Leonard Cohen

Poet

Leonard Norman Cohen was born in Westmount, Quebec, on 21 September 1934. His father, who owned a clothing store, died when he was nine, and as a teenager he formed a country-folk group called the Buckskin Boys. He enrolled at McGill in 1951, saw his first poem published in March 1954 and brought out his first book, Let Us Compare Mythologies, in 1956. After a year at Columbia University he published The Spice-Box of Earth in 1961, then lived on the Greek island of Hydra from 1963 to 1966, where he wrote the novels The Favourite Game and Beautiful Losers and the collection Flowers for Hitler.

In 1966 he wrote "Suzanne", which Judy Collins recorded, and moved to the United States, where John Hammond of Columbia signed him. Songs of Leonard Cohen followed on 27 December 1967. He wanted a sparse sound, while the producer John Simon favored strings and horns, and the two clashed over the mix. The record reached number 13 in Britain and stayed on the chart for more than a year. It holds Suzanne and So Long, Marianne.

Nashville and the road

Songs from a Room (1969) was made with the producer Bob Johnston in Nashville and went to number 2 in Britain. It holds Bird on the Wire. Songs of Love and Hate (1971) added a new backing band called The Army, led by Ron Cornelius, and a live track from the Isle of Wight Festival of 1970. It holds Famous Blue Raincoat and Joan of Arc. Cohen described the period as one when everything was falling apart around him, and in 1973 he called the record an experiment that failed. Critics have been kinder: the BBC's Tim Nelson thought it one of the scariest albums of the last forty years.

Live Songs (1973) drew mostly on the 1972 European tour. Also in 1973 he sang for soldiers in the Sinai during the Yom Kippur War, where he played a new song, "Lover Lover Lover". New Skin for the Old Ceremony (1974) was produced by Cohen and John Lissauer in New York, with Janis Ian, Steve Gadd, Billy Cobham and Phil Collins among the players. Death of a Ladies' Man (1977) was produced and co-written by Phil Spector, and Recent Songs (1979) by Cohen and Henry Lewy.

Hallelujah and the synthesizers

Columbia declined to release Various Positions in the United States, so Passport put it out in 1984. It was written largely on a Casio keyboard and holds Hallelujah and Dance Me to the End of Love. Hallelujah spread slowly through covers by John Cale and Jeff Buckley. He toured the world in 1985.

I'm Your Man (1988) was his first studio album with a sole production credit for Cohen. Built on synthesizer, sequencer and drum-machine sound, it went to number 1 in Norway. Rolling Stone's David Browne called it the first Cohen album that could be listened to during the daylight hours. It opens with Everybody Knows and also holds First We Take Manhattan and Tower of Song. The Future followed in 1992.

Silence and return

From 1994 to 1999 Cohen lived at the Mt. Baldy Zen Center, and in 1996 he was ordained a Rinzai Zen monk with the Dharma name Jikan. He came back with Ten New Songs in 2001, made with Sharon Robinson, which won four Junos in 2002, and Dear Heather in 2004. In late 2005 he found that his manager, Kelley Lynch, had misappropriated much of his money, and in March 2006 he won a civil judgment of US$9 million.

A world tour ran from 2008 to 2010. Old Ideas (2012) became his highest-charting album in the United States, at number 3, and Popular Problems appeared in 2014. Because of spinal fractures and mobility problems, You Want It Darker was recorded between April 2015 and July 2016 in his Los Angeles living room, with his son Adam Cohen co-producing. It came out on 21 October 2016, and he died on 7 November, aged 82. The posthumous Thanks for the Dance appeared in 2019.

He was made a Companion of the Order of Canada in 2003 and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He won the Prince of Asturias Award for literature and the Glenn Gould Prize, both in 2011. The title song of his last album won a Grammy for Best Rock Performance in January 2018. His songs live on through covers and tribute records, among them I'm Your Fan (1991), the Tower of Song memorial concert (2017) and Here It Is (2022).