Songs of Leonard Cohen

John Hammond was first assigned to the record but fell ill and was replaced by Simon. Cohen wanted a sparse sound and Simon favored strings and horns, so they argued over the mix. The biographer Ira Nadel says some of Simon's additions could not be removed from the four-track master tape.

It reached number 13 in Britain, number 83 on the Billboard 200 and number 4 in the Netherlands. Rolling Stone's Arthur Schmidt gave it a mixed review in 1968, while Pitchfork's Brian Howe later rated it 9.6 and said it holds many of his most essential songs.

Hammond had Cohen work up Master Song and Sisters of Mercy with the jazz bassist Willie Ruff before Simon took over. The instrumentalists Chester Crill, Chris Darrow, Solomon Feldthouse and David Lindley were recruited by Cohen after he saw their band at a New York club. Sylvie Simmons wrote in Mojo that Cohen found the orchestration of Suzanne overblown, and that he had stipulated no drums. Cohen and Simon also quarreled over a slight stop in the middle of So Long, Marianne.

Stranger Song, Sisters of Mercy and Winter Lady were used in Robert Altman's film McCabe & Mrs. Miller in 1971. A remastered CD with the bonus tracks Store Room and Blessed Is the Memory came out in the United States on 24 April 2007. Pitchfork's Howe said the bonus cuts come from the Hammond sessions. The AllMusic critic Mark Deming wrote that few musicians have created a more remarkable or enduring debut, and the BBC's Tim Nelson in 2007 called it the absolute must-have classic.