Cohen was first known as a poet, and on the basis of his first volume of poetry he was described as Canada’s leading poet. As the 1965 documentary Ladies and Gentleman, Mr. Leonard Cohen attests, he became a celebrity in Canada on the basis of his poetry even before he had recorded an album. He continued to publish poetry throughout his career, and the relationship of the poems to the lyrics is interesting and complicated. Cohen’s early poetry is more modernist, largely eschewing rhyme or regular rhythm, while his later poems are often similar to his lyrics. Poetry inhabits both novels in various ways. Lawrence Breavman enjoys a first name that nods to and withdraws Lawrentian possibilities, and the strategies of the poet are all over Beautiful Losers: repetition, anaphora, listing, grammatical and syntactical dislocation, a variety of forms, symbolism, making strange, surrealism. Sometimes, Cohen publishes his song lyrics as poems, sometimes verbatim, sometimes in a different form. Other poems are quite different from his songs set to music, yet he seems to have thought of his poems and lyrics collectively as “songs.”

Cohen was born and raised in the Westmont neighborhood of Montreal, where his family had lived for several generations. Cohen’s first artistic community was the literary one in and around McGill University in Montreal where he took his bachelor’s degree. In The Favourite Game, it is reported that “Some say that no one ever leaves Montreal, for that city, like Canada itself, is designed to preserve the past.” One critic has remarked of that novel that the problem with its protagonist, Lawrence Breavman, is that he can’t let go of anything, and since Breavman is like his creator in most things, it’s hard not to read the line quoted above as self-referential as well. Cohen, like Breavman, “fled the city,” but he always returned, indeed even to his mother’s house before she died. Cohen’s songs may not very often be literally about or set in Montreal, but they are of that place, just as the Beatles’ songs are of Liverpool. This chapter explores Montreal as a source and context for Cohen’s work.

Cohen did not shy away from autobiography in his work, and so his fans may have a sense that they already know his life story. Yet, except for his novel The Favourite Game, Cohen’s work typically makes unexplained references to his personal history rather than to narrate episodes of it. In order to provide a frame for the more particular aspects his life featured in later chapters, this chapter will offer an essayistic overview of Cohen’s life from his boyhood in the Westmont neighborhood of Montreal, to the Greek island of Hydra and the Chelsea Hotel, through his stays at Zen Monastery on Mt. Baldy, to his triumphant late tours necessitated by his manager’s theft. Along the way, Cohen encountered and was influenced by lovers, poets, other songwriters, and religious teachers, not to mention the family into which he was born and the more disparate one that he fathered.

In 1969, Franco Zeffirelli invited Cohen to Italy to discuss scoring his film Brother Sun, Sister Moon. The collaboration did not advance, but in 1971 German director Rainer Fassbinder used Cohen’s songs for Beware the Holy Whore. A few years later, Robert Altman chose to use four songs from Cohen’s first album for the soundtrack of McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), for which Cohen also wrote some new material that Altman did not use. Since then, Cohen’s songs have been used in over 300 films and TV episodes. Roger Young’s Kiss the Sky (1998) includes eight Cohen songs on the soundtrack, and the film echoes themes that run throughout Cohen’s work. Sarah Polley’s Take This Waltz (2011) was inspired by Cohen’s song. “Hallelujah” has been used prominently in numerous films and television episodes, including Shrek, The West Wing, and Saturday Night Live. Cohen was also directly involved in the production of several films, including I Am a Hotel (1983), which features the surreal interactions of several sets of lovers at a hotel. This chapter explores the relationship of Cohen’s music and lyrics to these films and assess their role in his career.

When his manager stole most of his wealth, Cohen was forced to go back out on the road at the age of seventy-three. The result was the beginning of a triumphant last chapter in his storied career. While rockers in the 1960s often proclaimed that they couldn’t imagine themselves continuing into their fifties or sixties, many have continued well beyond that. The Rolling Stones, of whom the youngest remaining member is seventy-four, just completed a well-received tour of the United States. But the Stones and most other older performers do not present themselves as old. Mick Jagger continues to prance around the stage with almost as much energy as he exhibited in his twenties. Cohen, on the contrary, performed on these late tours honestly and gracefully as a septuagenarian. Some of this is consistent with the persona he has displayed since the 1960s, for example dressing in the style of the previous generation. But the new Cohen was not just conservatively dressed. He directly confronted the limitations of age in his stage patter, and his songs, which had always taken account of death, now took on a new resonance, as it was apparent that the singer’s days were numbered. Where other old rockers seem to assume that they deserve the audience’s adoration, Cohen was humble and grateful for the renewed interest in his work. This chapter explores what it means for a rock star to present himself as an old man, a persona that challenges some of the fundamental assumptions about what a rock star is.

Unlike Bob Dylan, Cohen was never a protest singer. Indeed, it is difficult to find clearly articulated political positions anywhere in his work, and he frequently expressed the wish to not take sides. Yet Cohen has often referred to the songs of the Spanish Civil War and socialist folk singers as early influences. Cohen’s work does address political issues, and it can be read as articulating political positions regardless of the artist’s claims. Cohen often found himself in the middle of political strife, from Havana in the early years of Castro’s revolution to the Arab–Israeli conflicts. Songs like “First We Take Manhattan,” “Democracy,” and “Everybody Knows” offer political critique, even if they don’t endorse any program – and not choosing sides is also a political position. This chapter assesses the political valences and import of Cohen’s work and persona.

Cohen is perhaps best known and most lauded as a songwriter, yet when he began to write songs he had no formal musical training, and he could not read music. His career in music began with Judy Collins recording his songs, and it was revived several times by the success of later covers of them. Yet songwriting never came easily to Cohen, who often worked for years on songs, sometimes continuing even after he recorded them. Of “Hallelujah” he has said that he wrote maybe eighty verses before he felt that the song was finished, but he continued to tinker with it after the initial recording. Cohen reports that before he can discard a verse, “I have to write it. I have to work on it, and I have to polish it and bring it to as close to finished as I can.” This seems both a commitment to craft and something verging on obsessive-compulsive disorder, and it distinguishes Cohen from many other successful songwriters, who often say they toss off great lyrics in a few minutes.

Who is Leonard Cohen? As the chapters in the volume demonstrate, this remains a question despite his enormous following. That Cohen remains a mystery may be surprising, given that in many respects he was remarkably unchanged over the course of his career. His appearance, for example, changed little, his well-tailored suits and short hair apparent in 1967 and 2009. The themes and concerns of his songs – sex, love, death, religion – are also consistent from start to finish. While his voice deepened as he aged, his singing style remained largely the same. Moreover, a strong part of Leonard’s appeal was that we as his audience felt that he was baring his soul to us. There is an intimacy in his self-presentation that made us feel that we knew him. And yet, more than Dylan or anyone else in popular music, he remains a mystery because he doesn’t fit any of the usual categories.

It is true that Cohen is more known for his songs than for his albums. There is nothing in his oeuvre that has the reputation of Sergeant Pepper’s, Exile on Main Street, or Blood on the Tracks. For much of Cohen’s career, his best-selling albums were compilations. Yet Cohen’s albums define his career more clearly than does his songwriting. From 1967’s Songs of Leonard Cohen through the posthumous Thanks for the Dance (2019), Cohen released fifteen studio albums of new material. They are arguably his most important artistic legacy, representing a different kind of art from the songs. Each album is a cooperative effort, involving at a minimum a producer, musicians, and backup vocalists. While the songs are available to be recorded and performed by anyone in a potentially infinite number of versions, the albums themselves are finished works of art, where the selection and arrangement of the tracks combine to produce something more than the sum of the parts. This chapter analyzes these works of art, while also discussing their cultural impact and historical significance.

Cohen was not, like many devotees of the scene in the 1950s and early 1960s, a folk purist. Bob Dylan seemed to be the figure who gave Cohen the idea of becoming a singer-songwriter, and the Dylan that influenced him had already adopted rock & roll. While musically Cohen’s early albums are not rock & roll, he found himself from quite early on in the culture of rock. His early musical contacts included Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground and others who lived in or came through New York. His record company packaged his albums and sent him out to tour behind them as rock stars did. And by the middle of his career the influence of rock music on his recordings became apparent, not only in his incorporation of rock riffs and song forms, but also in instrumentation, including drums, electric guitars, and synthesizers, and in arrangements that feature rock-inspired backing vocals. This chapter explores rock’s influence on Cohen and Cohen’s influence on rock, the latter demonstrated by the rock musicians who have covered his songs or made reference to him in their lyrics.