Leonard Cohen seemed to have remained largely the same throughout his career. This chapter calls that assumption into question by detailing three successive personas that Cohen adopted over the course of his career. The argument is not that Cohen’s persona changed radically, but rather that at different moments, different elements came to the fore. The first persona Boucher identifies, “The Poet of Rock & Roll,” fits nicely with the trajectory Glass describes. The second one, which itself has two aspects, the “Ladies’ Man” or “Depressive Lothario,” is associated with Cohen’s struggles in achieving critical and commercial success in the 1970s. It isn’t so much a rejection of the first persona as it is a specification of it, bringing out elements that had long been lurking. The final mask, the “High Priest of the Heart,” becomes dominant in the 1990s and remains so through the end of Cohen’s life. It relies in part on his becoming a Buddhist monk, a role seemingly at odds with that of a “Lothario,” but which also relies on continuities that go back as far as his early 1960s poetry.

If Cohen’s first musical formation was folk, he joined it as its viability as a commercial music genre was already in decline. One of his first major gigs was to appear at the singer-songwriter afternoon of the Newport Folk festival, along with Joni Mitchell, an event that pointed away from the traditional folk music the festival had long favored. By 1970, singer-songwriters such as Mitchell and James Taylor were now reclassified as occupying a niche of their own, and Cohen fit that niche. Cohen’s autobiographical songs were actually closer to the confessional mode of the singer-songwriters than they were to traditional folk. Where folk had claimed to be public, political music, the singer-songwriters were singing about private struggles and mental anguish. The singer-songwriters were defined by the sense of direct address to the listener, seeming to reveal their very souls in the details of their misdeeds. Called “confessional” because of perceived similarities with the poetry of Lowell, Plath, and Sexton, singer-songwriter music is often self-therapeutic, but unlike the poetry it does not usually use self-exposure as cultural criticism. This chapter reads Cohen’s songs in relation to the singer-songwriter movement, exploring the similarities and differences between his recordings and those of other figures central to the formation. Cohen’s poetry, while not usually associated with the confessional movement, bears some similarity to it, and his songs sometimes invite a broadly cultural reading.

Authors such as Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway were among the most important celebrities of the earlier part of the twentieth century. Authors were later overshadowed by movie stars and then rock stars, who by the time Cohen began recording were at the top of the heap. This chapter will examine the transformation of Cohen from a literary figure who was already a celebrity in Canada into an international rock star. This unusual career path meant that Cohen would have a different sort of persona from those who were merely authors or popular musicians. His claim to the status of poet, for example, was different than that of Dylan or other songwriters who did not publish books of verse. His fame as a singer-songwriter gave the books he published later new meaning and a larger audience.

When Leonard Cohen died in 2016, he left a treasure trove of notebooks, recordings, manuscripts, and other materials that had previously been inaccessible to anyone but the artist himself. Unlike some other rock stars, Cohen has not been represented by bootleg recordings, and his written records have appeared only to the extent that he has sometimes published excerpts from them. Thus, the archives, when they are available to scholars and journalists, will be a significant boon to our understanding of the man and his creations. The concluding chapter of this volume both offers a survey of the Cohen archives – real and virtual – and provides some sense of how they might change our understanding of Cohen and his work.

The word “cover” was initially used to describe the once common record-company practice of recording the hit songs of other companies in new versions, often with different audiences in mind. In the 1950s, it was especially used to name recordings by white artists of songs first recorded by African Americans. It now is used to name any recording by a different artist of a song of another artist, but we should not call Judy Collins’s recording of “Suzanne” a cover, because hers was the first recording of Cohen’s song. Cohen was a songwriter before he was a recording artist. But, late in his career, covers of his songs proliferated, and they did play a significant role in gaining Cohen new audiences. Alan Light has documented the significance of covers by John Cale and Jeff Buckley in popularizing “Hallelujah,” making it eventually Cohen’s most recorded song. Several tribute albums, including I’m Your Fan, also contributed to a resurgence of interest in Cohen after his recording career had hit bottom with Columbia’s refusal to release Various Positions. This chapter considers the role of covers in the public’s reception of Cohen’s songs, and the influence of those cover versions on Cohen’s own art.

For much of his adult life, Leonard Cohen studied Rinzai Zen Buddhism with Roshi Kyozan Joshu Sasaki, living for a number of years at his monastery on Mt. Baldy in California and eventually being ordained a Buddhist monk. Cohen also studied for a shorter period with the Hindu master Ramesh S. Balsekar in Mumbai, learning the discipline of Vedanta. While these Asian religious teachings were very important in his life, there is little explicit reference to them in his songs. Yet there is a general asceticism that Cohen’s songs often express that is consistent with these disciplines and Cohen’s interest in them. They therefore form an important context for understanding Cohen’s work, which this chapter will explore.

All of the evidence seems to suggest that Leonard Cohen’s fan base had more women than men. Perhaps Leonard’s focus on desire, on wanting rather than having, enhanced his appeal to women. Women featured prominently in Cohen’s life and music – as objects of desire, as muses, as torturers, as partners, bandmates, audiences, and as fans. Cohen’s representations of women’s desire make his songs so appealing to female listeners. Arnet’s title comes from something Cohen said in 1968: “I wish the women would hurry up and take over … I really am for the matriarchy.” His songs express this point by giving us female characters who have agency. Numerous great women artists, from Judy Collins to Nina Simone to Tori Amos, have recorded Cohen’s songs and in various ways made them their own.

Leonard Cohen came of age in the 1950s, prior to the youth rebellions of the 1960s. Nevertheless, his emergence as a songwriter and recording artist in the later 1960s occurred in the midst of the counterculture of the period. If Cohen always dressed like a visitor to that scene from an earlier time, he often behaved in a way that was very much in keeping with the youth culture of the time. His relationships and representations of them are an expression of what was called the “sexual revolution.” His use of drugs, while not a major subject of his songs, was consistent with the habits of the rock stars of that moment. His search for spiritual and personal fulfillment over and above traditional markers of success illustrates another dimension of the counterculture. This chapter explores Cohen’s complicated relationship to this cultural phenomenon, which involves mutual influence and a certain distance.

The poet who seems to have had the largest role in determining Cohen’s decision to practice that art was the Spanish writer Federico García Lorca, whom Cohen first read as teenager. Cohen’s song “Take This Waltz” is a translation of one of Lorca’s poems, and Cohen named his daughter Lorca. Another influence was the thirteenth-century Persian poet, Rumi, whom Cohen called “probably the greatest ascetic religious poet – in the same league as King David.” When Cohen studied briefly at Columbia University, he encountered the Beat movement, which influenced him in a number of ways, though it had little impact on the form of his poems. His writing always had a broad range of reference, from the Bible and ancient mythologies to modernism and postmodernism. His novel Beautiful Losers is reckoned a manifestation of international postmodernism, and, if Cohen’s first literary contexts were Montreal and Canada, his songs and records have had a large international audience. This chapter moves Cohen from a Canadian to a more global context, exploring the cosmopolitan origins of his work.

Leonard Cohen was born into a prominent and observant Jewish family. His maternal grandfather was a rabbi who lived with the family in his retirement and at whose knee Cohen studied. Cohen felt some estrangement from the Jewish community in which he was raised, as The Favourite Game suggests when it describes its protagonist as “suspect” among certain commercial Jews, and yet with Gentiles he “often broke into little Hasidic dances around the tea table.” Despite his unwillingness to be the good Jewish son who follows his father into the family business and temple, Cohen always identified as Jewish. He was reluctant to talk about the religious aspects of his work, but it is hard to think of another popular songwriter who drew so explicitly on the Jewish tradition. The use he made of tradition was often not explicitly religious, transforming Biblical stories and images for secular purposes, while religious concerns often are expressed in modern, seemingly secular contexts. Several of Cohen’s songs, such as “If It Be Your Will” and “Who by Fire,” draw extensively from Jewish prayers. This chapter explores the influence of Judaism on Cohen’s work, and the expression that work gives to the experience of Judaism.

Leonard Cohen has been the subject of at least five video documentaries about his life and work, beginning as early as 1965, with Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen, and continuing up to the present with Marianne and Leonard: Words of Love (2019). These different narratives of Cohen’s life give us conflicting perspectives, and this chapter explores how they respond to different cultural moments and how they construct differing images of Cohen’s life and work.

Unlike with Judaism and Buddhism, Cohen did not participate in the Christian religion, but he was raised in a predominantly Christian city and nation. Just as Cohen found no conflict between his Zen and his Judaism, he does not experience his Judaism as an obstacle to his appreciation of Christianity. His work frequently draws on Christian imagery, especially the figure of Jesus, and texts, especially the book of Revelation. “Suzanne,” the first song of his to be recorded, has an entire verse built around the story of Jesus walking on the water. “The Butcher” is about Jesus’s sacrifice as the Lamb of God, while “Last Year’s Man” refers to Revelation in the line, “Babylon the bride.” And since Christianity is rooted in the Hebrew Bible, Cohen’s references to these texts are also relevant to Christianity. This chapter explores Cohen’s use of Christianity in his work and discuss the ways in which it reflects on this religious tradition.

When Cohen started to write songs, the musical formation of which he was first a part was the folk scene. Cohen reports that socialist folk singers in Montreal first got him interested in songs. When he decided to pursue a career as a singer and songwriter, he went to New York, because it was the hub of North American folk music. He hung out and performed at such folk venues as the Bitter End, and his songs were first recorded by such folk singers as Judy Collins. Cohen’s earliest songs display the influence of this scene, as did his preferred style of performance, accompanying himself on an acoustic guitar. His unhappiness with the way some of the songs on his first album were produced seems to have stemmed from their not sounding like folk. And yet the lyrics of Cohen’s songs have little in common with those typical of a genre that claimed to reflect the people rather than the individual. This chapter considers how folk molded Cohen’s work, and where his work pushed the boundaries of the genre.

One might argue that Cohen expressed the world through sex – or vice versa. Some of his most memorable songs (“Marianne,” for example) use individual paramours as prisms that refract larger experience. His lyrics, while not explicit in the sense that some rock or rap songs are, often evoke the power and pleasure of sex. Both of his novels are more about sex than anything else, and his drawings feature female nudes. Cohen has asserted that he finds no tension between sex and spirituality, and songs like “Hallelujah” insist upon their deep imbrication with each other. He has been called, and called himself, a “ladies’ man,” but he also dismisses the assertion that he has been especially successful with women. In the era of #MeToo, one might think that Cohen would have come in for more condemnation, but his genuine interest in women and a lack of guilt about sex perhaps combined to forestall this. This chapter explores the uses and the meaning of sex and sexuality in Cohen’s work.