Leonard Cohen

Leonard Cohen (born September 21, 1934, Montreal, Quebec, Canada—died November 7, 2016, Los Angeles, California, U.S.) was a Canadian singer-songwriter whose spare songs carried an existential bite and established him as one of the most distinctive voices of 1970s pop music.

Already established as a poet and novelist (his first book of poems, Let Us Compare Mythologies, was published in 1956), Cohen became interested in the Greenwich Village folk scene while living in New York City during the mid-1960s, and he began setting his poems to music. In 1967 Judy Collins recorded two of his songs, “Suzanne” and “Dress Rehearsal Rag,” and that same year Cohen began performing in public, including an appearance at the Newport (Rhode Island) Folk Festival. By the end of the year, he had recorded The Songs of Leonard Cohen, which included the melancholy “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye.” That album was followed by Songs from a Room (1969), featuring the now often-covered “Bird on a Wire,” and Songs of Love and Hate (1971), containing “Famous Blue Raincoat,” a ballad in the form of a letter from a cuckold to his wife’s lover.

Though some did not care for Cohen’s baritone voice and deadpan delivery, he mostly enjoyed critical and commercial success. Leonard Cohen: Live Songs (1973) and New Skin for the Old Ceremony (1974), which included “Chelsea Hotel No. 2,” a frank recollection of a brief sexual encounter with Janis Joplin, further deepened Cohen’s standing as a songwriter of exceptional emotional power. His career then took a decided turn for the worse with the disappointing Death of a Ladies’ Man (1977), a collaboration with legendary producer Phil Spector, whose grandiose style was ill suited to Cohen’s understated songs. For most of the 1980s Cohen was out of favour, but his 1988 album, I’m Your Man, included the club hits “First We Take Manhattan” and “Everybody Knows” and introduced his songwriting to a new generation. In addition, Various Positions (1984) included what became Cohen’s best-known song, “Hallelujah.” Although it did not initially receive much attention, the single gained widespread popularity when covered by Jeff Buckley in 1994. The ballad was later performed or recorded by hundreds of artists and featured in soundtracks of TV shows and films.

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After releasing The Future (1992), he retired to a Buddhist monastery outside Los Angeles. He emerged in 1999 and returned to the studio, producing Ten New Songs (2001) and Dear Heather (2004). The critically acclaimed documentary Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man (2005) blended interview and archival footage with performances of Cohen’s songs by a variety of musicians.

In 2005 Cohen discovered that his business manager had embezzled some $5 million from his savings, virtually wiping out his retirement fund. While he won a $7.9 million judgment against her the following year, Cohen was unable to recover the money, and he embarked on a concert tour—his first in 15 years—in 2008 to rebuild his finances. One performance from that tour was recorded for the album Live in London (2009), a two-disc set which proved that at age 73 Cohen was as vibrant and vital as ever. The aptly titled Old Ideas (2012) was a bluesy exploration of familiar Cohen themes—spirituality, love, and loss—that eschewed the synthesized melodies of much of Cohen’s post-1980s material in favour of the folk sound of his earliest work. Released just weeks before his death, Cohen’s 14th studio album, You Want It Darker (2016), was received by critics as a late-period masterpiece. For the title track, he posthumously received a Grammy Award for best rock performance. In 2008 he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and in 2010 he was honoured with a Grammy for lifetime achievement.

The documentary Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love (2019) explores his relationship with Marianne Ihlen, who was considered his muse in the 1960s.