Leonard Cohen
Leonard Cohen was a Canadian songwriter, singer, poet and novelist, born in Montreal in 1934. He was an established literary figure before he was a musician, publishing poetry through the fifties and the novel Beautiful Losers in 1966, and only turned to songwriting in his thirties. His subjects stayed constant across five decades: faith, desire, failure, and the distance between them. A collapsed retirement fund forced him back on the road in his seventies, and the resulting tours produced some of the best-reviewed performances of his life. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008 and died in 2016.
Movies (1)
Books (2)
Music (19)
- Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967)
- I’m Your Man (1988)
- Ten New Songs (2001)
- Songs of Love and Hate (1971)
- The Future (1992)
- Songs From a Room (1969)
- Old Ideas (2012)
- Various Positions (1984)
- Death of a Ladies’ Man (1977)
- New Skin for the Old Ceremony (1974)
- You Want It Darker (2016)
- Popular Problems (2014)
- Dear Heather (2004)
- Thanks for the Dance (2019)
- Recent Songs (1979)
- Live in London (2009)
- The Essential Leonard Cohen (2002)
- So Long, Marianne (1989)
- The Best of Leonard Cohen / Greatest Hits (1975)
Where to start with Leonard Cohen
Songs of Leonard Cohen is the debut and still the most immediately beautiful. Songs of Love and Hate is the bleakest and the one other songwriters cite most. I’m Your Man is the mid-career reinvention with synthesisers and the famous voice drop. The Future is the angriest, and You Want It Darker is the last record he made.
The early acoustic records
Four albums in seven years that established everything: the plain guitar figures, the low unhurried delivery, the women's voices behind him. Songs of Love and Hate is the bleakest of them and the one other songwriters return to most often when they talk about his influence.
The synthesiser years and the reinvention
In the eighties the voice dropped an octave and the arrangements went synthetic, and it worked far better than it had any right to. Various Positions contains Hallelujah, which almost nobody noticed for a decade. I'm Your Man is the album that made him fashionable again.
The late albums
Cohen in his seventies and eighties, recording with his son producing and a voice worn down to something close to speech. You Want It Darker is the one most people mean when they talk about the late work, and Thanks for the Dance was assembled from the same sessions.