Leonard Cohen

• 1. Introduction

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  Leonard Cohen once predicted, "I feel I have a huge posthumous career in front of me." He said it long before he died, and the forecast turned out to be sound. Cohen was a Canadian poet, novelist, singer and songwriter, and for much of his life nobody could say which of those trades would define him. In the end he was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame, the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. His work circles faith and mortality, isolation and depression, betrayal and redemption, desire, regret and loss. How did a bookish young man from Montreal become a songwriter whom other musicians revered? What happened when a trusted manager drained his savings? And why would a man known for gloom retreat to a Zen monastery for years?

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• 2. Montreal To Hydra

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  Leonard Norman Cohen was born on the 21st of September 1934 in Westmount, an English-speaking enclave of Montreal, Quebec. His family was Orthodox Jewish. His mother, Marsha Klonitsky, known as Masha, had come from Kaunas in 1927 and was the daughter of the Talmudic writer and rabbi Solomon Klonitsky-Kline. His grandfather Lyon Cohen had emigrated from Suwałki in Congress Poland and became the founding president of the Canadian Jewish Congress. His parents gave him the Hebrew name Eliezer, which means "God helps."

  Nathan Bernard Cohen, a clothing store owner, died when his son was nine years old. The family belonged to Congregation Shaar Hashomayim, and Cohen kept his ties to it for the rest of his life. Speaking in 1967 about being a kohen, he said, "I had a very Messianic childhood. I was told I was a descendant of Aaron, the high priest."

  At Herzliah High School, where Cohen finished grades seven through nine, he met Irving Layton, the teacher who became his literary mentor. In 1948 he moved to Westmount High School to study music and poetry, and he fell for the Spanish poems of Federico García Lorca. He also took part in photography, the yearbook, cheerleading, an arts club, a current events club and theater, and he served as president of the Students' Council. He taught himself acoustic guitar and formed a country-folk group called the Buckskin Boys. Then a young Spanish guitarist showed him "a few chords and some flamenco," and Cohen switched to a classical guitar. He credited his mother, who sang around the house, for his love of music.

  On Saint Laurent Boulevard, Cohen and one of his cousins used to head for the Main Deli Steak House. Journalist David Sax says they went to "watch the gangsters, pimps, and wrestlers dance around the night." After leaving Westmount, Cohen bought a place on the boulevard, in the then working-class neighbourhood of Little Portugal. He read his poems at clubs nearby, and there he wrote the lyrics to some of his most famous songs.

  In 1951 Cohen enrolled at McGill University, where he joined the fraternity Zeta Beta Tau and led the McGill Debating Union. He won the Chester MacNaghten Literary Competition for two poems, "Sparrows" and "Thoughts of a Landsman." His first published poem appeared in March 1954 in the magazine CIV/n, next to work by Layton and Louis Dudek, who taught him and sat on the editorial board. He graduated with a B.A. the following year. Among his influences were William Butler Yeats, Walt Whitman and Henry Miller, along with Layton.

  In 1956 Dudek published Let Us Compare Mythologies as the first book in the McGill Poetry Series. The poems were written mostly when Cohen was between 15 and 20, and he dedicated the book to his late father. The critic Northrop Frye gave it what Cohen later received as restrained praise. Cohen then spent a term in the McGill Faculty of Law and a year, 1956-57, at the Columbia University School of General Studies. He summed up graduate school as "passion without flesh, love without climax."

  Back in Montreal in 1957, Cohen took odd jobs and worked on fiction and poetry. A modest trust income from his father's will kept him going. The Spice-Box of Earth, published in 1961 by McClelland & Stewart, widened his audience beyond McGill. The critic Robert Weaver called Cohen "probably the best young poet in English Canada right now."

  In September 1960 Cohen bought a house on the Greek island of Hydra with $1,500 he had inherited from his grandmother. He lived there with Marianne Ihlen for most of the decade, and he later wrote "So Long, Marianne" to her and about her. From that quiet base he published the novel The Favourite Game in 1963, an autobiographical story of a young man who finds his identity through writing. The poetry collection Flowers for Hitler followed in 1964. In 1965 the National Film Board made a 44-minute documentary about him called Ladies and Gentlemen... Mr. Leonard Cohen.

  The 1966 novel Beautiful Losers drew heavy attention in the Canadian press and stirred controversy with its sexually graphic passages. The Boston Globe declared, "James Joyce is not dead. He is living in Montreal under the name of Cohen." That same year he published the poems of Parasites of Heaven. Both books got mixed reviews and sold few copies, and in the same year a Montreal television producer heard Cohen announce a very different plan.

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• 3. From Page To Stage

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  In 1966, CBC-TV producer Andrew Simon, who made a local Montreal current-affairs program called Seven on Six, offered Cohen a job as host. Simon recalled Cohen's reply: "I decided I'm going to be a songwriter. I want to write songs." After that Cohen published much less, with long gaps between books. That same year he wrote "Suzanne," which The Stormy Clovers performed and Judy Collins recorded on her album In My Life. In 1967, disappointed with his results as a writer, he moved to the United States to try for a career as a folk singer-songwriter.

  In New York, Cohen was a fringe figure in Andy Warhol's Factory crowd during the 1960s. Warhol guessed that Cohen had listened to Nico in clubs and absorbed something of her style. Collins remembered that when they first met, Cohen insisted he could neither sing nor play the guitar. He did not even think "Suzanne" was a song. She brought him to a big fundraiser where Jimi Hendrix was also on the bill. Cohen had never sung before so large an audience, and he walked off halfway through. The crowd demanded his return, and Collins went back out with him. She introduced him to television audiences in 1966, when they sang duets of his songs.

  As for "Suzanne," it became a hit for Collins and for years was his most recorded song. Cohen said he had been duped into giving up its rights. He added that he was glad, because it seemed wrong to write a song so well loved and also grow rich from it.

  After a few folk festival appearances, Cohen caught the eye of Columbia Records producer John Hammond, who signed him. The result, Songs of Leonard Cohen, came out in the United States in late 1967 to generally dismissive reviews. In the United Kingdom, in early 1968, it became a favourite and stayed on the album charts for over a year. Cohen appeared on BBC TV in 1968 to sing a duet from it with Julie Felix. Songs from a Room followed in 1969 and included "Bird on the Wire." Songs of Love and Hate arrived in 1971. In the spring of 1968 he had a brief relationship with Janis Joplin at the Chelsea Hotel, and his song of the same name refers to it.

  In 1970 Cohen toured for the first time, across the United States, Canada and Europe, and played the Isle of Wight Festival. A year later, director Robert Altman used "The Stranger Song," "Winter Lady" and "Sisters of Mercy" in his film McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Writing after Cohen's death, Tim Grierson said Altman's and Cohen's legacies would forever be linked by that movie.

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• 4. Soldier And Stylist

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  In 1972 Cohen toured Europe and Israel, and the filmmaker Tony Palmer captured it on camera. When a show in Israel seemed to be going badly, Cohen left the stage, went to his dressing room and took LSD. Then he heard the audience calling him back by singing to him in Hebrew. He returned and finished the concert. Palmer's film was eventually released in 2010 as Bird on a Wire.

  On Yom Kippur in 1973, Egypt and Syria attacked Israel, and Cohen flew there without a guitar. He meant to volunteer on a kibbutz for the harvest, though he had no firm plan. In a Tel Aviv cafe called Pinati, the Israeli musicians Oshik Levi, Matti Caspi and Ilana Rovina spotted him. They invited him to come to Sinai and sing for soldiers. Before the war he had reportedly voiced pro-Arab political views. Afterward he said, "I know only that war is cruel, that it leaves bones, blood and ugly stains on the holy soil."

  In Sinai, Cohen met Major General Ariel Sharon, a future prime minister of Israel. He played "Suzanne," "So Long Marianne" and "Bird on the Wire," along with a new song he called "Lover Lover Lover." He later described the concerts: "We would just drop into little places, like a rocket site and they would shine their flashlights at us and we would sing a few songs." He called it "very informal, and you know, very intense."

  The war shaped the 1974 album New Skin for the Old Ceremony. "Lover Lover Lover" was written and first performed in Sinai. "Who By Fire" takes its name from the Unetaneh Tokef, a Yom Kippur prayer. "Field Commander Cohen" and "There is a War" also came from the experience. In 1976 Cohen told a concert audience that "Lover Lover Lover" was written for "the Egyptians and the Israelis." Yet he had written and sung it for Israeli soldiers, and it first contained the line "I went down to the desert to help my brothers fight." The song has been read as a personal renunciation of armed conflict. It ends with the hope that it will serve a listener as "a shield against the enemy."

  In 1974, challenged about his serious manner and the military salutes that closed his shows, Cohen answered, "I don't consider myself a civilian. I consider myself a soldier, and that's the way soldiers salute."

  Columbia released his first concert album, Live Songs, in 1973. From 1974, Cohen worked with the pianist and arranger John Lissauer, and critics praised the live sound they made together. They toured Europe, the United States and Canada. In late 1975 the pair played a short run of shows with a new band, previewing songs from an album in progress called Songs for Rebecca. That album was abandoned in 1976, and none of the recordings from those tours was ever officially released.

  In 1976 Cohen gave 55 shows on a European tour from April to July, including his first appearance at the Montreux Jazz Festival. Laura Branigan sang backup. Then came Death of a Ladies' Man in 1977, co-written and produced by Phil Spector, a sharp move away from his minimalist sound. In 1979 Cohen returned with Recent Songs, which he co-produced with Henry Lewy, the sound engineer for Joni Mitchell. The Austin jazz-fusion band Passenger, who knew Cohen through Mitchell, brought in the oud, Gypsy violin and mandolin. From that record on, Cohen co-produced his albums.

  Jennifer Warnes sang backup on tours in 1972 and 1979, with Sharon Robinson also singing backup in 1979. Cohen said Warnes backed his 1980 tour even though her own career was in much better shape than his. "So this is a real friend," he said, calling her "someone who in the face of great derision, has always supported me."

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• 5. Hallelujah

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  Almost 200 artists have performed "Hallelujah" in various languages, yet the song made little impression when it first appeared on Cohen's album Various Positions in 1984. Columbia declined to release that record in the United States. The credits read "Vocals by Leonard Cohen and Jennifer Warnes," a rare full co-vocals credit for Warnes. Cohen supported the album with his biggest tour to date, across Europe and Australia, plus his first Canada and United States dates since 1975. The band played the Montreux Jazz Festival and the Roskilde Festival.

  In Poland, which had been under martial law just two years earlier, the band gave highly emotional and politically controversial concerts. There they performed "The Partisan," regarded as the hymn of the Polish Solidarity movement. Cohen sang "Hallelujah" on his 1985 European tour, but it stayed a modest success for years. Its wider fame grew from a 1991 cover by John Cale, which formed the basis for a later cover by Jeff Buckley.

  Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote that Cohen spent years struggling with the song. She called it "one of the most haunting, mutable and oft-performed songs in American musical history." A. O. Scott, the paper's movie critic, observed that "Hallelujah is one of those rare songs that survives its banalization with at least some of its sublimity intact." Alan Light devoted a 2012 book to it, The Holy or the Broken. In 2022 Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine released the documentary Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song.

  In 1987, Warnes's tribute album Famous Blue Raincoat helped restore Cohen's career in the United States. The next year he released I'm Your Man, marking his turn to synthesized productions. He promoted it with television interviews and an extensive tour of Europe, Canada and the United States. For the first time he performed on PBS's Austin City Limits. The track "Everybody Knows" and the song "If It Be Your Will," heard in the 1990 film Pump Up the Volume, reached a wider audience. "Everybody Knows" also featured in Atom Egoyan's 1994 film Exotica.

  In 1992 came The Future, whose dark lyrics refer to political and social unrest. Its title track is reportedly a response to the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Three of its tracks, "Waiting for the Miracle," "The Future" and "Anthem," appeared in the film Natural Born Killers, introducing Cohen to a new generation of American listeners. The actress Rebecca De Mornay co-produced the record, and he dedicated it to her with an inscription about Rebecca at the well in Genesis, giving water to the camels of Eliezer. Cohen promoted the album with videos for "Closing Time" and "The Future" and with a major tour, and the 1994 album Cohen Live drew mostly on its Canadian leg.

  During the 1980s the French photographer Dominique Issermann had been his partner. She shot his first two music videos, for "Dance Me to the End of Love" and "First We Take Manhattan." Her photographs also appeared on the cover of Stranger Music and inside the booklet for I'm Your Man, which he dedicated to her.

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• 6. Zen And Judaism

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  In 1994 Cohen retreated to the Mt. Baldy Zen Center near Los Angeles, beginning what became five years of seclusion. In 1996 he was ordained as a Rinzai Zen Buddhist monk and took the Dharma name Jikan, meaning "silence." He served as personal assistant to Kyozan Joshu Sasaki Roshi, a teacher he had been associated with since the late 1970s. Sasaki turns up in Cohen's poetry, especially in Book of Longing, and he took part in Leonard Cohen: Spring 1996, a 1997 documentary about Cohen's monastery years.

  The New York Times described Cohen as a Sabbath-observant Jew. Allen Ginsberg once asked how he squared that with Zen. Cohen answered that in the Zen tradition he practiced there was no prayerful worship and no affirmation of a deity, so theologically it posed no challenge to any Jewish belief. He added, "I'm not looking for a new religion. I'm quite happy with the old one, with Judaism." In a 2007 interview for BBC Radio 4, he recalled that his friend Brian Johnson said he had never met a religion he didn't like. Cohen said his explorations of other spiritual systems had illuminated and enriched his own tradition.

  Cohen's curiosity ran wide. Around 1970 he went through a brief phase of trying many world views, from Scientology to "delusions of me as the High Priest rebuilding the Temple." He also showed interest in the teachings of Ramesh Balsekar, who taught in the Advaita Vedanta tradition. Of Jesus he said, "I'm very fond of Jesus Christ. He may be the most beautiful guy who walked the face of this earth."

  His 1984 book Book of Mercy, which won the Canadian Authors Association Literary Award for Poetry, holds 50 prose-poems influenced by the Hebrew Bible and Zen writings. Cohen called them "prayers." In the book Stranger Music, published in 1993, he gathered selected poems and songs. The Academy of American Poets said the book makes clear how successfully he blended poetry, fiction and music.

  In 1997 Cohen oversaw the album More Best of Leonard Cohen, which included a previously unreleased track, "Never Any Good," and an experimental piece, "The Great Event." Many listeners assumed he had stopped recording. But in September 1998 he began emailing new poems, drawings and early versions of songs to the fan website The Leonard Cohen Files, among them an early "A Thousand Kisses Deep." He returned to Los Angeles in May 1999. The site's section of his online writings was titled "The Blackening Pages."

  Ten New Songs came out in 2001 after two years of production, shaped by the producer and co-composer Sharon Robinson. They recorded at Still Life Studios, the home studios of Cohen and Robinson. The album includes "Alexandra Leaving," a reworking of the poem "The God Abandons Antony" by the Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy. It was a major hit in Canada and Europe, and it won four Juno Awards in 2002, including Best Artist and Best Songwriter. In October 2003 Cohen was named a Companion of the Order of Canada.

  Dear Heather appeared in October 2004, mostly a collaboration with the jazz singer and romantic partner Anjani Thomas. After the dark mood of the previous record, it was light. Cohen said in several interviews that his depression had lifted in recent years, and he credited Zen Buddhism. Two later albums, Ten New Songs and Popular Problems, carry dedications to Sasaki.

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• 7. Stolen Fortune, Last Tours

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  In late 2005, Cohen's daughter Lorca began to suspect his longtime manager, Kelley Lynch, of financial wrongdoing. Lorca, born in 1974, was named after the poet García Lorca. Lynch was a close family friend who handled Cohen's business affairs, according to the biographer Sylvie Simmons. Cohen discovered he had unknowingly paid a $75,000 credit card bill of Lynch's. He also found that most of the money in his accounts was gone, including retirement funds and charitable trust money. Lynch had begun selling his music publishing rights as early as 1996.

  In October 2005 Cohen sued Lynch, alleging she had misappropriated more than US$5 million from his retirement fund and left only $150,000. Other former business associates sued him in turn. The Canadian magazine Maclean's ran a cover feature headlined "Devastated!" In March 2006 a Los Angeles County superior court awarded him US$9 million after Lynch ignored the suit and a subpoena for her financial records. NME reported that Cohen might never collect. In 2012 Lynch was jailed for 18 months and given five years' probation for harassing Cohen after he dismissed her.

  In May 2006, Cohen published Book of Longing, a book of poems and drawings that took ten years of delays, additions and rewrites. A Toronto retailer offered signed copies to the first 1,500 online orders, and all sold within hours. On the 13th of May, he made his first public appearance in 13 years at a Toronto bookstore. About 3,000 people came, and the surrounding streets were closed. He sang "So Long, Marianne" and "Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye," accompanied by the Barenaked Ladies and Ron Sexsmith. The composer Philip Glass later wrote music for Book of Longing.

  To recoup his losses, Cohen began his first world tour in 15 years on the 11th of May 2008 in Fredericton, New Brunswick. He said it "warmed some part of my heart that had taken on a chill." At the Glastonbury Festival on the 29th of June 2008, his "Hallelujah" at sunset won a lengthy ovation from a packed Pyramid Stage field. In Dublin he was the first performer to give an open-air concert at the grounds of IMMA at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham, playing three nights in June 2008. His two Irish tours won Ireland's Meteor Music Award in 2009 and again the next year. Live in London, recorded at the O2 Arena in July 2008, contains 25 songs and was his first official DVD.

  In January 2009 an audience of 12,000 in New Zealand rose for five standing ovations. On the 19th of February 2009 he played the Beacon Theatre in New York, his first American concert in 15 years. NPR broadcast it, the only show of the whole tour on the radio. He played Coachella on the 17th of April 2009 before one of the largest outdoor crowds in the festival's history. On the 18th of September 2009 in Valencia he fainted during "Bird on the Wire" and was taken to hospital. Stomach problems, possibly food poisoning, were reported. Three days later, on his 75th birthday, he played Barcelona, where fans lit green candles in his honour.

  On the 24th of September 2009 Cohen played Ramat Gan Stadium near Tel Aviv, his first Israeli show since 1980. Despite a proposed cultural boycott, the 47,000 tickets sold out in under 24 hours. Proceeds were to go to a charitable fund for Israeli and Palestinian peace groups, though Amnesty later withdrew from the arrangement. A planned Ramallah show was cancelled after criticism from Palestinian activists. Onstage, Cohen spoke Hebrew prayers, opening with the first sentence of Ma Tovu and closing with the blessing of Birkat Kohanim. The 2009 tour reportedly earned $9.5 million, placing him 39th on Billboard's list of the year's top money makers.

  On the 12th of August 2010, Cohen played the 200th show of the tour in Gothenburg. Old Ideas followed on the 31st of January 2012 and became the highest-charting album of his career. It reached number one in eleven countries, including Canada, Norway and New Zealand, and the top ten in the United States and the United Kingdom. It launched the same day as Lana Del Rey's debut album Born to Die. Jon Pareles of The New York Times called it "an autumnal album, musing on memories and final reckonings, but it also has a gleam in its eye." The Old Ideas tour began on the 12th of August 2012, with 56 shows in Europe, the United States and Canada. His final concert was at the Vector Arena in Auckland in late 2013.

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• 8. Afterlife

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  Popular Problems arrived on the 24th of September 2014 and included "A Street," which Cohen had first recited in 2006. The New Yorker printed it in the issue of the 2nd of March 2009, and a 2011 poetry volume gave it the title "Party's Over." His 14th and final album, You Want It Darker, came out on the 21st of October 2016, with his son Adam credited as a producer. Its title track won a Grammy Award for Best Rock Performance in January 2018.

  Cohen died in his Los Angeles home on the 7th of November 2016, aged 82. Leukemia was a contributing cause. His manager said a fall at home that evening led to his death in his sleep. The death was announced on the 10th of November, the day of his funeral in Montreal. As he had wished, he was buried by Jewish rite in a simple pine casket in a family plot at the Congregation Shaar Hashomayim cemetery on Mount Royal.

  Marianne Ihlen had died of leukemia three months and nine days before him. At her funeral, a farewell from Cohen was read aloud, and the media often misquoted it. The real text is an email that begins, "Dearest Marianne, I'm just a little behind you, close enough to take your hand." It ends, "Safe travels old friend. See you down the road. Endless love and gratitude."

  In the summer after his death, two murals appeared in Montreal. Kevin Ledo painted a nine-story portrait near Cohen's home on Plateau Mont-Royal. Gene Pendon and El Mec painted a 20-story likeness of Cohen in a fedora on Crescent Street. On the 9th of November 2017 the contemporary art museum MAC opened "Leonard Cohen: Une Brèche en Toute Chose / A Crack in Everything." It ran until the 9th of April 2018, broke the museum's attendance record, and then went on tour to the Jewish Museum in New York in April 2019. A bronze statue was unveiled in Vilnius on the 31st of August 2019. In 2021 two species were named for him: Loxosceles coheni, a recluse spider from Iran, and Cervellaea coheni, a weevil from South Africa.

  The poetry collection The Flame, which Cohen was still working on when he died, appeared in 2018. Thanks for the Dance, begun with his son Adam, was released on the 22nd of November 2019. Another posthumous track, "The Goal," reached Cohen's YouTube channel on the 20th of September 2019. The television series So Long, Marianne, made by Norway's NRK and Canada's Crave, retells his bond with Ihlen.

  Bob Dylan called Cohen the "number one" songwriter of their time and himself "number zero." He said, "When people talk about Leonard, they fail to mention his melodies," and he compared Cohen to Irving Berlin. In 2011 Cohen received one of the Prince of Asturias Awards for literature and the ninth Glenn Gould Prize. In 2023 Rolling Stone ranked him the 103rd-greatest singer of all time. The documentary makers Geller and Goldfine said Cohen was first seen as a "monster of gloom," yet Goldfine called him "one of the funniest guys ever."

  Susan Cain dedicated her 2022 book Bittersweet to his memory and quoted his lyric from "Anthem": "There is a crack, a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in." Suzanne Vega said that knowing his work felt like belonging to a "secret society" among people of her generation. In 2022 Matti Friedman published Who By Fire, about Cohen's 1973 trip to the Yom Kippur War front, and a television miniseries based on it was expected in 2024.

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