First We Take Manhattan

Jennifer Warnes recorded it first for her Cohen tribute album Famous Blue Raincoat, with Stevie Ray Vaughan on lead guitar. The producer Roscoe Beck, a friend of Vaughan, asked him at the Grammy Awards in late February 1986 to record the guitar, and the finished recording took two or three takes. The video was directed by Paula Walker and shot on the Brooklyn Bridge. Cohen's own synth-pop version, with extra verses, opened I'm Your Man in February 1988, with a black-and-white video shot by Dominique Issermann.

Cohen said in a 1988 interview that the song means exactly what it says: it is a terrorist song and a response to terrorism, and he distinguished the psychic kind from the physical. On the 1988 tour he used a funk arrangement suggested by his backing vocalists Perla Batalla and Julie Christensen. His studio recording plays over the closing credits of the film Watchmen (2009).

Covers

R.E.M. covered it for the tribute album I'm Your Fan in 1991, and Joe Cocker recorded it on No Ordinary World in 1999.