One of the most fascinating and enigmatic -- if not the most successful -- singer/songwriters of the late '60s, Leonard Cohen has retained an audience across four decades of music-making interrupted by various digressions into personal and creative exploration, all of which have only added to the mystique surrounding him. Second only to (and perhaps ), he commands the attention of critics and younger musicians more firmly than any other musical figure from the 1960s who is still working at the outset of the 21st century, which is all the more remarkable an achievement for someone who didn't even aspire to a musical career until he was in his thirties. Cohen was born in 1934, a year before or , and his background -- personal, social, and intellectual -- couldn't have been more different from those of any rock stars of any generation; nor can he be easily compared even with any members of the generation of folksingers who came of age in the 1960s.
Though he knew some country music and played it a bit as a boy, he didn't start performing on even a semi-regular basis, much less recording, until after he had already written several books -- and as an established novelist and poet, his literary accomplishments far exceed those of or most anyone else who one cares to mention in music, at least this side of operatic librettists such as Hugo Von Hoffmanstahl or Stefan Zweig, figures from another musical and cultural world. He was born Leonard Norman Cohen into a middle-class Jewish family in the Montreal suburb of Westmount. His father, a clothing merchant (who also held a degree in engineering), died in 1943, when Cohen was nine years old.
It was his mother who encouraged Cohen as a writer, especially of poetry, during his childhood. This fit in with the progressive intellectual environment in which he was raised, which allowed him free inquiry into a vast range of pursuits. His relationship to music was more tentative -- he took up the guitar at age 13, initially as a way to impress a girl, but was good enough to play country western songs at local cafes, and he subsequently formed a group called the Buckskin Boys.
At 17, he enrolled in McGill University as an English major -- by this time, he was writing poetry in earnest and became part of the university's tiny underground "bohemian" community. Cohen only earned average grades, but was a good enough writer to earn the McNaughton Prize in creative writing by the time he graduated in 1955 -- a year later, the ink barely dry on his degree, he published his first book of poetry, Let Us Compare Mythologies (1956), which got great reviews but didn't sell especially well.
He was already beyond the age that rock roll was aimed at -- , by contrast, was still , still in his teens, and young enough to become a devotee of when the latter emerged.
In 1961, Cohen published his second book of poetry, The Spice Box of Earth, which became an international success critically and commercially, and established Cohen as a major new literary figure. Meanwhile, he tried to join the family business and spent some time at Columbia University in New York, writing all the time. Between the modest royalties from sales of his second book, literary grants from the Canadian government, and a family legacy, he was able to live comfortably and travel around the world, partake of much of what it had to offer -- including some use of LSD when it was still legal -- and ultimately settling for an extended period in Greece, on the isle of Hydra in the Aegean Sea.
He continued to publish, issuing a pair of novels, The Favorite Game (1963) and Beautiful Losers (1966), with a pair of poetry collections, Flowers for Hitler (1964) and Parasites of Heaven (1966) around them. The Favorite Game was a very personal work about his early life in Montreal, but it was Beautiful Losers that proved another breakthrough, earning the kind of reviews that authors dare not even hope for -- Cohen found himself compared to James Joyce in the pages of The Boston Globe, and across four decades the book has enjoyed sales totaling well into six figures. It was around this time that he also started writing music again, songs being a natural extension of his poetry.
His relative isolation on Hydra, coupled with his highly mobile lifestyle when he left the island, his own natural iconoclastic nature, and the fact that he'd avoided being overwhelmed (or even touched too seriously) by the currents running through popular music since the 1940s, combined to give Cohen a unique voice as a composer. Though he did settle in Nashville for a short time in the mid-'60s, he didn't write quite like anyone else in music, in the country music mecca or anywhere else. This might have been an impediment but for the intervention of
She added Cohen's "Suzanne" to her repertory and put it onto her album , a record that was controversial enough in folk circles -- because of her cover of the song that gave the LP its title -- that it pulled in a lot of listeners and got a wide airing. "Suzanne" received a considerable amount of radio airplay from the LP, and Cohen was also represented on the album by "Dress Rehearsal Rag." It was
He made his debut during the summer of 1967 at the Newport Folk Festival, followed by a pair of sold-out concerts in New York City and an appearance singing his songs and reciting his poems on the CBS network television show Camera Three, in a show entitled Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen. It was around the same time that actor/singer brought "Suzanne" onto the pop charts with a recording of his own.
One of those who saw Cohen perform at Newport was , the legendary producer whose career went back to the 1930s and the likes of , , and , and extended up through and, ultimately, to . got Cohen signed to Columbia Records and he created , which was released just before Christmas of 1967. Producer was able to find a restrained yet appealing approach to recording Cohen's voice, which might have been described as a appealingly sensitive near-monotone; yet that voice was perfectly suited to the material at hand, all of which, written in a very personal language, seemed drenched in downbeat images and a spirit of discovery as a path to unsettling revelation.
Despite its spare production and melancholy subject matter -- or, very possibly because of it -- the album was an immediate hit by the standards of the folk music world and the budding singer/songwriter community. In an era in which millions of listeners hung on the next albums of and -- whose own latest album had ended with a minor-key rendition of "Silent Night" set against a radio news account of the death of -- Cohen's music quickly found a small but dedicated following. College students by the thousands bought it; in its second year of release, the record sold over 100,000 copies.
was as close as Cohen ever got to mass audience success.
Amid all of this sudden musical activity, he hardly neglected his other writing -- in 1968, Cohen released a new volume, Selected Poems: 1956-1968, which included both old and newly published work, and earned him the Governor-General's Award, Canada's highest literary honor, which he proceeded to decline to accept. By this time, he was actually almost more a part of the rock scene, residing for a time in New York's Chelsea Hotel, where his neighbors included and other performing luminaries, some of whom influenced his songs very directly.
His next album, (1969), was characterized by an even greater spirit of melancholy -- even the relatively spirited "A Bunch of Lonesome Heroes" was steeped in such depressing sensibilities, and the one song not written by Cohen, "The Partisan," was a grim narrative about the reasons for and consequences of resistance to tyranny that included lines like "She died without a whisper" and included images of wind blowing past graves. subsequently recorded the song, and in her hands it was a bit more upbeat and inspiring to the listener; Cohen's rendition made it much more difficult to get past the costs presented by the singer's persona. On the other hand, "Seems So Long Ago, Nancy," although as downbeat as anything else here, did present Cohen in his most expressive and commercial voice, a nasal but affecting and finely nuanced performance.
Still, in all, was less well received commercially and critically -- 's restrained, almost minimalist production made it less overtly appealing than the subtly commercial trappings of his debut, though the album did have a pair of tracks, "Bird on the Wire" and "The Story of Isaac," that became standards rivaling "Suzanne" -- "The Story of Isaac," a musical parable woven around biblical imagery about Vietnam (which is also relevant to the Iraq War), was one of the most savage and piercing songs to come out of the antiwar movement, and showed a level of sophistication in its music and lyrics that put it in a whole separate realm of composition; it received an even better airing on the album, in a performance recorded in Berlin during 1972. Cohen may not have been a widely popular performer or recording artist, but his unique voice and sound, and the power of his writing and its influence, helped give him entrée to rock's front-ranked performers, an odd status for the now 35-year-old author/composer. He appeared at the 1970 Isle of Wight festival in England, a post-Woodstock gathering of stars and superstars, including late appearances by such soon-to-die-or-disband legends as and ; looking nearly as awkward as his fellow Canadian , Cohen strummed his acoustic guitar backed by a pair of female singers in front of an audience of 600,000 ("It's a large nation, but still weak"), comprised in equal portions of fans, freaks, and belligerent gatecrashers, but the mere fact that he was there -- sandwiched somewhere between and -- was a clear statement of the status (if not the popular success) he'd achieved.
One portion of his set, "Tonight Will Be Fine," was released on a subsequent live album, while his performance of "Suzanne" was one of the highlights of Murray Lerner's long-delayed, 1996-issued documentary Message to Love: The Isle of Wight Festival.
Already, he had carved out a unique place for himself in music, as much author as performer and recording artist, letting his songs develop and evolve across years -- his distinctly noncommercial voice became part of his appeal to the audience he found, giving him a unique corner of the music audience, made of listeners descended from the same people who had embraced 's early work before he'd become a mass-media phenomenon in 1964. In a sense, Cohen embodied a phenomenon vaguely similar to what enjoyed before his early-'70s tour with -- people bought his albums by the tens and, occasionally, hundreds of thousands, but seemed to hear him in uniquely personal terms.
He earned his audience seemingly one listener at a time, by word of mouth more than by the radio which, in any case (especially on the AM dial), was mostly friendly to covers of Cohen's songs by other artists. Cohen's third album, (1971), was his most powerful body of work to date, brimming with piercing lyrics and music as poignantly affecting as it was minimalist in its approach -- arranger 's work on strings was peculiarly muted, and the children's chorus that showed up on "Last Year's Man" was spare in its presence; balancing them was Cohen's most effective vocalizing to date, brilliantly expressive around such acclaimed songs as "Joan of Arc," "Dress Rehearsal Rag" (which had been recorded by
And the most compelling moments -- among an embarrassment of riches -- came on lyrics like "Now the flames they followed Joan of Arc/As she came riding through the dark/No Moon to keep her armor bright/No man to get her through this night...
."; indeed, hearing Cohen's lyrics 25 years on, one could almost find a burlesque of Cohen's music in the songs of Lisa Kudrow's Phoebe Buffay on Friends -- who, even money bet probably grew up on in her fictional bio -- and lyrics like "They found their bodies the third day..
.."
Teenagers of the late '60s (or any era that followed) listening devotedly to Leonard Cohen might have worried their parents, but also could well have been the smartest or most sensitive kids in their class and the most well-balanced emotionally -- if they weren't depressed -- but also effectively well on their way out of being teenagers, and probably too advanced for their peers and maybe most of their teachers (except maybe the ones listening to Cohen).
, coupled with the earlier hit versions of "Suzanne," etc., earned Cohen a large international cult following. He also found himself in demand in the world of commercial filmmaking, as director Robert Altman used his music in his 1971 feature film McCabe and Mrs.
Miller, starring Warren Beatty and Julie Christie, a revisionist period film set at the turn of the 19th century that was savaged by the critics (and, by some accounts, sabotaged by its own studio) but went on to become one of the director's best-loved movies. The following year, he also published a new poetry collection, The Energy of Slaves. As was his won't, Cohen spent years between albums, and in 1973 he seemed to take stock of himself as a performer by issuing .
Not a conventional live album, it was a compendium of performances from various venues across several years and focused on highlights of his output from 1969 onward. It showcased his writing as much as his performing, but also gave a good account of his appeal to his most serious fans -- those still uncertain of where they stood in relation to his music who could get past the epic-length "Please Don't Pass Me By" knew for certain they were ready to "join" the inner circle of his legion of devotees after that, while others who only appreciated "Bird on the Wire" or "The Story of Isaac" could stay comfortably on an outer ring.
Meanwhile, in 1973, his music became the basis for a theatrical production called Sisters of Mercy, conceived by Gene Lesser and loosely based on Cohen's life, or at least a fantasy version of his life.
A three-year lag ensued between and Cohen's next album, and most critics and fans just assumed he'd hit a dry spell with the live album covering the gap. He was busy concertizing, however, in the United States and Europe during 1971 and 1972, and extending his appearances into Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. It was during this period that he also began working with pianist and arranger John Lissauer, whom he engaged as producer of his next album, (1974).
That album seemed to justify his fans' continued faith in his work, presenting Cohen in a more lavish musical environment. He proved capable of holding his own in a pop environment, even if the songs were mostly still depressing and bleak.
The following year, Columbia Records released , featuring a dozen of his best-known songs -- principally hits in the hands of other performers -- from his previous four LPs (though it left out "Dress Rehearsal Rag").
It was also during the mid-'70s that Cohen first crossed paths professionally with , appearing on the same bill with the singer at numerous shows, which would lead to a series of key collaborations in the ensuing decade. By this time, he was a somewhat less mysterious persona, having toured extensively and gotten considerable exposure -- among many other attributes, Cohen became known for his uncanny attractiveness to women, which seemed to go hand in glove with the romantic subjects of most of his songs. In 1977, Cohen reappeared with the ironically titled , the most controversial album of his career, produced by .
The notion of pairing -- known variously as a Svengali-like presence to his female singers and artists and the most unrepentant (and often justified) over-producer in the field of pop music -- with Cohen must have seemed like a good one to someone at some point, but apparently Cohen himself had misgivings about many of the resulting tracks that never addressed, having mixed the record completely on his own. The resulting LP suffered from the worst attributes of Cohen's and 's work, overly dense and self-consciously imposing in its sound, and virtually bathing the listener in Cohen's depressive persona, but showing his limited vocal abilities to disadvantage, owing to 's use of "scratch" (i.e.
, guide) vocals and his unwillingness to permit the artist to redo some of his weaker moments on those takes. For the first (and only) time in Cohen's career, his near-monotone delivery of this period wasn't a positive attribute. Cohen's unhappiness with the album was widely known among fans, who mostly bought it with that caveat in mind, so it didn't harm his reputation -- a year after its release, Cohen also published a new literary collection using the title Death of a Ladies' Man.
Cohen's next album, (1979), returned him to the spare settings of his early-'70s work and showed his singing to some of its best advantage. Working with veteran producer (best known for his work with ), the album showed Cohen's singing as attractive and expressive in its quiet way, and songs such as "The Guests" seeming downright pretty -- he still wrote about life and love, and especially relationships, in stark terms, but he almost seemed to be moving into a pop mode on numbers such as "Humbled in Love." never needed to look over his shoulder at Cohen (at least, as a singer), but he did seem to be trying for a slicker pop sound at moments on his record.
Then came 1984, and two key new works in Cohen's output -- the poetic/religious volume The Book of Mercy and the album (1984). The latter, recorded with , is arguably his most accessible album of his entire career up to that time -- Cohen's voice, now a peculiarly expressive baritone instrument, found a beautiful pairing with , and the songs were as fine as ever, steeped in spirituality and sexuality, with "Dance Me to the End of Love" a killer opener: a wry, doom-laden yet impassioned pop-style ballad that is impossible to forget. Those efforts overlapped with some ventures by the composer/singer into other creative realms, including an award-winning short film that he wrote, directed, and scored, entitled I Am a Hotel, and the score for the 1985 conceptual film Night Magic, which earned a Juno Award in Canada for Best Movie Score.
Sad to say, went relatively unnoticed, and was followed by another extended sabbatical from recording, which ended with (1988). But during his hiatus, had released her album of Cohen-authored material, entitled , which had sold extremely well and introduced Cohen to a new generation of listeners. So when did appear, with its electronic production (albeit still rather spare) and songs that added humor (albeit dark humor) to his mix of pessimistic and poetic conceits, the result was his best-selling record in more than a decade.
The result, in 1991, was the release of , a CD of recordings of his songs by the likes of , , Nick Cave the Bad Seeds, and , which put Cohen as a songwriter pushing age 60 right back on center stage for the 1990s. He rose to the occasion, releasing , an album that dwelt on the many threats facing mankind in the coming years and decades, a year later. Not the stuff of pop charts or MTV heavy rotation, it attracted Cohen's usual coterie of fans, and enough press interest as well as sufficient sales, to justify the release in 1994 of his second concert album, , derived from his two most recent tours.
A year later came another tribute album, , featuring Cohen's songs as interpreted by , , et al. In the midst of all of this new activity surrounding his writing and compositions, Cohen embarked on a new phase of his life. Religious concerns were never too far from his thinking and work, even when he was making a name for himself writing songs about love, and he had focused ever more on this side of life since .
He came to spend time at the Mt. Baldy Zen Center, a Buddhist retreat in California, and eventually became a full-time resident, becoming a Buddhist monk during the late '90s. When he re-emerged in 1999, Cohen had many dozens of new compositions in hand, songs and poems alike.
His new collaborations were with singer/songwriter/musician Sharon Robinson, who also ended up producing the resulting album, (2001) -- there also emerged during this period a release called , comprised of live recordings from his tour of 22 years before. In 2004, the year he turned 70, Cohen released one of the most controversial albums of his career, . It revealed his voice anew, in this phase of his career, as a deep baritone more limited in range than on any previous recording, but it overcame this change in vocal timbre by facing it head-on, just as Cohen had done with his singing throughout his career -- it also contained a number of songs for which Cohen wrote music but not lyrics, a decided change of pace for a man who'd started out as a poet.
And it was as personal a record as Cohen had ever issued. His return to recording was one of the more positive aspects of Cohen's resumption of his music activities. On another side, in 2005, he filed suit against his longtime business manager and his financial advisor over the alleged theft of more than five million dollars, at least some of which took place during his years at the Buddhist retreat.
Four decades after he emerged as a public literary figure and then a performer, Cohen remains one of the most compelling and enigmatic musical figures of his era, and one of the very few of that era who commands as much respect and attention, and probably as large an audience, in the 21st century as he did in the 1960s. As much as any survivor of that decade, Cohen has held onto his original audience and has seen it grow across generations, in keeping with a body of music that is truly timeless and ageless. In 2006, his enduring influence seemed to be acknowledged in Lions Gate Films' release of Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man, director Lian Lunson's concert/portrait of Cohen and his work and career.
~ Bruce Eder, All Music Guide "In dreams the truth is learned that all good works are done in the absence of a caress." "A woman watches her body uneasily, as though it were an unreliable ally in the battle for love." "What is most original in a man's nature is often that which is most desperate.
Thus new systems are forced on the world by men who simply cannot bear the pain of living with what is. Creators care nothing for their systems except that they be unique. If Hitler had been born in Nazi Germany he wouldn't have been content to enjoy the atmosphere.
" "The term clinical depression finds its way into too many conversations these days. One has a sense that a catastrophe has occurred in the psychic landscape." "Let judges secretly despair of justice: their verdicts will be more acute.
Let generals secretly despair of triumph; killing will be defamed. Let priests secretly despair of faith: their compassion will be true." "What is the appropriate behavior for a man or a woman in the midst of this world, where each person is clinging to his piece of debris?
What's the proper salutation between people as they pass each other in this flood?" "Seven to eleven is a huge chunk of life, full of dulling and forgetting. It is fabled that we slowly lose the gift of speech with animals, that birds no longer visit our windowsills to converse.
As our eyes grow accustomed to sight they armor themselves against wonder." For more famous quotes by Leonard Cohen, visit poetry in in 1956 and his first novel in 1963.
Cohen's early songs are based in melodies and instrumentation.
In the 1970s, he Since the 1980s he typically has sung in a bass register, with accompaniments from electronic and female backing vocals.
sexuality, and complex interpersonal relationships.
Cohen's songs and poetry have influenced many other singer-songwriters, and more than a thousand renditions of his work have been recorded.
He has been inducted into the and , the nation's highest civilian honour.
Cohen was born to a middle-class family of Polish ancestry in 1934 in , . He grew up in on the .
His father, Nathan Cohen, was the owner of a substantial Montreal clothing store, and died when Leonard was nine years old. Like many other Jews named Cohen, Katz, Kagan, etc., his family made a proud claim of descent from the : "I had a very Messianic childhood," he told Richard Goldstein in 1967.
"I was told I was a descendant of , the high priest." As a teenager he learned to play the , subsequently forming a -folk group called the Buckskin Boys. His father's will provided Leonard with a modest income, sufficient to allow him to pursue his literary ambitions.
Cohen idolized his father, and his death threw him into a deep . As he his awareness to the "hypocrisy" and "self-delusion" that are "common traits of humanity," ideas which are prominent themes in his songs. His mother Masha Cohen, from whom he inherited his love for songs and poets, died in 1978.
Cohen's depression did not lift until the late 1990s.[ (1956), was published under as the first book in the McGill Poetry Series, while Cohen was an undergraduate.
(1961) made him well known in poetry circles, especially in his native Canada.
Cohen applied a strong work ethic to his early and keen literary ambitions. He wrote poetry and fiction through much of the 1960s, and preferred to live in quasi-reclusive circumstances.
After moving to , a island, Cohen published the poetry collection young man finding his identity in writing.
In contrast, Beautiful Losers can be considered as an 'anti-bildungsroman' since it — in an early fashion — deconstructs the identity of the main characters by combining the sacred and the profane, religion and sexuality in a rich, lyrical language. Reflecting Cohen's roots, but perhaps unusually for someone from a Jewish background, a secondary plot in Beautiful Losers concerns , the mystic.
Beautiful Losers initially shocked Canadian reviewers, with its explicit sexual content.
In 1967, Cohen relocated to the to pursue a career as a folk singer-songwriter. His song " " became a hit for .
After performing at a few folk festivals, he came to the attention of representative (who signed ( ) was too dark to be a commercial success, but was widely acclaimed by folk music buffs. He became a cult name in the UK, where the album spent over a year on the album charts. He followed up with Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, Cohen toured the United States, Canada and .
during the . Beginning around 1974, his collaboration with pianist/arranger John Lissauer created a live sound praised by the critics, but which was never really captured on record. During this time, Cohen often toured with as a back-up singer.
In , Cohen released (note the plural possessive case; one year later in 1978, Cohen released a volume of poetry with the coyly revised title, Death of a Lady's Man). The album was produced by , well known as the inventor of the " " technique, in which pop music is backed with thick layers of instrumentation, an approach very different from Cohen's usually minimalist instrumentation. The recording of the album was fraught with difficulty; Spector reportedly mixed the album in secret studio sessions and Cohen said Spector once threatened him at gunpoint.
Cohen thinks the end result is "grotesque" . Produced by Cohen himself, and Henry Lewy ( 's sound engineer), the album-included performances by a jazz-fusion band, introduced to Cohen by Mitchell, and oriental instruments (oud, Gypsy violin and mandolin). In 2001, Cohen releasing the live In , Cohen released , a highly spiritual and synthesizer-guided album, featuring the often covered " ".
Columbia declined to release the album in the United States, where Cohen's popularity had declined in recent years. (Throughout his career, Cohen's music has sold better in Europe and Canada than in the U.S.
; he once satirically expressed how touched he is at the modesty the American company has shown in promoting his records.)
. In , ' tribute album Famous Blue Raincoat helped restore Cohen's career in the U.
S., his music. ruled the album, although in a much more subdued manner than on Death of a Ladies' Man, and Cohen's lyrics included more social commentary and dark humour.
It was Cohen's most acclaimed songs.
The use of the album track " " (co-written by ) in the 1990 film helped to expose Cohen's music to a younger audience. In , Cohen released , which urges, (often in terms of prophecy) perseverance, reformation, and hope in the face of grim prospects.
Three tracks from the album In the title track, Cohen prophesies impending political and social collapse, reportedly as his response to the : "I've seen the future, brother: It is murder." In "Democracy," Cohen, criticizes America but says he loves it: "I love the country but I can't stand the scene." Further, he staying home tonight/getting lost in that hopeless little screen.
"
In 1994, following a tour to promote The Future, Cohen retreated to the Centre near Los Angeles, beginning what would become five years of seclusion at the center. In 1996, Cohen was ordained as a Zen monk and took the name Jikan, meaning 'silent one'. He left Mount Baldy in 1999.
. With this album, Cohen shed the relatively extroverted, engaged, and even optimistic outlook of The Future (the sole political track, “The Land of Plenty,” abandoning stern commandment for departure of love, romantic and even divine. Ten New Songs' cohesive musical style (perhaps absent from Cohen's albums since Recent Songs) owes much to Robinson’s involvement.
Although not Cohen’s bitterest album, it may rank as his most melancholic.
although Sharon Robinson returns to collaborate on three tracks (including a duet). As light as the previous album was dark, recent years, which he attributes to the neurological processes of aging.
Dear Heather is perhaps his least cohesive, and most experimental and playful album to date, and the stylings of some of the songs (especially the title track) frustrated many fans. In an interview following his induction into the Canadian Songwriters' Hall of Fame, Cohen explained that the album was intended to be a kind of notebook or scrapbook of themes, and that a more formal record had been planned for release shortly afterwards, but that this was put on ice by his legal battles with his ex-manager.
, an album of songs co-written by Anjani and Cohen, was released on , to positive reviews.
The album is sung by Anjani, who according to one reviewer "sounds like Cohen reincarnated as woman. . .
. though Cohen doesn't sing a note on the album, his voice permeates it like smoke." The album includes a recent musical setting of Cohen's "As the mist leaves no scar," a poem originally published in in 1961 and adapted by Spector into "True Love Leaves No Traces" on Cohen has been under new management since April 2005.
He recently wrote and produced the album for . Cohen's new book of poetry and drawings, Book of Longing, was published in May 2006; in March a -based retailer offered signed copies to the first 1500 orders placed online, which saw the entire amount sold within hours. The book quickly topped bestseller lists in Canada.
On , , Cohen made his first public appearance for thirteen years, at an in store event at a bookstore in Toronto. Approximately 3000 people turned up for the event, causing the streets surrounding the bookstore to be closed. He sang two of his earliest and best-known songs: "So Long, Marianne" and "Hey, That's No Way To Say Goodbye", accompanied by the and .
Also appearing with him was Anjani, the two promoting her new CD, along with his book. Cohen's new album meanwhile is also slated for late 2007, while announced touring, first after 1993, still isn't confirmed.
to his songs) were misappropriated by his longtime former manager, Kelley Lynch.
A lawsuit is pending for gross misappropriation over US$5 million from Cohen's retirement fund, leaving only $150,000. Cohen was sued in turn by other former business associates. These events have put him in the public spotlight, including a cover feature on him with the headline "Devastated!
" in Canada's magazine. In March of 2006, Cohen won the , and was awarded US$9 million by a Los Angeles County superior court. Lynch, however, had completely ignored the suit, and did not respond to a subpoena issued for her financial records.
For a long time it was believed that the character Lorenzo in Jensen's novel Joacim (1961) was based on Cohen, but Axel told him it was influenced by Tunström. Elrod took the cover photograph on Cohen's Live Songs album and is pictured, on the right, on the cover of the Death of a Ladies' Man album. In 1990, Cohen was Recurring themes in Cohen's work include love and sex, religion, psychological depression, and music itself. He has also engaged with certain political themes, though sometimes ambiguously so. Love and sexuality are common themes in popular music, yet Cohen's background as a novelist and poet enabled him to bring a darker, deeper edge to these themes. "Suzanne" mixes a wistful type of love song with a religious meditation, themes that are also mixed in "Joan of Arc." "Famous Blue Raincoat" is infidelity with his close friend, and is written in the form of a letter to that friend, to whom he writes, "I guess that I miss naked man and woman/ Are just a shining artifact of the past." However, he still considers himself also a Jew: "I'm not looking for a new religion. I'm quite less so with the onset of old age), Cohen has written much (especially in his early work) about depression and . The wife of the protagonist of Beautiful Losers commits a gory suicide; "Seems So Long Ago, "Tonight Will Be Fine. " As in the aforementioned "Hallelujah", music itself is the subject of many songs, including "Tower of Social justice often shows up as a theme in his work, where he seems, especially in later albums, to expound a leftist politics, albeit with culturally conservative elements. In "Democracy" lamenting "the wars against disorder/ … the sirens night and day/ … the fires of the homeless/ … the ashes of the gay," he concludes that the United States is actually not a democracy: A specifically (and classically) leftist position, as is his observation (in "Tower of Song") that "the rich have got their channels in the bedrooms of the poor/ And there's a mighty judgment coming." In the title track of The Future he recasts this prophecy on a pacifist note: "I've seen the nations rise and fall/ …/ But love's the only engine of survival. " In "Anthem," he promises that "the killers in high places [who] say their prayers out loud/ … [are] gonna hear from me." " Disillusioned by encounters with captured and wounded enemy troops, and having expressed ambivalence from the start about the causes of the conflict, he eventually left, but not before beginning to write his song "Lover Lover Lover," as he His recent politics continue a lifelong predilection for the underdog, the "beautiful loser,". Whether covering own "The Old Revolution", written from the point of view of a defeated royalist, he has throughout his career through his music expressed his sympathy and support for the oppressed. Although Cohen's fascination with war is often as metaphor for more explicitly cultural and personal issues, as in New Skin for the Old Ceremony, by this measure his most "militant" album. Cohen has also covered such love songs by ), chosen in part for their unlikely juxtaposition to his own work.
According to biographer and filmmaker Harry Rasky, Cohen has been married once, to children with Elrod: a son, Adam, was born in 1972 and a daughter, Lorca, named after poet , was born in 1974. Adam Cohen began his own career as a singer-songwriter in the mid-1990s.
Cohen and Elrod had divorced by 1979. Contrary to popular belief, " ", one of his best-known songs, refers to Suzanne Verdal, the former wife of his friend, the Québécois sculptor Armand Vaillancourt, rather than Elrod.
"Sisters of Mercy" evokes genuine love ( more than ) found in a hotel room encounter with two women, whereas stand rather unsentimentally, and the title of "Don't Go Home with Your Hard-On" speaks for itself.
Cohen comes from a background, most obviously reflected in his song " ", and also in "Who by Fire," whose words and melody echo the , an 11th century liturgical poem recited on . Broader themes are sounded throughout the album Various Positions: "Hallelujah", which has music as a secondary theme, begins by evoking the biblical king In his early career as a novelist, Beautiful Losers grappled with the mysticism of the Catholic/Iroquois Katherine Tekakwitha. Cohen has also been involved with at least since the 1970s and in 1996 he was ordained a Buddhist monk.
In "The Land of Plenty," he characterizes the United States (if not the opulent West in general) of benightedness: "May the lights in The Land of Plenty/ Shine on the truth some day." And in "On That Day," in a sincere and genuine lament for the , he nevertheless, startlingly, raises (and takes an agnostic position on) the question of whether "It's what we deserve/ For sins against God/ For crimes in the world.
War is an enduring theme of Cohen's work which in his earlier songs, as indeed in his early life, he approached ambivalently. tensions in 1961—allegedly sporting -style beard and military fatigues. This song was actually written immediately following Cohen's front-line stint with the air force, In 1973, Cohen, who had traveled to to sign up on the Israeli side in the 1973 war with Egypt, had instead been assigned to a -style entertainer tour fire and reportedly shared cognac with an unlikely self-professed fan, then-General .
work) gentle acceptance. His wit contends with his stark analyses, as his songs are often verbally playful and even cheerful: In "Tower of Song," the famously raw-voiced Cohen sings that he was "… born with the gift/ Of a golden voice"; the generally dark "Is This What You Wanted?" nonetheless contains playful lines "You were and the Beast of Babylon/ I was "; in concert, he often plays around with his lyrics (for example, "If you want a doctor/ I'll using a phrase from another song or poem (for example, introducing "Leaving Green Sleeves" by paraphrasing his own "Queen Some of his songs, such as "Ballad of the Absent Mare" and " " are simply beautiful, and "Democracy" looks at a future as hopeful as that of "The Future" is bleak.
album, Songs of Leonard Cohen: "Stranger Song" is McCabe's theme, "Winter Lady" is Mrs.
Miller's, and "Sisters of Mercy" is the theme of the prostitutes who work in their establishment. He also composed some incidental music for the movie.
A cover of "Everybody Knows" is also heard in the film and appears on the CD of the
Jealousy (1998) uses "Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye"
Buckley's version was also featured in
Leonard Cohen was the subject of the 1965 documentary Ladies and Gentleman..
. Mr. Leonard Cohen, directed by His song I'm Your Man was also the inspiration for a 1996 NFB animated short.
produced by . The film, directed by Lian Lunson, has appearances by , , of , and Wainwright, among others, and a performance life and career.
's song "Los restos del naufragio", Cohen is mentioned.
The National Post, 24 March 2001.
(2005) , The Guardian. October 8, 2005.
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