Leonard Cohen
Towers of song. By Sylvie Simmons.
LEONARD COHEN doesn’t have that big a discography for someone who made music over a five-decade span: 15 studio albums, though he made up for a near-decade gap after The Future (1992) by recording four albums in the last five years of his life (the last, 2019’s Thanks For The Dance, released posthumously.) It wasn’t that he couldn’t write a song, he told me as his biographer. But he was a perfectionist – which made for 15 essential albums.
Cohen was a relatively old 33 when his first album came out in 1967, when the mantra was to trust no one over 30. Born and raised in Montreal, he’d previously published four books of poetry and two novels.
His first collection, Let Us Compare Mythologies (1956), had him hailed as the golden boy of Canadian verse. Other than reciting poems over a jazz combo and a short stint as guitarist in a square-dance country band, he had no background in music. His own compositions were dense and poetic, and it was penury that made him try his hand at songwriting in the ’60s. And it was penury that forced him to make that extraordinary comeback in the 2000s when Cohen, in his seventies, discovered that his bank account had been stripped bare by his manager. Previously he had hated touring. This time it energised him to record more albums, so that he could go back on the road.
In the latter years of his life, Cohen – in sharp suit and fedora, like a Rat Pack rabbi – was playing sold-out shows to standing ovations. He earned back his lost money and a whole lot more, and when he died at age 82, with his latest album You Want It Darker (Columbia, 2016) at Number 1 in the charts, he was at the top of his game.
“Cohen – in sharp suit and fedora, like a Rat Pack rabbi…”