Suzanne

The song began as a poem, "Suzanne Takes You Down", in the collection Parasites of Heaven in 1966. Judy Collins recorded it that year on In My Life. Cohen's own version, produced by John Simon at Columbia Studio E in New York, opened Songs of Leonard Cohen and came out as a single in January 1968, with Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye and So Long, Marianne on the B-sides.

It is about the dancer Suzanne Verdal, who served him Constant Comment tea in Montreal. In a 1994 BBC interview Cohen said he had only imagined having sex with her.

Cohen told the BBC in 1986 that he wrote most of it in Montreal over four or five months, with many verses to throw away. He signed away the publishing of Suzanne, Stranger Song and Dress Rehearsal Rag early on, and told Q in 1991 that he had got them back about three years earlier. In a 2014 Rolling Stone readers poll it ranked number 2 among his songs, and Pitchfork placed it number 41 on its list of the top 200 songs of the 1960s.

Covers

Noel Harrison's 1967 cover reached number 56 on the Billboard Hot 100, and Herman van Veen's 1969 Dutch version reached number 4 in the Dutch Top 40. Nina Simone recorded it in 1969, Roberta Flack in 1973 and Fabrizio De Andre in Italian in 1974. R.E.M. gave Cohen a co-credit on "Hope" (1998). After his death it re-entered charts in 2016, reaching number 3 in France.