I'm Your Man

His first studio album with a sole production credit for Cohen, with Jean-Michel Reusser producing Take This Waltz and Michel Robidoux producing Everybody Knows, and Roscoe Beck credited as production coordinator. It rests on synthesizer, sequencer and drum-machine sound, and Cohen said his voice had settled. The biographer Anthony Reynolds called it an evolutionary leap forward from Various Positions.

It went to number 1 in Norway, number 2 in Finland, number 6 in Sweden, number 34 in Canada and number 48 in Britain, and was certified 4x Platinum in Norway. Rolling Stone's David Browne gave it four stars, and Pitchfork rated it 9.5.

Pitchfork's Dorian Lynskey wrote that the cover shows Cohen in sunglasses and a pinstripe suit eating a banana, photographed by his publicist Sharon Weisz at the video shoot for Jennifer Warnes's version of First We Take Manhattan. Cohen was 53. I Can't Forget began as a song about the Exodus that he felt he lacked the conviction to sing, so he wrote a new first verse at his kitchen table. He said the album broke down three or four times in the making. The Guardian reported that it topped the charts in several European countries.