Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye

Leonard Cohen wrote "Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye" in 1966 at the Penn Terminal Hotel on 34th Street in New York; he said of the room that it was overheated: I am in the wrong room. I am with the wrong woman. Judy Collins released it first, on Wildflowers (Elektra, 1967, 3:28), and Cohen's own recording on Songs of Leonard Cohen, produced by John Simon, came the following month. Flack's version is track five on First Take, 4:08, recorded between February 24 and 26, 1969 at Atlantic Studios; it was the B-side of her first single, "Compared to What", released on August 14, 1969. We found no track-by-track personnel beyond the album's, no chart entry of its own, no video and no comment from her on the song.

Far Out calls her cover less melancholic than Cohen's original, cooler and fuller than Collins's, with soft strums, warm piano, soaring strings and occasional twangy guitar. Indiana Public Media's Afterglow named it among the songs she popularized. Other versions include Feist, Ariel Engle and Daniela Gesundheit at a 2017 Tower of Song tribute, Michael Monroe of Hanoi Rocks, and Herman van Veen's Dutch version, "Een ochtend vol liefde" (1969).