His favorite was the poet Irving Layton. “There was Irving Layton and then there was the rest of us,” Cohen said at Layton’s funeral in 2006. “He is our greatest poet, our greatest champion of poetry.” Layton was disheveled and larger than life, in contrast to Cohen, who was always well-attired and reserved.

Layton guided Cohen in his studies of great poets, and Cohen attended parties at Layton’s house; there, he met other poets and read his own work to them. Louis Dudek, another Canadian poet who taught at McGill, attended those parties. He already knew Cohen’s work and had encouraged him to develop it. Layton and Dudek edited a literary magazine, CIV/n, which was mimeographed and had limited distribution. Cohen’s first published poem appeared in the March 1954 edition of the magazine.

Cohen’s poetry continued to gain attention, and The Forge, McGill’s literary magazine, soon published his work. He won first prize in McGill’s Chester Macnaghten Literary Competition for “Sparrow” and a four-part poem titled Thoughts of a Landsman. Both had been published in The Forge, and Thoughts of a Landsman included “For Wilf and His House.” That poem’s opening stanza gives some indication of Cohen’s talent for striking imagery and poetic rhythm and melody:

When young the Christians told me
how we pinned Jesus
like a lovely butterfly against the wood,
and I wept beside paintings of Calvary
at velvet wounds
and delicate twisted feet.

Layton was a dynamic performer at his poetry readings, and on occasion he invited Cohen onstage to read. The younger poet sometimes accompanied himself on guitar. Cohen was not, technically, a student of Layton’s, who advised him academically but treated him as a colleague. Cohen studied under other instructors at McGill, including Dudek and novelist Hugh MacLennan.

Ira Nadel’s Various Positions notes the important contributions of those other writers but emphasizes Layton’s role: “Of all Cohen’s mentors at McGill, however, Irving Layton was unquestionably the most influential.” Layton’s work embodied two strains that would inform Cohen’s work. “[He] forced a new vitality into moribund poetic forms,” Nadel wrote, “and linked the prophetic with the sexual.”

Cohen graduated from McGill in 1955 with a BA and attended law school briefly before enrolling in graduate school at Columbia University. Nadel wrote that Cohen “needed a freer artistic world, one without boundaries or roots.” By the time he moved to New York, McGill had published his first collection of poems, Let Us Compare Mythologies, part of a McGill-planned series to introduce new writers.

Although Dudek was listed as the editor, Cohen oversaw the collection, including the artwork. The book was well reviewed in Canada. Northrop Frye, a prominent Canadian literary critic, gave the book positive, if restrained praise. Nadel’s biography of Cohen noted several themes In Let Us Compare Mythologies that would recur in Cohen’s work: “History, especially related to Jewish persecution, and the Holocaust; sexuality and attraction to women; lyrical sensuality; anger; cultural stereotypes; religion; and frustration with art or history as a means of solving personal crises.”

García Lorca had studied at Columbia and Louis Dudek had received a PhD there, but rather than throw himself into his studies, Cohen spent his year in New York writing poetry and running into the Beat writers. The Beats wrote about jazz, sex, and openness to life, and they were a significant phenomenon in American literature at the time. They challenged bourgeois mores and traditional approaches to writing. Cohen’s work was, by comparison, structured and old-fashioned. He told Simmons in an interview that “I felt close to those guys, and I later bumped into them here and there, although I can’t describe myself remotely as part of that circle.”

Cohen was approaching the end of his time in New York when Folkways Records released Six Montreal Poets, a collection of readings organized and recorded by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. That LP was the first time Leonard Cohen’s voice appeared on a record, as he read poems from Let Us Compare Mythologies.

He was back in Montreal in the summer of 1957. “He had enjoyed the beat culture,” Nadel wrote, “but he realized he would always be an outsider; his roots were in Montreal.” He moved home and worked on completing his first novel, Ballet of Lepers. He submitted it to several publishers, but it was rejected and remained unpublished until after he died.

After having lived on his own in New York, Cohen decided he needed to move into an apartment upon returning to Montreal. He supported himself by working for a couple of businesses run by his uncles. He appeared onstage in a jazz club, reading his poetry to accompaniment by a jazz group—something he picked up from the Beats. He also sang and played guitar.

He eventually had a falling out with Louis Dudek, who published an essay critical of Cohen’s poetry. But he still had a champion in Irving Layton, who encouraged his writing and helped him apply for grants. In the spring of 1959, he and Layton both received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts. In May, Cohen drove to Toronto to deliver his second collection of poems to publisher Jack McClelland, whom he had contacted by mail a few weeks earlier.

McClelland had taken over the publishing firm McClelland & Stewart from his father and was eager to bring attention to Canadian writers. He skimmed the poems and decided on the spot to publish them. “I said OK, we’re going to publish this guy,” he told Nadel. “I don’t give a shit if the poetry’s good, although I did look at a couple of the poems and thought they were pretty good.”

Cohen applied for a passport soon after he got his grant from the Canada Council, and in December he left for London. On the day he arrived, he bought a typewriter and a blue raincoat that he would later immortalize in song. He moved into a boarding house that catered to artists and writers, and one of the conditions the owner set was that her tenant must complete three pages of writing each day. He wrote poems and completed the first draft of a second novel.

McClelland & Stewart had sent Cohen the manuscript of his poetry collection for revision while he was in London. He returned it with the hope it would appear in print by March. That publishing date passed, and by the spring of 1960 Cohen was ready to leave London and continue traveling. His application to the Canada Council noted that he would be visiting several important cities; in April he spent four days in Jerusalem and then moved on to Athens.

Cohen remembered that a friend in London had told him about Hydra, a small Greek island in the Aegean Sea. He took a ferry to the island from Athens. “As soon as he set eyes on Hydra in the distance,” Simmons wrote, “before the ferry even entered the port, Leonard liked it.” Artists and writers from around the world visited Hydra to work amid its beauty and isolation. Cohen quickly made friends and found a place to live and work. His grandmother died that summer while he was on Hydra, and with a small inheritance from her he bought a house there.

He also fell in love on Hydra. “There were muses before Marianne in Leonard’s poetry and song, and there have been muses since,” Simmons wrote. “But if there were a contest, the winner, certainly the people’s choice, would be Marianne.” By the time Cohen met Marianne Ihlen, she had a young son and was separated from her husband.

Marianne and her son moved into Cohen’s house on Hydra, and he continued to write. In November 1960, Cohen accompanied Marianne and her son briefly to Oslo so she could complete her divorce proceedings. Cohen then returned to Montreal to apply for another Canada Council grant and to work with Layton on some teleplays they both hoped to sell. Marianne and her son joined him in Montreal.

Cohen spent some time in Cuba in March and April 1961, just before McClelland & Stewart released The Spice-Box of Earth, his second book of poetry. The publisher had rejected the novel he had written during his stay in London. Cohen took in the sights in post-revolution Cuba and spent time talking and hanging out with people there. He had arrived in the country with a romantic view of Cuba and Castro, but a close look at the actual conditions revealed a more complex picture.

At one point, a Canadian official came to his hotel room and escorted him to the Canadian Embassy. Cohen thought his activities might have attracted attention, but it turned out his mother was worried about him and had contacted the embassy to check up on him. By the end of April Cohen was back in Montreal, and a month later The Spice-Box of Earth appeared in bookstores.

The Spice-Box of Earth was well received by critics. Cohen was both traditional and forward-looking, which made it hard to place him within any specific movement in poetry. The poems in the book touched on themes that would become familiar as Cohen’s career as a poet and songwriter developed. “Sex and spirituality share a bed in several poems,” Simmons wrote. Cohen also touched on the religion and culture that formed him. He wrote three poems about his grandfather, and in “Lines from My Grandfather’s Journal” he wrote that “it is strange that even now prayer is my natural language.”

By August 1961, Cohen had received a grant from the Canada Council and was back at work on Hydra. He dabbled in some of the drugs that were popular with artists and intellectuals, including marijuana and LSD. The latter disagreed with his stomach, so he did not take it often, though it did influence some of his poems.

Cohen returned to London in March 1962 to revise his second novel, which an English publisher, Secker & Warburg, had accepted after his Canadian publisher rejected it. He stayed for two months, revising the novel and working on another book of poetry. By July, he was back on Hydra with Marianne and her son. His mother came to visit for a month; after she left, he continued work on the novel, which he would publish as The Favourite Game.

The Favourite Game appeared on shelves in September 1963 in the UK, and Viking picked it up for publication in the US a year later. The book was based on events in Cohen’s life, but he disapproved of it being treated as autobiography rather than fiction. Though it received glowing notices, the novel didn’t appear in print in Canada until 1970. Apparently McClelland thought of Cohen as a poet rather than a novelist.

Cohen traveled back and forth between Hydra and Montreal, returning home to make money that enabled him to live and write in Greece. Marianne and her son usually stayed on Hydra while Cohen returned to Canada to apply for grants and look for other work. Throughout 1964 he was revising a new poetry collection he had submitted to McClelland & Stewart.

Cohen wanted to title the new collection Opium for Hitler, but McClelland asked him to change it; Cohen instead chose Flowers for Hitler. The book appeared in the fall of 1964. “Thematically, Flowers for Hitler was not entirely new for Leonard,” Simmons wrote. “There had been sex, violence, murder and the Holocaust in his first two books of poems, as well as songs to lovers and celebrations of teachers and friends. What was different was its style. It was much less formal and its language freer and more contemporary.”

Despite its difficult subjects and methods, Flowers for Hitler was another critical success for Cohen and raised his stock even higher in the literary community. He poured himself into a third novel, which was turning out to be highly experimental.

In December 1963, Cohen gave a lecture titled “Loneliness and History” at a symposium called “The Future of Judaism in Canada” at the Jewish Public Library in Montreal. “He startled the audience,” Nadel wrote, “with an indictment of the community’s neglect and indifference to its artists.” According to Simmons, he “castigated the Montreal Jewish community for abandoning the spiritual for the material.”

This article in the Jewish Journal presents a detailed look at Cohen’s speech. “At one point, he breaks off, seemingly distracted by someone in the audience snickering or perhaps rolling their eyes,” Matthew Schultz wrote. “‘I take this seriously,’ he says to the eye-roller, and then he continues where he left off.” Indeed, Cohen’s faith and the Jewish culture he grew up with defined his work, his intellect, and his emotions.

There’s much more to the speech, as well as to Cohen’s faith, than can be reasonably covered here, but it put him at odds with his uncles and with the Jewish community in Montreal. It also made headlines across Canada. “His indictment made the front page of the Canadian Jewish Chronicle,” Simmons wrote, “with the headline POET-NOVELIST SAYS JUDAISM BETRAYED.”

In the winter of 1965 in Montreal he met another muse, Suzanne Verdal. His relationship with Marianne was becoming difficult at times, in part because of the time they spent apart, in part because it was an open relationship. The first time Cohen saw Suzanne Verdal, she was dancing with her husband at a nightclub.

Verdal was gaining recognition as an avant-garde dancer who designed her own costumes for performances. She hosted gatherings for artists in her Montreal apartment. She and Cohen became friends, walking through Old Montreal and sitting in her apartment drinking tea and eating oranges. She would be the inspiration for a poem and, later, a song.

In a burst of drug-fueled energy and inspiration, Cohen returned to his third novel, completing it in long writing sessions at his house on Hydra. When he completed the book, he took to fasting and suffered a severe depression. It wasn’t his first bout with the illness; he would struggle with it throughout his life. It ran in his family, especially on his mother’s side, and he had lapsed into it during his early visits to New York and London. This time it was more severe, probably amplified by the amphetamines and LSD he took while writing the novel.

McClelland & Stewart published Cohen’s novel Beautiful Losers in the spring of 1966. The book was highly experimental, challenging in its use of symbolism, and graphically sexual. Reviews were mixed. Canadian critic Robert Fulford praised some aspects of the book but also called it “the most revolting book ever written in Canada.” He also said it was “probably the most interesting Canadian book of the year.”

Beautiful Losers would in time gain a reputation as an important postmodern Canadian novel, but it did not sell many copies. Still, Cohen had gained enough notoriety as a writer that the National Film Board of Canada commissioned a documentary centered on his activities. Originally the film was supposed to include other poets who, with Cohen, went on a tour of Canada. Cohen’s footage was the most interesting, so the filmmakers created Ladies and Gentlemen . . . Mr. Leonard Cohen. The CBC television network broadcast the documentary in 1965. Cohen was an active participant in its creation and commented throughout on the nature of fame, creating an image, and appearing on film.

Cohen had become a respected figure, but he still had to scramble for grants to stay afloat as a writer. His fourth poetry collection, Parasites of Heaven, received mixed notices and poor sales. He wanted to try something else that might be more lucrative.

It’s not clear when Leonard Cohen made up his mind to take a shot at music. In a 1967 interview for the Village Voice, he said he decided to “go to Nashville and become a songwriter” after he completed Beautiful Losers and was coming out of his depression. His friends recalled different instances in which Cohen told them about his intention to write and sing songs, but all agreed they took place in 1966.

Cohen had played guitar since he was a teen and had on quite a few occasions played and sung for friends. Ladies and Gentlemen . . . Mr. Leonard Cohen includes footage of him singing. He did a poetry reading in New York in February 1966 and closed with a song. Marianne even reported that he was talking about making records in the early 1960s. Simmons said of Cohen’s drift towards music, “It happened by degrees, sometimes in public, more often in private, alone or with friends.”

While both Simmons and Nadel were clear that Cohen liked music and thought of it as a legitimate way for him to express himself, they were also clear that a larger concern moved him to try his hand at songwriting. As Simmons wrote, “Everybody, including Leonard, agrees on why he decided to be a singer-songwriter: economics.” He was well regarded as a poet, but he wasn’t making a living at it.

“Beautiful Losers had had good reviews but marginal sales,” Nadel wrote in Various Positions.“The Favourite Game had sold approximately two hundred copies in Canada and one thousand in the United States. Cohen realized that unless he chose the unattractive path of a university post, he could not survive as a writer, despite the critical praise.”

Initially, Cohen planned to go to Nashville to try to break into music, but first he stopped in New York. He stayed at a few hotels, finally settling in at the Chelsea on West 23rd street, which had a long history as a haunt for writers, artists, and musicians. While Cohen was there, he ran into Allen Ginsberg, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, and Janis Joplin.

Cohen arrived in New York with some money that his close friend Robert Hershorn had given him. Hershorn was from a wealthy Montreal family and was close to many of Cohen’s friends in the city’s artistic community. He arranged for Cohen to meet Mary Martin, who had moved there from Toronto in 1962 and had subsequently established a successful artist-management company.

Cohen played some of his songs for Martin, and she got in touch with folk singer Judy Collins. Collins had arrived in New York in 1961 and was picked up by Elektra Records after Jac Holzman, the company’s president, heard her at the Village Gate. She was recording her fifth album when Martin called her.

According to Nadel’s bio, Collins decided to record “Suzanne” after Cohen played it for her over the phone. Collins told Simmons, on the other hand, that she asked Cohen to play some songs for her after they met for dinner, and decided to record “Suzanne” and “Dress Rehearsal Rag” as soon as she heard them. Both were included on her fifth album, In My Life, released in late 1966. Holzman said, “Those two songs were the glue we needed to hold it all together.”

Collins told Simmons, “His songs—there was nothing like them around. Nobody, including Dylan. Leonard was an unskilled, untrained musician, but because of his intelligence and sheer stubbornness, I suppose, he taught himself the guitar and he came up with songs which were very unusual—the melodic structure is not something that you would normally find and there are unexpected changes and twists and turns in every piece he does. They’re brilliant, articulate, literary and utterly beyond.” Cohen continued to send her songs, and, as she told Simmons, “I think there was a Leonard song on practically every album after that.”

After two months in New York, Cohen had a manager and two songs on a major artist’s album, so he decided to remain there. He continued writing songs and working on his guitar skills, although his playing remained somewhat simple. “The more he played, the more songs would come,” Simmons wrote. “It was as if his relatively minimal skills as a guitar player added a simplicity to the proceedings.”

Cohen returned briefly to Montreal, but by early 1967 he was back in New York and hanging around the East Village, where Andy Warhol was holding his Exploding Plastic Inevitable art shows, which featured the Velvet Underground. He met Lou Reed, who told him how much he’d enjoyed Beautiful Losers. Cohen became entranced by the band’s other singer, Nico. He continued to write songs, including several about Nico—who did not return his affections.

Judy Collins’s fifth album was her biggest-selling up to that point, and “Suzanne” brought Cohen enough attention that John Hammond, a director of artists and repertoire for Columbia Records, noticed. Hammond had been with the label since the 1930s and had signed Billie Holiday, Count Basie, and Bob Dylan, among many others. He would later add Bruce Springsteen to the label’s roster.

When Hammond expressed admiration for Cohen’s songs on the Judy Collins record, Mary Martin pressed the advantage. Martin had Cohen record a demo tape and delivered it to Hammond’s office. Hammond invited Cohen to lunch and then asked if he could come back to the Chelsea and listen to him play some of his songs. After Cohen played and sang for an hour, Hammond told him, “You’ve got it, Leonard.”

When Hammond told Columbia Records that he was signing Leonard Cohen to the label, they were skeptical. Rock music, not folk, was in ascendance in 1967, and Cohen, in his thirties, was not a likely teen idol. Hammond stayed firm, and Columbia signed Cohen in April. By the middle of May he was in the recording studio, with Hammond producing. Cohen had never been in a recording studio and found working with studio musicians intimidating. After some early sessions with a larger band, Hammond had him record while accompanying himself on guitar, with Willie Ruff on bass.

Cohen set the mood in the studio by asking for the studio lights to be turned off so he could light candles. He also lit incense and brought in a full-length mirror, because he always practiced in front of a mirror. He worked on the album over the next five months in three different recording studios. He was also performing during those months, including an appearance at the Newport Folk Festival that Collins had arranged.

He met Joni Mitchell at Newport, and they had a brief romance that inspired songs by both. Cohen continued recording his first album, despite the fact that John Hammond had moved on. The reasons given for Hammond dropping out vary. Nadel and other sources say he became ill and had to leave, but Simmons says that as recording went on, Cohen was leaning towards something beyond the vocal-and-guitar album Hammond had envisioned.

Columbia assigned John Simon to produce Cohen’s album. He was a staff producer for the label who had produced the hit single “Red Rubber Ball,” a song by Paul Simon that the group the Cyrkle had recorded. Simon listened to the recordings Cohen had made so far and brought him back into the studio in October. Between the sessions with Hammond and Simon, Cohen recorded 25 songs, many of them requiring multiple takes before he was satisfied.

The recordings with Simon continued to feature Cohen on guitar and vocals. When they were completed, Simon overdubbed background vocals and other instruments. Cohen disagreed with many of Simon’s changes, and the producer “finally threw up his hands,” Cohen told Simmons. “He said, ‘You mix it. I’m going on vacation.’”

Columbia Records released Songs of Leonard Cohen in late December 1967. His photo on the cover looks more like something that would appear on a book’s dust jacket than a record album. Some of the changes Cohen wanted couldn’t be realized, but he was able to take out many of the things that bothered him.

The album opens with “Suzanne,” which Judy Collins had already introduced in a stirring and impressive version on In My Life. From the first notes of Cohen’s guitar on his version, it’s obvious that his take on the song is definitive. His guitar intro sets a contemplative tone, and when he begins to sing the tempo shifts subtly.

The lyrics to the song originally appeared in Parasites of Heaven as a poem called “Suzanne Takes You Down.” The subject of the poem is Cohen’s friendship with Suzanne Verdal, and it begins with his memories of them having tea and talking (“She feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China”). Cohen describes a deep connection that allows them to communicate without words, but he also describes his longing for her. The chorus closes with “for you’ve touched her perfect body with your mind.”

Cohen gives the relationship with Suzanne a spiritual dimension by singing a verse about Jesus (“And Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water / And he spent a long time watching from his lonely wooden tower”). Religious imagery crops up throughout the album. “The Stranger Song” uses gambling, especially poker, as a metaphor for complex, unfulfilled relationships and the search for meaning in life. “He was just some Joseph searching for a manger,” Cohen sings at two points in the song.

“So Long, Marianne” was Cohen’s tribute to Marianne Ihlen. “I didn’t think I was saying goodbye, but I guess I was,” Cohen wrote in the liner notes to his Greatest Hits. He wrote “Sisters of Mercy” about two women he met during a snowstorm in Edmonton. “Winter Lady,” about a one-night stand or an encounter with a prostitute, is probably the most down-to-earth song on the album, but all the lyrics on the album are open to so much varied interpretation that they are still being pored over more than 50 years later.

Although Cohen supervised the final mix on the album, many of John Simon’s ideas for Cohen’s songs remained. The background vocals and strings lend “Suzanne” an ethereal air, and the harmonium adds a touch of whimsy to “Sisters of Mercy.” The tremolo on the electric guitar on “Master Song” gives the song an edge, and the single-note guitar melodies on “Winter Lady” bring a blues tint to the track. There are no musicians credited on the album cover, but guitar great David Lindley was among the supporting talent.

Cohen’s guitar is still at the center of the arrangements. As with most self-taught players, he stumbled onto his own style, and he shifts keys and tempos as the mood in a song changes. One of the musicians on the sessions, Chris Darrow, told Simmons, “He had this sort of amorphous guitar style that was very circular.”

His voice is emotive but controlled. Cohen—like Bob Dylan and Lou Reed, two other poetic songwriters—was not a traditionally “good” singer. Robert Christgau called his voice a “charcoal monotone,” an accurate description that still doesn’t quite capture how deeply his vocals resonate emotionally. He never pushes, and he stays within a somewhat narrow range. His guitar playing on the album also follows repeated patterns that help reinforce the thematic connections between songs.

Reviews for Songs of Leonard Cohen were lukewarm, and it didn’t chart in the US or Canada. It was so popular in the UK, however, that it remained on the charts there for a year. Cohen was popular there throughout his career. The album now ranks with critics among the best recordings of the ’60s, and its songs have been covered by many other singers.

Cohen was garnering enough attention from his music that his American publisher, Viking, decided to release his novel Beautiful Losers and Selected Poems 1956–1968 in June 1968. He was thinking about what to do for his second album when Joni Mitchell got in touch with him to tell him she’d talked David Crosby into producing it.

Crosby booked sessions in May 1968 at Columbia’s studio in Los Angeles, where he had recorded with the Byrds. He had been unsuccessful in trying to produce an album for Mitchell; it turned out he couldn’t help Cohen either. “It’s an embarrassing story for me and a bitter pill to swallow because I could produce him now in a minute,” he told Simmons. “But then I had no idea how to record him.”

Cohen bumped into Bob Johnston while in LA. Johnston came from a family of songwriters, and he had been in the music industry for about ten years when he started working as a producer for Columbia. He had worked with Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, and Simon & Garfunkel. In the first few months of 1968 alone, Columbia released three hit LPs that Johnston had produced: Dylan’s John Wesley Harding, Cash’s At Folsom Prison, and Simon & Garfunkel’s Bookends.

Johnston told Cohen he had wanted to produce the singer’s first album. “I liked the way he talked and how he understood my first album,” Cohen told an interviewer, “exactly what was good and what was bad about it.” Johnston had rented a farm in the Nashville area that belonged to songwriter Boudleaux Bryant. He handed Cohen the keys and told him to move in.

After a brief trip to Hydra and a stop in London to appear on John Peel’s show on BBC radio and on a live TV show, Cohen returned to Nashville in September to begin work on his second album. Johnston’s recording engineer, Neil Wilburn, set up the microphones. “For Leonard’s album they used three microphones on his vocal,” Simmons wrote, “putting them through old echo plates for reverb.”

They recorded one song with Cohen alone on guitar and vocals. “Then I played it back to him,” Johnston told Simmons. “His voice sounded like a goddamn mountain. When he heard it he said, ‘Is that what I’m supposed to sound like?’ I said, ‘You’re goddamn right.’”

Cohen asked Johnston to bring in musicians he knew for the session, so the producer pulled in players who were outside the mainstream in Nashville, including Charlie Daniels, who was years away from fame. Daniels told Simmons, “The main thing was being part of it but unobtrusive, very transparent, nothing that would distract from his lyric and melody.”

Columbia released Songs from a Room in April 1969. The cover photo of Cohen looks washed-out, somewhat overexposed. The rear cover shows Marianne Ihlen sitting at a desk in Cohen’s house on Hydra, wrapped only in a towel and typing. Cohen had written “Bird on the Wire,” which opens the album, during his stopover on Hydra a few months earlier. Its lyrics embody Cohen’s life and work at that point—courtly, but only faithful in his own manner, and acknowledging that any pain or discomfort he caused is because of his own character flaws.

The song is slightly outside Cohen’s range, and his performance is tentative, which adds to its effectiveness. Johnston gave the song a string arrangement that doesn’t overpower Cohen’s guitar or voice. A simple bass-guitar line helps anchor the song. Cohen was never satisfied with his performance of it on the record and revisited it live many times.

“Story of Isaac” retells the biblical tale from Genesis. When Cohen introduced the song for a performance included on Live Songs, he told the audience, “This is a song called ‘The Story of Isaac,’ and it’s about those who would sacrifice one generation on behalf of another.” As he noted in another performance of the song, “at the last moment before he was about to sacrifice Isaac, an angel held the hand of the father. But today the children are being sacrificed and no one raises a hand to end the sacrifice. And this is what this song is about.”

“Seems So Long Ago, Nancy” tells the tragic story of an acquaintance of Cohen’s, a woman who suffered from depression and killed herself. “The Butcher” is a blues tune that uses Old and New Testament imagery to contrast spiritual expectations with earthly realities and disappointments. “The Old Revolution” describes the disillusionment that can flow out of political activism.

Johnston gave the songs simple backing that leaves Cohen’s guitar and vocals at the center. For “The Partisan,” an adaptation of an anti-fascist song, Johnston flew to France to have backing vocals dubbed onto the recording. “Story of Isaac” uses a prominent bass line and light keyboards. “A Bunch of Lonesome Heroes” includes a distorted guitar line, a new element for Cohen, but it’s still understated and doesn’t overshadow his voice.

Songs from a Room is not dramatically different from Cohen’s debut, aside from being a bit more simply arranged. Reviews, like those for Cohen’s debut, were mixed. It did better on the charts in Canada and the US than Songs of Leonard Cohen had, and it was another very popular release for him in the UK, where it hit #2.

Cohen spent some time in Nashville, and after a trip to Canada he returned to the Chelsea Hotel in New York. He dabbled briefly in Scientology, and during one visit to the Scientology center in New York he met artist and photographer Suzanne Elrod. She moved into the Chelsea with him. They would be together until 1979 and had two children, Adam and Lorca.

Columbia Records was pressuring him to tour, but Cohen wasn’t confident of his ability to perform onstage. He asked Johnston to manage the tour and to play keyboards. Johnston put together a band with the musicians who had appeared on Songs from a Room, and they played dates in Europe beginning in April 1970.

In August, Cohen appeared at two music festivals, one in France and one on the Isle of Wight off the coast of England. Organizers expected 150,000 for the five days of the Isle of Wight Festival 1970, but more than a half million arrived on the island. As had occurred a year before at Woodstock, the promoters made it a free festival.

Like Woodstock, the Isle of Wight Festival became uncomfortable because of the unplanned influx of people. Tensions ran high. Singer Kris Kristofferson had to dodge bottles and endure boos during his performance. “They were booing everybody,” Kristofferson told Simmons. Cohen came onstage early in the morning on the last day of the festival.

He opened with “Bird on the Wire,” which immediately had a calming effect on the crowd. He told a story about going to the circus with his dad, and recalled how a high point was when one of the circus performers asked everyone in the audience to light a match. Cohen asked everyone in the crowd at the Isle of Wight to light a match so he could see them. His calm, reassuring voice helped change the atmosphere of the festival during his performance.

Both Simmons and Nadel pointed out that Cohen and his band were taking Mandrax, a strong sedative that helped give Cohen a relaxed demeanor. Whatever the reason for Cohen’s persona, Kristofferson told Nadel, “[Cohen] did the damndest thing you ever saw: he Charmed the Beast. A lone sorrowful voice did what some of the best rockers in the world had tried for three days and failed.”

A few weeks after the Isle of Wight festival, Cohen was in the studio in Nashville with Johnston to work on his third album, using the same musicians who had worked on Songs from a Room. Johnston asked composer and arranger Paul Buckmaster to write and conduct string arrangements for some of the songs. Columbia released Songs of Love and Hate in March 1971. The album cover had a photo of Cohen’s face, partially in shadow. The back cover had the same photo, and his short poem “They Locked Up a Man” instead of song titles. The titles, along with session information, were in a booklet inside the cover.

“Avalanche” highlights Cohen’s familiar fingerstyle guitar and deep voice, enhanced by Buckmaster’s intelligent string arrangement. The narrator of the song is both divine and earthly, and he struggles with that paradox. He doubts himself and his followers. “Joan of Arc” tells the saint’s story as a dialog with the fire that was taking her life:

“Then fire, make your body cold
I’m gonna give you mine to hold”
Saying this she climbed inside
To be his one, to be his only bride

“Famous Blue Raincoat” is in the form of a letter—it closes with the line “Sincerely, L. Cohen”—addressed to a man who had an affair with the narrator’s partner (“And you treated my woman to a flake of your life”). The song contains a reference to “going clear,” a term from Scientology. Cohen had briefly looked into Scientology but quickly moved on, although he had met Suzanne Elrod at a Scientology center in New York.

Even by the standards Cohen had set on his first two albums, Songs of Love and Hate was dark. He doubts himself as a writer on “Dress Rehearsal Rag,” “Love Calls You by Your Name” is a jaundiced look at romance, and even the jaunty “Diamonds in the Mine” reminds listeners that many of life’s pursuits lead nowhere.

As they did with Songs from a Room, Johnston and the musicians on Songs of Love and Hate helped flesh out Cohen’s songs without making them too ornate. Buckmaster told an interviewer for Disc and Echo, “Cohen’s music is almost unarrangeable.” His own contributions merely added “little areas of emotional texture and color.” “Diamonds in the Mine” uses a full band and background singers, but most of the accompaniment enhances the songs while staying out of Cohen’s way.

Songs of Love and Hate was very popular in England but did not chart in the US. Still, Cohen was getting some attention in America, and songs from his three albums were being covered by other artists. His first three albums established him as a unique songwriter with a strong poetic voice who reflected the alienation and disenchantment of the younger generation. The irony was that Cohen was closing in on 40.

A few months after Songs of Love and Hate hit record stores, Warner Brothers released Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller, which included songs from Cohen’s first album on its soundtrack. Altman’s unique take on the American Western included Cohen’s recordings of “The Stranger Song,” “Sisters of Mercy,” and “Winter Lady,” and they helped set the tone of the film. Cohen’s music didn’t seem anachronistic or at odds with the 19th-century setting of the story.

That same year, German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film Warnung vor einer heiligen Nutte—Beware of a Holy Whore included music by Cohen. Another German filmmaker, Werner Herzog, used Cohen’s music in Fata Morgana.

In January 1972, McClelland & Stewart published Cohen’s sixth poetry collection, The Energy of Slaves. The poems reflected his doubts about his talent as a poet and his frustrations at having to meet the expectations of readers, music fans, and his record company. The collection was panned.

Columbia was again pressing Cohen to tour, and he got in touch with Johnston to help put together a group for performances. They booked dates in Europe and decided to hire a filmmaker to document the shows. The resultant film, Leonard Cohen: Bird on a Wire, appeared in 1974 and captured various aspects of touring, including the inconveniences of travel and the occasional problems with instruments and equipment. It also showed Cohen building a rapport with his audience and finding a way to make his songs work onstage.

Cohen and his group flew to Israel after completing the European leg of the tour. It was Cohen’s first exposure to the besieged country. There were emotional moments during the shows in Israel, some of them fueled by the group’s LSD use. Audiences were welcoming, and Cohen would return to Israel the following year.

Adam Cohen was born in Montreal in September 1972. Cohen spent time trying to adjust to fatherhood, returning to the Chelsea in New York and flying out to California to check out a guru he’d heard about from a friend. Simmons observed that what he was writing during this time “did not give much hope for optimism.”

Simmons was referring to how Cohen was working through life and fatherhood during those months but was not recording any music—and hadn’t since Songs of Love and Hate. Columbia Records released Live Songs in April 1973. The cover is a black-and-white photo of Cohen, hair buzzed short, looking thin and frail. Most of the songs were performances from the 1972 tour and had appeared in studio versions on his albums. Two live tracks came from appearances in 1970. He had played “Tonight Will Be Fine” at the Isle of Wight Festival.

The longest track on the album was from a 1970 performance in London. Cohen introduces the song with a story about a walk he took in New York: “I was walking in New York City and I brushed up against the man in front of me. I felt a cardboard placard on his back. And when we passed a streetlight, I could read it, it said: ‘Please don’t pass me by—I am blind, but you can see I’ve been blinded totally. Please don’t pass me by.’”

Cohen mentions other unfortunates he sees on the streets, and he says everyone he sees is singing “please don’t pass me by.” He begins to sing the chorus, with the backing singers and musicians filtering in behind his voice and guitar. He soon realizes he’s also speaking for himself in the song, and he tells the audience they will also end up singing it (“One day you’ll be on your knees”). Over the song’s 12 minutes, Cohen sings of the many who have suffered or will suffer, and of their need for release. He notes that even with his songs and poems, he’s as damaged as any of us. At points, he sings the song in an aggressively raw voice.

The performance of “Bird on the Wire” is more impassioned than it was on Songs from a Room, and Cohen sings it more naturally. “Story of Isaac” also benefits from a more confident performance. Simmons calls Live Songs “a contender for the most somber live album ever,” but Cohen sounds more relaxed than he did in the studio recordings, and the backing vocals add some lightness without washing out Cohen’s sometimes bleak lyrics. One of the singers, Jennifer Warnes, would go on to a successful career on her own. In 1986 she released Famous Blue Raincoat, a well-regarded collection of her interpretations of some of Cohen’s songs.

Throughout 1973, Cohen was struggling with parenthood, working on the editing of Leonard Cohen: Bird on a Wire to ensure it presented an accurate view of himself as an artist, and struggling to write. In October, Egypt and Syria attacked Israel to begin the Yom Kippur War. Cohen left Suzanne and Adam in Hydra and flew to Tel Aviv. He planned to join the Israel Defence Force and fight. “I’ve never disguised the fact that I’m Jewish and in any crisis in Israel I would be there,” he told an interviewer later.

Simmons opined that, in reality, he was driven by a “desperation to get away.” Family obligations, his view of himself as a poet in contrast to his popularity as a pop singer and songwriter, and his own neuroses were his true motives for going to Israel. In addition, the trip fit with his attraction to drama.

Soon after landing in Tel Aviv, he met an Israeli singer, Oshik Levi, who was organizing a group of performers to entertain the troops. He wanted to include Cohen, who wasn’t convinced his music was a good choice for lifting the spirits of an army. Eventually, he gave in. “For the next few weeks,” Simmons wrote, “Leonard traveled by truck, tank and jeep to outposts, encampments, aircraft hangars, field hospitals, anywhere they saw soldiers, and performed for them up to eight times a day. The soldiers would gather closely around—sometimes barely a dozen of them—and, if it was night and too dark to see, they would shine their flashlights on him as he played.”

His experiences in Israel had stirred up so many emotions, from fear to sadness, that when afterwards he landed for a brief visit to Ethiopia—a country that would soon be at war—he promptly began writing new songs and finishing others he had begun. Early in 1974 he returned to Montreal, and soon Suzanne was expecting their second child. By February, he was in the studio recording his fourth album.

Cohen was aiming for something different, and he brought in John Lissauer to produce his new recordings. Lissauer was still in college, studying music, but Cohen had heard some work he had done as an arranger for other musicians. Lissauer was untried as a producer, but John Hammond sat in on a few sessions and gave his approval.

New Skin for the Old Ceremony hit shops in August 1974. The instrumentation includes banjos, mandolin, and guitar, but Lissauer also brought in horns and strings to flesh out the arrangements. The vocal arrangements are richer and the percussion more pronounced than on Cohen’s previous studio outings.

The horns on “Is This What You Wanted” sound like something the Band would have done, and Cohen’s voice has a rough edge, especially when he reaches for high notes. Cohen compares himself to his lover and falls short:

You were the promise at dawn
I was the morning after
You were Jesus Christ, my Lord
I was the money lender

Some amusing comparisons follow (“You were Marlon Brando  / I was Steve McQueen / You were KY Jelly / I was Vaseline”), but the song is fundamentally brutal:

Is this what you wanted
To live in a house that is haunted
By the ghost of you and me?

A few lines point to the lovers’ problems, but even at those points Cohen is really shining the spotlight on his own selfishness.

Cohen had begun writing “Chelsea Hotel #2” a couple of years earlier. The song describes a sexual encounter he had with Janis Joplin at the Chelsea. She isn’t named in the song, but Cohen later revealed that she was the subject of the story. He sings the song tenderly, accompanying himself on guitar, and Lissauer’s understated string arrangement filters in to capture Cohen’s shifting memories of Joplin. Tenderness, cynicism, and self-deprecation mingle in the song.

“Lover Lover Lover” and “Field Commander Cohen” flowed out of Cohen’s experiences in Israel during the Yom Kippur War. “There Is a War” finds battles in all aspects of life, including romance and the differences between classes. “Who By Fire” is Cohen’s adaptation of the Unetaneh Tokef Prayer, which is recited during the Jewish High Holy Days.

Much of New Skin for the Old Ceremony is even more jaundiced in its views of life, romance, and Cohen’s struggles with his role as an artist than his other three albums. His singing, however, is confident, and Lissauer’s arrangements successfully embrace blues, jazz, Dixieland, and cabaret music. Stylistically, it was Cohen’s most daring album so far.

In September, a month after Columbia released New Skin for the Old Ceremony, Cohen’s second child was born. He and Suzanne named her Lorca, after the poet. The record wasn’t lighting up the charts, but Cohen embarked on an extensive tour shortly after Lorca’s birth. He would tour Europe, the US, the UK, and Canada over the next several months. Once again, Bob Johnston helped him put together a band.

Lissauer and Cohen began writing songs for another recording. After Cohen did some traveling and another tour, he and Lissauer recorded some of the songs they had written. They never completed an album. According to Lissauer, “It just evaporated. Without a word from anyone.”

Cohen was becoming restless in his partnership with Suzanne. According to Nadel’s biography, “In a 1980 film interview, Cohen admitted he had been completely obsessed with women ever since he could remember. As he became more well known, that obsession was reciprocated.” The sexual revolution of the 1960s and ’70s fed into Cohen’s views. His feelings, romantic to some extent but ambivalent about commitment, are currents that run through his songs.

His interest in spirituality persisted as well. He had been introduced to Kyozan Joshu Sasaki through friends a few years earlier. Joshu Sasaki was a Roshi, a designation in Zen Buddhism that refers to having reached a high level of education and spiritual enlightenment. Followers referred to him simply as “Roshi.” In the months after New Skin for the Old Ceremony was released, Cohen spent ever more time with him.

The Best of Leonard Cohen, released in January 1975 and titled Greatest Hits in Europe, comprised tracks from each of Cohen’s records so far. Cohen chose the songs and wrote the liner notes. By the end of the year, the second recording with Lissauer had ground to a halt. Another tour followed, and soon Cohen was working with Phil Spector as producer.

Spector and Cohen were managed by Marty Machat, who had arranged a contract for Spector with Warner Bros. Records. Warner had given Spector a big advance, but he hadn’t delivered any records. Lissauer told Simmons that Machat decided to have Spector and Cohen collaborate, bringing a stop to the record Lissauer was doing with Cohen. “[Machat] never returned my calls and Leonard didn’t return my calls,” Lissauer said.

Spector was five years younger than Cohen but had been in the music industry since 1958. His specialty was rock ’n’ roll, and he’d enjoyed a string of hits that had influenced everyone from Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys to Bruce Springsteen. In the years before he worked with Cohen, he produced Let it Be by the Beatles and solo recordings by John Lennon and George Harrison.

Cohen and Spector worked on songs in the latter’s Beverly Hills mansion, Spector writing the music and Cohen the lyrics. When they started recording in June 1977, they had more than a dozen songs ready. Early sessions went well, although Spector brought in his usual army of musicians to create his signature Wall of Sound.

The experience was in sharp contrast to Cohen’s other recordings so far. During one session, Bob Dylan and some friends, including Allen Ginsberg, joined in. Dylan and Cohen had met before. Two years earlier, Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue was in Montreal, and he was unable to coax Cohen to join him onstage. One of the people in Dylan’s entourage was Ronee Blakley, who had been on the Rolling Thunder tour. She and Cohen sang together on two of the Spector sessions.

As the sessions went on, they became stranger and more taxing. Spector was controlling and surrounded by armed guards, and he carried a gun. His desire for perfection meant that Cohen didn’t get to sing until the early morning hours. Accounts of the tensions and productivity of the sessions vary, but both the Nadel and Simmons biographies lean towards Spector and Cohen having different ideas of how the music should be recorded.

Warner Bros. released Death of a Ladies’ Man in November 1977, and it’s unlike any other Leonard Cohen record. It had the largest number of session players listed thus far on any of his albums, and for the first time the arrangements were not built around Cohen’s guitar. Blakley duets with him on the first two tracks, “True Love Leaves No Traces” and “Iodine.” She brings a gentle charm to the songs, and Cohen makes a game effort to croon Spector’s melodies.

Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg are among the guests on “Don’t Go Home with Your Hard-On,” which is likeably whimsical. “Fingerprints” comes off as a country-and-western parody, and “Memories” tries to immerse Cohen in Spector’s pop-music glories of the early ’60s. “Death of a Ladies’ Man” contains echoes of Spector’s work with John Lennon a few years earlier.

Cohen’s lyrics on Death of a Ladies’ Man were as probing and complex as any he had written. The title track looks back on the lives of a man and woman who were in love and describes the shifts in their relationship over time. Longing, loss, and regret course through the song. Many of the other songs reflect Cohen’s feelings as his relationship with Suzanne was failing. “A heavy burden lifted from my soul / I learned that love was out of my control,” he sang on “Paper Thin Hotel.”

It’s hard to appreciate what Cohen was singing on the album because of Spector’s usual mixture of excess and kitsch. Cohen often sounds more emotionally raw than he did on previous records, but some of that effect comes from pushing to be heard over the arrangements or singing outside his range. Cohen disliked the way his voice sounded and tried to get Spector to recut some of the vocals, but he refused. “The arrangements got in my way,” Cohen told the New York Times. “I wasn’t able to convey the meaning of the songs.”

Reviews for the album were mixed, but many critics responded well to the raw honesty of the vocals and to Cohen’s change in direction. As with his other albums, Death of a Ladies’ Man sold better in the UK than it did in the US, but it was not as commercially successful as his previous releases.

By the time Death of a Ladies’ Man was in stores, Suzanne had left him, and his mother was dying of leukemia. Marsha Cohen died in February 1978, and that spring McClelland & Stewart published a collection of poems, prose, and commentary by Leonard. It was also titled Death of a Ladies’ Man, and he dedicated it to his mother. The book contained 212 poems or short prose writings, along with Cohen’s commentary about them.

Although Suzanne returned to help Cohen cope with his mother’s death, by the end of 1978 they were apart again. He was doing some tentative recording, but he decided not to tour in support of Death of a Ladies’ Man. He moved to Los Angeles to spend more time with Roshi and to meditate at the Zen Center of Los Angeles or the Mount Baldy Zen Center, about an hour away. Joni Mitchell suggested that he collaborate with Henry Lewy, who had worked with her, Neil Young, and other singers in southern California.

Lewy’s methods were simpler than Spector’s, closer to how Cohen had worked with other producers. “He had that great quality that Bob Johnston had,” Cohen told Simmons. “He had a lot of faith in the singer, as he did with Joni. And he just let it happen.” Members of the jazz group Passenger formed the main band for the sessions, augmented by other players, including Garth Hudson and John Lissauer.

Recent Songs (1979) couldn’t help but be less jarring than Death of a Ladies’ Man. Cohen said in his liner notes that his mother spoke to him before she died “of the kind of music she liked.” That music was Russian and Jewish folk songs, and Cohen and Lewy brought in musicians to play violin and oud. “The Guests” shows the influence of that music, and its lyrics embrace spirituality and the afterlife as something both mysterious and welcoming.

“Humbled in Love” presents Cohen’s views on love in light of his recent romantic difficulties. “The Gypsy’s Wife” describes how lovers drift apart and is, in part, about his disintegrating relationship with Suzanne. In a 1979 documentary, he told an interviewer, “It’s just a song about the way men and women have lost one another, that men and women have wandered away from each other and have become gypsies to each other.”

Three songs on the album were revisits of songs originally recorded during the uncompleted sessions with Lissauer a few years earlier. The string arrangement on “The Traitor” helps elicit a beautiful vocal performance from Cohen. “The Smokey Life” has a slight jazz feel and an effective string arrangement that doesn’t overpower the song. Lissauer shares a writing credit for “Came So Far for Beauty,” consolation, perhaps, for having been dropped so suddenly from the earlier project.

Recent Songs is an easier album to like than its predecessor. Cohen toured in support of the album, with Passenger backing him and Jennifer Warnes once again among the backup singers. Filmmaker Harry Rasky had concurrently been working on a documentary, The Song of Leonard Cohen, which was broadcast on Canadian TV in 1980. Cohen himself was also working on another book of poems.

At that point he decided to take some time away from music. He visited his children, who were living in France with their mother. He spent time at the monastery in California, and he returned to Hydra on occasion to write. He worked closely with an editor on his next book of poems, Book of Mercy, which McClelland & Stewart published in April 1984. He dedicated the book to Roshi, who he said had brought him to a deeper understanding of his Judaism. Cohen had just turned 50, and he told an interviewer for the CBC that in difficult times, “the only thing you can do is prayer.”

Cohen went to Los Angeles to record a reading of Book of Mercy accompanied by a string quartet. That session was never released. He had also written some songs for a musical that was broadcast on TV. His hiatus from music ended up lasting five years, after which he decided to return to recording. “The majority of Leonard’s income came from his songs, not his books,” Simmons wrote. He went to New York and got in touch with Lissauer, asking him to produce his next album.

Lissauer never blamed Cohen for their earlier aborted recording, placing the onus on Cohen’s manager. Cohen sang some of his new tunes for Lissauer, accompanying himself with a cheap Casio keyboard. Lissauer concluded that Cohen had turned to the keyboard because he needed an instrument other than the guitar to push him in a new direction. Lissauer booked studio time and hired musicians to play with him and Cohen on the sessions. Cohen insisted on using the Casio, and Lissauer built the arrangements around it.

Various Positions appeared in December 1984 in Europe and Canada, a few months after Cohen turned 50. Columbia Records chose not to release it in the US because the label’s president, Walter Yetnikoff, didn’t like it. He told Cohen, “Leonard, we know you’re great, we just don’t know if you’re any good.” Passport Records picked up the album for distribution in the US in January 1986.

Cohen is listed on guitar for the sessions, and the Casio is only occasionally audible. Lissauer used synthesizers, including the Synclavier, during the sessions, and they add color to many of the songs, but the album’s instrumentation is largely traditional. The biggest difference from other Cohen albums is his voice, which Lissauer told Simmons had dropped by a major third since their previous collaboration.

“Dance Me to the End of Love” is a cabaret-style song that Jennifer Warnes sings in a duet with Cohen. He wrote it in reaction to a story he had read about musicians in a concentration camp being forced to play as their fellow prisoners were led to the gas chambers. Warnes harmonizes with him on “Night Comes On,” where he recalls each of his parents and their deaths. He makes references to other events in his life, including his trip to Israel during the Yom Kippur War and his relationship difficulties.

“Hallelujah” is perhaps Cohen’s best-known tune, to the point that even he grew weary of it. John Cale and Jeff Buckley covered it, and it has appeared in countless TV shows and movies. The song evokes hopes of reaching out spiritually through song, à la King David. It also recounts David’s affair with Bathsheba and its consequences, suggesting that songwriters aim for earthly rewards at the expense of spirituality. Sin and judgement, romance and its fading, and the divine and the temporal mingle throughout the song.

“The Captain” describes the fog of war and its moral complexity. A captain with no ship makes an appearance in “Heart with No Companion,” along with a mother who has no children. The spiritual dimensions of the album coalesce in its closing song, “If It Be Your Will,” which Cohen told interviewer Paul Zollo for the book Songwriters on Songwriting (1992) was “an old prayer that it came to me to rewrite.”

The Jennifer Warnes album Famous Blue Raincoat appeared in late 1986 and brought further attention to Cohen’s songs. A high point of the album was a moving duet with Cohen on “Joan of Arc.” Other singers, including Nick Cave, were covering his music, and younger songwriters were praising him in interviews. Cohen kept writing, spending some time with Roshi in the monastery in Los Angeles, and in the summer of 1987 he began work on another album.

Roscoe Beck had played with Cohen on Recent Songs and produced Famous Blue Raincoat, to which Cohen contributed vocals and a sketch used in the album sleeve. Cohen chose him to help start work on his own next album. He was still using a keyboard to write, but had moved up to a better, more sophisticated one. Sessions ended up taking place in Los Angeles and Montreal in late summer and into the fall of 1987.

This time, Columbia didn’t take a pass on a Cohen album; they released I’m Your Man in early 1988. If Various Positions signaled a slight change in direction, I’m Your Man was a full embrace of new technology. “First We Take Manhattan,” which Warnes had debuted on Famous Blue Raincoat, is late-’80s synth rock, with keyboard swells and percussion machines. The slightly ominous feel of the song is reinforced by Cohen’s deep voice.

The AIDS crisis inspired “Ain’t No Cure for Love,” and Cohen again mingles love and God, arguing for love’s permanence in troubled times. “Everybody Knows” presents Cohen’s dark view of the world, but there’s an element of humor in the song that’s aided by John Bilezikjian’s jaunty oud melodies. “Tower of Song” is a sarcastic look at the difficulties of songwriting and at Cohen’s talents as a performer (“I was born with the gift of a golden voice”).

The album cover features a photo of Cohen looking suave but holding a half-eaten banana. That image suggested a more relaxed, less somber singer than most people thought they might be getting. Many of the songs offer a sardonic take on his standing as a songwriter, poet, and tortured romantic icon, with the humor often turned in his direction. I’m Your Man was well received by critics and sold well, especially in Europe. It’s not hard to imagine its music appearing in a video on MTV, although I don’t remember seeing any in rotation there.

As he was getting ready to go on the road again, Cohen received news that his manager, Marty Machat, was dying of cancer. Kelley Lynch, Machat’s assistant, took over administrative details for Cohen’s tour. She would soon take over Machat’s job as Cohen’s manager. Cohen played 59 shows over a three-month period in Europe. He returned to the US to play a sold-out show at Carnegie Hall.

As 1988 ended, I’m Your Man was outselling all of Cohen’s previous recordings and the New York Times named it album of the year. A period of depression brought on by the disintegration of another romance, this time with photographer Dominique Issermann, led to another stay at the monastery in California.

Cohen was working on more songs in California in 1989 and traveled to New York to appear on the American TV show Night Music, co-hosted by David Sanborn and Jools Holland. He also appeared on the PBS show Austin City Limits. He had returned to California to work on more songs when he received a phone call that his son, Adam, had been in a bad car accident. At the time, Adam was in Guadeloupe working as a roadie for a calypso band.

Adam was taken by air to a hospital in Toronto. His father had remained close with him and his sister, Lorca, after the split with Suzanne. Leonard stayed by his son in the hospital during his four-month recuperation. Suzanne told Simmons, “If I had forgotten why I loved him even for a moment with what might have been a heart full of resentments, after Guadeloupe, to see how he was so solidly there for our children, I remembered.”

A 1991 tribute album of his songs, I’m Your Fan: The Songs of Leonard Cohen, included covers of his songs performed by REM, Nick Cave, the Pixies, and many others. John Cale’s version of “Hallelujah” first appeared on that album. Cohen was pleased that other songwriters admired his work. He was inducted into the Juno Hall of Fame that same year and became an Officer of the Order of Canada.

In January 1992, Cohen began work on his next album. He would take six months to record it, working at various recording studios. The Future, released in November, lists seven co-producers, including Rebecca De Mornay, with whom he had become involved romantically. It includes two covers. One is a soul song by Frederick Knight, “Be for Real.” The other is “Always,” an Irving Berlin song that was a favorite of his mother’s.

In the years since I’m Your Man, the Berlin wall had fallen, the Soviet Union had collapsed, there were riots in Los Angeles after the arrest of Rodney King, and the AIDS crisis had become more acute. The title song on The Future presented a dark view of the world that referred to those events and to the fallout of the sexual revolution. According to Nadel’s biography of Cohen, the song went through many rewrites and took up 60 pages of Cohen’s notebooks. The song rocks solidly, and Cohen’s voice seems to have deepened even further since his last album.

“Waiting for the Miracle” lightens the mood a bit, but Cohen still mixes the glory and pain of romance. “Democracy,” like “The Future,” was pared down from many verses into a somewhat more condensed form. Cohen makes a direct reference to Tiananmen Square and an oblique one to the fall of the Berlin Wall. “Democracy is coming to the USA,” Cohen sings. He recounts America’s faults but hopes it will rise to meet its promise.

Cohen had recorded a version of “Anthem” during the Various Positions sessions, but a technical glitch led him to scrap it. As with the title track and “Democracy,” the lyrics have political and social overtones but avoid hectoring, choosing instead thoughtful and realistic engagement.

The arrangements on The Future are often lush, with lovely and engaging string parts, stirring and beautiful background vocals, and inspired playing by the session musicians. Dean Parks’s slide solo on “Always” is a high point of the album. Cohen’s take on that song carries with it an ironic air of distance from its sentimentality, but he doesn’t condescend to it. Cohen often delivers his deep vocals as recitative on this album.

Before leaving for another tour, Cohen completed a second poetry anthology that also included his song lyrics. McClelland & Stewart published Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs in March 1993. The following month he was touring Europe, and recordings from those shows were added to performances recorded on his tour for Various Positions and released as Cohen Live. As 1993 came to a close, he received another honor from his homeland, the Governor General’s Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement.

At a point where honors and popularity for his music were high, Cohen was turning 60 and decided to go back to California to, as Simmons wrote, “a small, bare hut on a mountain, where he had chosen to live as the servant and companion of an old Japanese monk.” Cohen often returned to Roshi and the Zen monastery when he needed to recharge. Nadel observed that “once life becomes too cluttered, he moves to an empty room.”

“I’ve always been drawn to the voluptuousness of austerity,” Cohen told an interviewer from Mojo while he was in the monastery in 1994, “but I’m working on a song while I’m sitting there.” He told Simmons that his faith was still Judaism. “‘I have a perfectly good religion,’ he said, and pointed out that Roshi had never made any attempt to give him a new one.” Roshi’s Zen teachings and his monastery gave Cohen the solitude he needed to ensure that he remained creative.

While songwriting, recording, and touring were creative outlets, Cohen didn’t like the commercial demands of the music business, and never really warmed up to performing. In addition, he and De Mornay had broken up. The time at the monastery allowed him to clear his head. His living conditions were simple, but he was allowed to have an electronic keyboard and was able to work on songs. In 1996, he was ordained a Zen Buddhist monk. He did it, he told Simmons, to “observe protocol.” It was out of deference to Roshi, who was 90 and wanted Cohen to preside over his funeral.

Since Cohen had released three brisk-selling albums, Columbia was eager to keep him in front of the public. The label released Cohen Live in 1994 and More Best Of in 1997. Cohen’s stay at the monastery continued into 1998. Things seemed to be going well when a sudden fit of depression hit him. He spent time in India with a spiritual leader who practiced another form of Buddhism. As 1999 ended, the depression had lifted, and Cohen was ready to record again.

He got in touch with Roscoe Beck, who called singer Sharon Robinson and recording engineer Leanne Ungar. Cohen had moved back to a house he still maintained within the Los Angeles city limits. His daughter Lorca had been living in the house since the mid-’80s. Robinson and Ungar put together a recording studio in a room above the garage.

Cohen gave Robinson lyrics he had been working on, and she wrote music for them. Ten New Songs, released in October 2001, was Cohen’s first musical entry in the new millennium. The credits on the album list Robinson as the producer, co-writer of the songs, and the sole instrumentalist, aside from guitarist Bob Metzger on one track and a string section on another. She also shares the vocals with Cohen. He dedicated the album to Roshi.

The programmed instruments on the album are surprisingly warm. Even the drums sound realistic and rhythmically fluid. Robinson harmonizes well with Cohen, and while his voice still sounds deep and raspy, he leans into the melodies. “In My Secret Life” looks at romance and regret, and the contrast between our ideals and the choices we actually make. Metzger’s guitar helps fill the song out.

“A Thousand Kisses Deep” looks at the changes that moving into the final stages of life bring. “I saw that there were no oceans left / For Scavengers like me,” Cohen sings. He makes a reference to Robert Frost (“And maybe I had miles to drive / And promises to keep”) and embraces life’s impermanence. “That Don’t Make It Junk” suggests that even bad decisions help lead us to our destinations in life, and the overall tone of Ten New Songs is one of acceptance and calmness.

Robinson’s melodies for the songs are memorable, and her voice adds to their emotional force. Her choices for the instrumentation are often inspired. “In My Secret Life” and the gospel-infused “Boogie Street” are unusually funky for Cohen. The record flows easily, and despite its reliance on then-current technology, it doesn’t sound dated today. Cohen sings with as much conviction as ever but sounds more at ease, both with himself and with performing. Sharing the album with Robinson gave him room to relax.

Ten New Songs received good notices and sold well outside the US, where it didn’t crack the top 100. It went platinum in Canada, where he continued to be honored by his compatriots. The Canadian consulate in New York organized a tribute concert for him, which producer Hal Willner oversaw. The show was held in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park in June 2003. Soon Cohen began work on a collection of poems, his first since the publication of Book of Mercy in 1984. And in October 2003, he was made a Companion of the Order of Canada, among the country’s highest civilian honors.

Cohen’s 11th album, Dear Heather, appeared in October 2004. He dedicated it to his publisher, Jack McClelland, who had died a few months earlier at age 81. Cohen turned 70 about a month before the album’s release. One of the tracks on the album was from an earlier session, while another was from a live performance in 1985. The rest were new recordings, captured in his home studio in Los Angeles.

“Go No More A-Roving” was an adaptation of a poem by Lord Byron. Robinson produced the track, which Cohen dedicated to his mentor, Irving Layton. The arrangement comes awfully close to smooth jazz, but Cohen’s recitation of the poem, in his now even deeper, raspier voice, helps keep the song from being too sappy; regardless, it’s not an auspicious opening to the album.

“Because Of” would have been a better choice for an opener. Cohen praises women for their kindness, even as he acknowledges that he used poetry, and sometimes guile, to seduce them, along with his good looks. Ungar produced the track, and Anjani Thomas arranged the backing vocals. Cohen shares the vocals on “The Letters” with Robinson, his voice sounding dark and vulnerable, hers stronger but compassionate. Cohen looks back on life, love, and sex at various points on Dear Heather, sometimes wistfully, sometimes with a small amount of regret.

“On That Day” contemplates the horrific attacks on September 11, 2001. Cohen acknowledges the comments of religious conservatives and political activists and says in response:

I wouldn’t know
I’m just holding the fort
But answer me this
I won’t take you to court
Did you go crazy
Or did you report

Cohen was further moved by the events of 9/11 to recite a poem by Canadian writer Frank Scott, “Villanelle for Our Time,” written in 1944, which still resonated nearly 60 years later and conveyed the hope that people can summon out of horrible events:

This is the faith from which we start:
Men shall know commonwealth again
From bitter searching of the heart

Cohen decided not to tour in support of Dear Heather, which charted well. Production credits vary from song to song. Cohen, Ungar, Robinson, and Thomas each had a hand in the album. Thomas, who was Cohen’s romantic partner at that point, sang and played piano on many of the album’s tracks.

Soon after the album’s release, Cohen’s daughter Lorca called him. She had heard some news from one of Kelley Lynch’s employees that led her to suggest that her father take a close look at his bank accounts. Lynch had taken over managing Cohen when Marty Machat died. Cohen trusted her and was in constant contact with her about all aspects of his career.

Cohen and Lorca went to his bank and discovered that Lynch had drained his accounts. Since he had entrusted her with his finances, he was unprepared for the difficulties her actions caused, including tax penalties. She had also sold the rights to many of his songs without his knowledge. Cohen took legal action, and Lynch publicly attacked him through internet postings and harassing emails. Eventually, the courts ordered her to repay nearly $7.5 million, which she claimed she didn’t have.

Cohen finally finished Book of Longing, his first poetry collection since 1984’s Book of Mercy. He dedicated the book to his mentor Irving Layton, who had passed away five months earlier, in January 2006. The poems and drawings in the book examine age and how it affects life, spirituality, and sexuality—Cohen’s usual subjects, but now examined in light of mortality. The following year Philip Glass would set many of the poems to music for Book of Longing: Song Cycle Based on the Poetry and Images of Leonard Cohen.

In 2007, Cohen realized he would need to tour again to refill his bank account. Ticket prices, especially for older recording acts, had risen, and Cohen was popular, especially in Europe. He wasn’t looking forward to performing, but he hired Roscoe Beck to put together a band and prepare for a tour that would begin in May 2008. In March, Cohen was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Lou Reed read from Cohen’s poems and said, “We’re so lucky to be alive at the same time Leonard Cohen is.”

Cohen and the band he and Beck put together rehearsed for several months and did a series of shows in small Canadian towns to help Cohen ease back into performing. It had been 15 years since he last toured. The band consisted of six musicians and three backup singers, and Cohen appeared on stage in a dark suit and fedora, looking sharp.

The opening shows went well. The band was tight, and Cohen relaxed into his performances. The concerts often lasted three hours. Now reassured, Cohen embarked on a European tour, which included a performance at the Glastonbury Festival. Audiences were boisterous in their generous acceptance of Cohen’s shows. He was hesitant about dates that were coming up in the US, where his fanbase was smaller, but he was as warmly received there as he’d been in Europe.

Touring continued throughout 2008 and 2009 and included a stop in Tel Aviv. The shows for those two years grossed $50 million. “Leonard had earned back all he had lost and more,” Simmons wrote in I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen. Columbia released a two-CD set, Live in London, in March 2009. The set documented a July 2008 performance at London’s O2 Arena. In October, Columbia released Live at the Isle of Wight 1970. Both live releases were also made available on DVD.

When the tour ended in late 2009, Cohen decided he would tour again after a few months’ rest. In January 2010 he received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. Other honors continued to pour in. That spring, Cohen hurt his back while exercising and moved the tour back a couple of months. While recuperating, he started work on a new album. The tour began in July in Croatia, the first of 34 shows in Europe. In September, Columbia released yet another live Cohen CD and DVD, Songs from the Road, comprising songs from various performances in 2008 and 2009.

The tour now complete, it was time to return to the album he had begun a few months earlier. Cohen chose Patrick Leonard to produce it after hearing the work he did with Adam Cohen’s third album, Like a Man, in 2011. The two men met, and soon the producer was setting some of Cohen’s songs to music.

Patrick Leonard produced and co-wrote four of the ten tracks on Old Ideas, Leonard Cohen’s 12th studio album, released in January 2012. Cohen recorded Old Ideas at his home studio in Los Angeles and at 7th Street Sound, also in LA. He sings in a whispered, gravelly voice on “Going Home,” one of the tracks Patrick Leonard arranged and produced, and on which he played all the instruments. As he was so often in the past, Cohen is self-deprecating:

I’d love to speak with Leonard
He’s a sportsman and a shepherd
He’s a lazy bastard
Living in a suit

Cohen turns an occasional jaundiced eye towards his position as poet and sage. At 76, he sees some humor in how he’s viewed, but also sees release as his life comes to a close:

Going home without my burden
Going home behind the curtain
Going home without this costume
That I wore

“Show Me the Place,” another collaboration with Patrick Leonard, is full of religious imagery that is reinforced by the slight gospel tone of the accompaniment. The lyrics also seem to look at Cohen’s role as a poet and seeker. Cohen brings his guitar back for the beginning of “Darkness,” a convincing slice of R&B that evokes the uncertainty of life’s end.

Cohen’s touring band backed him on “Darkness,” and other musicians contributed to the rest of the songs. Aside from the four songs Cohen and Leonard produced, Ed Sanders, Anjani, Dino Soldo, and Cohen himself oversaw the remaining tracks. The arrangements for the songs were understated. “Crazy to Love You” was just Cohen on guitar and vocals, and none of the tracks felt crowded or too ornate. The backing vocals, by Sharon Robinson, Jennifer Warnes, and the Webb Sisters, were the only lavish touch. Cohen recited the lyrics on the album in an even deeper and more whispery voice than he used on Dear Heather.

Popular Problems, Cohen’s 13th studio album, appeared two days before his 80th birthday in September 2014. Kyozan Joshu Sasaki Roshi had died in July, and Cohen dedicated the album to him. Patrick Leonard produced the album and cowrote seven of its nine songs. “Slow” is Cohen’s sly glance back at the sexual revolution and his sometimes-reluctant part in it. “A Street” paints a picture of cultural change as Cohen ages and the world moves on uncertainly. “Samson in New Orleans” surveys the destruction left behind after Katrina, but it also suggests the collapse of things beyond that tragedy. “Nevermind” looks at the futility of war and the complex emotions that follow its aftermath.

Mortality is the current that runs through Cohen’s final recordings. The religious questions that had pervaded his work from the beginning intensified. By the time he began working on the follow-up to Popular Problems, he was in pain from spinal fractures and other ailments. Patrick Leonard was again on board as producer, with help from Adam Cohen. His father was nearly immobile and sang his parts while in a specially designed orthopedic chair.

Cohen speaks to God on the title track of You Want it Darker, released in October 2016. The title song opens the album, and the Shaar Hashomayim Synagogue Choir accompanies Cohen. The instrumentation is spare but features a prominent bass line. Cohen’s ongoing conversation with God over his long career reveals God to be majestic and still a mystery. Cohen is angry at God on “Treaty,” and he shows some ambivalence to Christianity, whose imagery and ideas he sometimes injected into his songs. Romance is embraced on other songs, with an occasional expression of regret.

In July, after recording of You Want it Darker was completed, Cohen received news that Marianne Ihlen, one of his earliest muses and the subject of one of his best-known songs, was dying. He wrote her a moving letter, saying he would be joining her soon. On November 7, 2016, Leonard Cohen died at age 82 at his home in Los Angeles. According to his obituary in the New York Times, he had been battling cancer.

Leonard Cohen was buried in a simple pine casket in a family plot in the Congregation Shaar Hashomayim cemetery on Mount Royal in Montreal, near his parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. He had observed the sabbath all his life and always reaffirmed his Jewish heritage, as well as his commitment to his faith. In 2009, when the New York Times asked “how he reconciles his observant Judaism with his practice of Zen, Mr. Cohen said: ‘Allen Ginsberg asked me the same question many years ago. Well, for one thing, in the tradition of Zen that I’ve practiced, there is no prayerful worship and there is no affirmation of a deity. So theologically there is no challenge to any Jewish belief.’”

Three years after he died, Columbia Records released Thanks for the Dance. Cohen had recorded some tracks for You Want it Darker that were not completed, and his son Adam created backing tracks for them. Among the musicians who contributed were Patrick Leonard, Beck, Daniel Lanois, Jennifer Warnes, and Adam Cohen.

As with the final three albums Cohen released while still alive, Thanks for the Dance is the work of an artist who sees the end coming soon. He looks at his accomplishments, mistakes, and responsibilities, taking stock. Cohen’s long struggle with the meaning and worth of his work comes through in “Happens to the Heart.” He sings that “I was always working steady / But I never called it art.” He wasn’t being modest. Cohen treated his work as a poet and lyricist as work, and revising and perfecting it drove him on. It also frustrated him.

“Puppets” begins with an image of the Holocaust (“German puppets burnt the Jews / Jewish puppets did not choose”) and explores the power of manipulation and circumstances to sweep us along and dehumanize us. “It’s Torn” is a memorial to Marianne Ihlen and to Cohen’s past, and “The Goal” describes the frustrations and discomforts of old age.

Adam Cohen’s arrangements for the songs are sympathetic and tasteful. Thanks for the Dance was a dignified and moving close to Leonard Cohen’s career, the logical conclusion to his ruminations on age and life’s end that began with Old Ideas.

As a lyricist with a wide knowledge of literature, history, and religion, and an ability to use them in service of his own vision, Leonard Cohen had few peers. Bob Dylan comes to mind as the most obvious comparison. They both wrote lyrics that are open to endless and varied interpretations and meanings. Go to five sites that “explain” Cohen’s lyrics and you’ll see five very different interpretations.

Dylan spoke about Cohen in an article in the New Yorker that appeared shortly before Cohen died. In the article, “Leonard Cohen Makes It Darker,” journalist David Remnick wrote about Cohen’s life and new album. He asked Bob Dylan about Cohen, and Dylan spoke at length about Cohen’s gifts as a melodist and disputed the oft-repeated notion that his work was depressing. “I see no disenchantment in Leonard’s lyrics at all,” Dylan told Remnick. “There’s always a direct sentiment, as if he’s holding a conversation and telling you something, him doing all the talking, but the listener keeps listening.”

Cohen was a mass of contradictions, and a more interesting artist because of them. He embraced many aspects of the ’60s, taking part in the sexual revolution but pointing out its limitations and hidden dangers. He exalted the search for spirituality, but he reminded listeners that God was powerful and to be feared as well as loved. He toured out of necessity, whether to promote his music or to replenish his stolen assets, but he emerged as a formidable and impressive stage presence.

Leonard Cohen mural in Montreal

Leonard Cohen was a poet who turned to music because he did not want the economically modest life that being a writer alone would have given him. He seems to have been ambivalent about that decision, as if he’d violated an agreement to pursue a higher calling. But then, he was ambivalent about everything, from his own talent and accomplishments to the fruits of his work, whether it was fame or the women who seemed to flock to him.

He never had any easy answers and never tried to provide any. He simply asked questions that invited us to find our own way.

. . . Joseph Taylor
josepht@soundstagenetwork.com