Czar of melancholy fell silent forever in his sleep
Los Angeles: Songwriter and poet Leonard Cohen died in his sleep after a fall in his Los Angeles home in the middle of the night, his manager has said.
“The death was sudden, unexpected, and peaceful,” his manager Robert Kory said in a statement published on the Cohen centric website.
Cohen, music’s man of letters whose songs fused religious imagery with themes of redemption and sexual desire, died on Nov. 7. He was 82. No cause was given for his death when it was announced three days later on his Facebook page. Cohen has been buried in Montreal in an unadorned pine box next to his mother and father, his son Adam said on Facebook on Sunday. “As I write this I’m thinking of my father’s unique blendof self-deprecation and dignity, his approachable elegance, his charisma without audacity, his oldworld gentlemanliness and the hand-forged tower of his work,” Adam Cohen wrote.
Born into a Jewish family in 1934 and raised in an affluent Englishspeaking neighborhood of Quebec, Cohen read Spanish poet Federico GarcA-a Lorca as a teenager — later naming his daughter Lorca. He learned to play guitar from a flamenco musician andformed a country band called the Buckskin Boys.
Cohen moved to New York in 1966 at age 31 to break into the music business. Before long, critics were comparing him with Bob Dylan for the lyrical force of his songwriting.
He won many honors, including induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and the Order of Canada.