Famous Blue Raincoat

Recorded in the fall of 1970 and released on 19 March 1971, with Bob Johnston producing, the song is a letter. It concerns a love triangle between the speaker, a woman named Jane and the man he is writing to. Guitarist Ron Cornelius said the band played it a lot before it went to tape.

Cohen said in 1994 that it was a song he had never been satisfied with. In the liner notes to The Best of Leonard Cohen (1975) he wrote that the raincoat was his own, a Burberry bought in London in 1959 and stolen from Marianne's loft in New York in the early 1970s.

Cohen described it to Reynolds as a man writing a letter to a man who has had an affair with his wife. He told Zollo that Jennifer Warnes's version was in a sense better, because he had worked on a more coherent version for her, and that in his own you could see the carpentry. Pitchfork's Brian Howe placed the song in a cold New York hotel, and said it alone helps justify the album's classic status. It ranked number 3 in a 2014 Rolling Stone readers poll of his songs.

Covers

Tori Amos, Joan Baez, Jonathan Coulton, Nathaniel Rateliff and First Aid Kit have all covered it. Jennifer Warnes named her album of Cohen songs after it, and Damien Rice sang it at the Tower of Song memorial concert in 2017.