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.

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.