The story of Leonard Cohen

A boy from Westmount

Leonard Norman Cohen was born on the twenty first of September 1934 in Westmount, the comfortable English speaking corner of Montreal. His family were pillars of Jewish Montreal. His grandfather Lyon Cohen was the founding president of the Canadian Jewish Congress, and his ancestors had helped build the synagogue the family attended, Congregation Shaar Hashomayim, where young Leonard sat in the third row. His mother Masha had arrived from Lithuania in 1927, the daughter of a rabbi and Talmudic scholar. His father Nathan ran the family clothing business. The boy was given the Hebrew name Eliezer, which means God helps, and he was raised knowing he was a kohen, a descendant of the high priest Aaron. He later joked that he had a very messianic childhood.[1] [2] [3]

When Leonard was nine years old, his father died. The funeral was held in the family home, and afterwards the boy did something he could never quite explain. He went to his father's closet, took a ready made bow tie, cut off one of its wings, wrote a farewell note, and buried both in a little hole in the back yard. He later called it a ritual response to an impossible event, and it was perhaps the first time he treated words as something sacred. His uncles made sure the family never went short. His mother was loving, emotional and prone to depression, and he had seen her hospitalised for it. He grew up knowing his own mind was fragile, and that work would help keep him steady.[1] [2] [3]

As a teenager Leonard was busier than his later gloomy image suggests. At Westmount High School he was president of the students' council, worked on the yearbook and even joined the cheerleaders. He fell in love with the poetry of the Spanish writer Federico Garcia Lorca, a passion so strong that he later named his daughter after him. At thirteen he read a book about hypnotism and, by his own account, tried it out on the family housekeeper, with startling results. At around sixteen, wearing his late father's suede jacket, he formed a country and folk group called the Buckskin Boys. He also liked to roam Saint Laurent Boulevard with a cousin, eating at the Main Deli and watching the gangsters, pimps and wrestlers of the night.[1] [2]

Cohen always told one story about where his music really came from. As a young man he met a Spanish guitarist near a tennis court in Montreal and took a few lessons from him. The man taught him a flamenco pattern built on six chords. Then he failed to turn up for the fourth lesson. When Cohen called the man's boarding house, he learned that the guitarist had taken his own life. Decades later, accepting the Prince of Asturias Award in Spain in 2011, Cohen said that those six chords and that guitar pattern had been the basis of all his songs. In the meantime he worked in an uncle's foundry and in the family clothing factory, where he learned to fold a suit so it would never wrinkle, a skill that served him on every tour.[1] [2]

The young poet

In 1951 Cohen enrolled at McGill University in Montreal. He became president of the McGill Debating Union and won a literary prize for his poems. His first published poem, called Satan in Westmount, appeared when he was nineteen, and in March 1954 he appeared in a small Montreal poetry magazine alongside his own professors. The most important of them was the poet Irving Layton, a loud, brilliant, rebellious figure who became his mentor and lifelong friend. Cohen once summed up their bond by saying that he taught Layton how to dress, and Layton taught him how to live forever. Another teacher, Louis Dudek, published Cohen's first book of poems in 1956, Let Us Compare Mythologies, as the first volume of the McGill Poetry Series.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Let Us Compare Mythologies was printed in an edition of only about four hundred copies. Most of its poems were written between the ages of fifteen and twenty, and Cohen dedicated it to his late father. The great critic Northrop Frye gave it restrained praise. In 1957 Cohen was one of six poets heard reading on a Folkways record called Six Montreal Poets, with Layton among the others. He tried a term of law school, then spent a year at Columbia University in New York, which he described as passion without flesh and love without climax. He came home to Montreal, took odd jobs, and lived on a modest trust income left by his father while he wrote.[1] [2] [3]

His second book, The Spice Box of Earth, came out in 1961 from the Canadian publisher McClelland and Stewart, and it made his name at home. The critic Robert Weaver called him probably the best young poet in English Canada. Before that, a grant from the Canada Council had sent Cohen to London, where he took a room in Hampstead and forced himself to write three pages a day of a novel then called Beauty at Close Quarters. Among his first purchases in London were an Olivetti typewriter and a blue Burberry raincoat. In a letter to his publisher he described the readers he was after, a list that included anguished lovers, disappointed Platonists and monks. He already knew exactly who his audience was.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

London in the spring of 1960 was cold and wet, and Cohen was miserable. An English dentist had just pulled one of his wisdom teeth. One grey day he went into a bank and noticed the teller's deep suntan. The man said he had just come back from Greece. Cohen bought a ticket. He flew to Athens, saw the Acropolis, took the ferry from Piraeus and stepped off at the small island of Hydra, where there were no cars, mules carried water up the steep stairways, and electricity came and went. He rented a house for fourteen dollars a month. He was twenty five, and he had found the place that would shape the next decade of his life and many of his most famous songs.[1] [2] [3]

Hydra and Marianne

Hydra in 1960 had a small colony of foreign writers and painters, and at its centre were the Australian couple George Johnston and Charmian Clift. They took Cohen in, let him work on their terrace, and Johnston went through his manuscripts with a fierce editor's pen. Cohen admired how they lived entirely by writing, and said they drank more, wrote more, cursed more and helped more than anyone else. When he first played Sydney in 1980, he dedicated the show to them as the people who taught him how to write. Their story ended in tragedy. Clift took her own life in 1969, and Johnston died of tuberculosis about a year later. Their daughter Shane also later took her own life at the age of twenty five.[1] [2] [3]

On the island Cohen kept noticing a beautiful young Norwegian woman named Marianne Ihlen. She was married to the novelist Axel Jensen, and in January 1960 she had given birth to their son, also called Axel. But Jensen had fallen for an American painter and left. One spring day Marianne was standing in a grocery shop with her basket, crying, when a man appeared in the doorway with the sun behind him and invited her to come and sit outside with his friends. It was Cohen. She said later that when their eyes met she felt it through her whole body. In September 1960, with fifteen hundred dollars inherited from his grandmother, Cohen bought a whitewashed house of his own on Hydra, and Marianne and her son gradually became his family.[1] [2] [3]

Their life together moved between Hydra, Oslo and Montreal. In 1961, short of money in Canada, Cohen sent Marianne a telegram saying he had a house and all he needed was his woman and her son, and she came. Back on Hydra they grew their own marijuana, and Marianne sometimes mixed it into meatballs. Cohen worked with great discipline, broken by periods of abandon. He fasted to sharpen his mind and took pot, speed and acid to expand it, later admitting that his long wait on the terrace to see God usually ended in a bad hangover. His autobiographical first novel, The Favourite Game, came out in 1963. His poetry collection Flowers for Hitler followed in 1964, dedicated to Marianne, after his publisher rejected his first title, Opium and Hitler.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 1964 and 1965 Cohen wrote his second novel, Beautiful Losers, in two intense bursts of about eight months each. He typed on his terrace while a portable record player spun a Ray Charles album, and as the book took shape he pushed himself to fifteen hours a day on amphetamines while fasting. When it was done he collapsed. He had hallucinations, and after going ten days without food his weight had dropped to one hundred and sixteen pounds. He later said amphetamines were a mistake for depressed people and that it took him ten years to fully recover. When the book came out in April 1966, one Toronto critic called it the most revolting book ever written in Canada. It sold poorly, yet by 2007 it had passed three million copies.[1] [2]

By 1966 Cohen was a respected Canadian poet, the subject of a 1965 National Film Board documentary called Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen, and nearly broke. His books were praised but did not sell. A CBC producer named Andrew Simon offered him the job of hosting a Montreal current affairs show called Seven on Six, and the contract was ready. Then, at eleven one night, Cohen phoned him. He said he had just been on a trip, and had realised he could not do the show. He had decided to become a songwriter. He had been listening to Bob Dylan and thought he might make a living writing country songs in Nashville. He set off south, but when he stopped in New York, the city caught him first.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Suzanne and the Chelsea Hotel

The song that opened the door was Suzanne. It grew from Cohen's friendship with a young Montreal dancer, Suzanne Verdal, the estranged wife of the sculptor Armand Vaillancourt. She lived near the St. Lawrence River, and when he visited she lit a candle and served him tea and mandarin oranges, and they walked through Old Montreal past the sailors' church of Notre Dame de Bon Secours. The words first appeared as a poem in his 1966 book Parasites of Heaven. In New York, the folk star Judy Collins heard the song and recorded it on her album In My Life that November. It became a hit for her. But Cohen had signed away the publishing on Suzanne and two other early songs, and did not win them back until the late eighties.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Cohen was terrified of performing. In 1967 Judy Collins asked him to sing Suzanne at an anti Vietnam War benefit at New York's Town Hall. He told her he would die of embarrassment, but she talked him into it. That night, with his legs visibly shaking, he got halfway through the first verse, stopped, apologised and walked off into the wings. Backstage he rested his head on her shoulder and said he could not go back. She told him he would, and offered to go out with him. The crowd was cheering, and together they finished the song. Cohen said later that the nervousness came from knowing he was not as good as he wanted to be, and that the feeling never really left him.[1] [2]

The legendary Columbia Records talent scout John Hammond, who had signed Bob Dylan, went to hear Cohen in his room at the Chelsea Hotel. Sitting on the bed, Cohen played Suzanne, Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye and The Stranger Song, and Hammond grinned and told him he had it. Hammond fell ill during the sessions and producer John Simon took over, and the two clashed. Cohen wanted a bare sound with no drums, and Simon added strings and horns. Cohen also asked for a full length mirror in the studio so he could watch himself play. Songs of Leonard Cohen came out on the twenty seventh of December 1967. It reached only number eighty three in America, but in Britain it spent well over a year on the charts.[1] [2] [3]

The Chelsea Hotel on West Twenty Third Street became Cohen's New York home, a shabby palace of writers, painters and rock stars. He said it was a place where you could arrive at four in the morning with a bear and four ladies and nobody would care. He was in his thirties, older than most of the scene, and often heard some version of the question, aren't you a little old for this? He moved on the edge of Andy Warhol's circle, fell hard for the singer Nico, who turned him down, and had a brief relationship with Joni Mitchell, who later called him a boudoir poet. In the spring of 1968 he also had a one night encounter at the hotel with Janis Joplin, which would later become a famous song.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In 1968 Cohen won Canada's top literary honour, the Governor General's Award, for his Selected Poems, and refused to accept it. For his second album he first tried recording in Hollywood with David Crosby, but it did not work. Instead he went to Nashville to work with Bob Johnston, the producer of Dylan and Johnny Cash, and lived on a farm outside the city. Johnston surrounded him with a small band including Charlie Daniels and Ron Cornelius, and called himself Cohen's musical bodyguard. For the French resistance song The Partisan, the two even flew to France to add French singers. Songs from a Room, with Bird on the Wire, came out in April 1969 and reached number two in Britain, while American critics complained that he could not sing.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Love, hate and war

In 1970 Cohen toured for the first time and played the enormous Isle of Wight Festival. That September in Nashville he recorded his third album with a backing band he called the Army. Songs of Love and Hate, released in March 1971, held some of his darkest work, including Famous Blue Raincoat and Avalanche. He admitted later that during those sessions everything was falling apart, his spirit and his will, and that he sank into a long depression. The album reached number four in Britain but only one hundred and forty five in America. That same year the director Robert Altman used three songs from Cohen's debut throughout his Western McCabe and Mrs. Miller, and the songs and the film became permanently linked.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In the spring of 1972 Cohen toured Europe and Israel, followed by the filmmaker Tony Palmer. The last night, in Jerusalem on the twenty first of April, went badly. Cohen kept stopping songs, told the audience he felt he was cheating them, offered refunds, and left the stage. In the dressing room he found some LSD in his guitar case and took it. Out in the hall, the audience began singing a Hebrew song of welcome to call him back. He returned, began So Long, Marianne, saw Marianne's face in front of him and started to cry, and his band cried too. They could not go on. Cohen disliked Palmer's film, paid heavily to have it recut, and the original version was thought lost for decades.[1] [2] [3]

By then Cohen had a new partner, Suzanne Elrod, an American artist. Their son Adam was born in Montreal in September 1972, and their daughter Lorca, named after the poet, followed in 1974. The change was painful for Marianne. In 1972, while she was living in Cohen's house on Hydra with her son, Elrod arrived with baby Adam and wanted the house, and Marianne moved out. She returned to Norway the next year, took an office job in the offshore oil industry, and later married. Cohen, meanwhile, felt stuck. In 1973 he announced that he was retiring and told a reporter he just wanted to shut up. He was thirty nine, depressed and, as he saw it, trapped in an unhappy home life.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the sixth of October 1973, on the holy day of Yom Kippur, Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel. To the surprise of those around him, Cohen flew to Tel Aviv, vaguely planning to help with a harvest on a kibbutz. In a Tel Aviv cafe, the Israeli singers Oshik Levi, Matti Caspi and Ilana Rovina spotted him and asked him to come and sing for the troops. He went all the way to the front in Sinai, crossing the Suez Canal close behind the army, singing from ammunition crates by the light of headlights. He met the general Ariel Sharon. In a private manuscript he wrote of his shame at feeling relief that a helicopter full of wounded men were Egyptian, not Israeli.[1] [2] [3]

The war revived him. At an air force base he wrote Lover Lover Lover and sang it to air crews between missions. Back home he made New Skin for the Old Ceremony with the young arranger John Lissauer, released in 1974. It included Who by Fire, built on a prayer recited on Yom Kippur and sung with Janis Ian, and Chelsea Hotel Number Two, about his night with Janis Joplin, who had died of a heroin overdose in October 1970. Its cover, a medieval alchemical picture of two winged figures making love, was replaced in some American pressings. When asked why he ended his concerts with a military salute, Cohen said he did not consider himself a civilian. He considered himself a soldier.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Guns, Zen and a rejected masterpiece

After New Skin, Cohen and Lissauer began a follow up called Songs for Rebecca, but it was abandoned after Cohen's manager, Marty Machat, cleared the way for a partnership nobody expected. Machat was also the lawyer of Phil Spector, the producer behind the Wall of Sound. Spector invited Cohen to his mansion, locked the door, and Cohen suggested that since they were locked in, they might as well write songs. For about a month they wrote and drank together at the piano in a house kept so cold by air conditioning that Cohen wore an overcoat. At first it went well. In the studio it turned into chaos. There were guns everywhere, heavily armed bodyguards, and a loaded forty five lying on the mixing desk.[1] [2] [3]

One night, according to Cohen's biographer Ira Nadel, Spector pointed a loaded pistol at Cohen's throat, cocked it, and said he loved him. Cohen quietly replied that he hoped he did. Bob Dylan and the poet Allen Ginsberg dropped by and were ordered to sing backing vocals. Then Spector simply stopped coming to the studio, kept the tapes and mixed the album alone, using what Cohen thought were only rough guide vocals. Cohen said he could either hire his own private army and fight it out on Sunset Boulevard, or let it go. He let it go. Death of a Ladies' Man appeared in 1977 to baffled reviews. Decades later, in 2009, Spector was convicted of the 2003 murder of the actress Lana Clarkson, and he died in prison in 2021.[1] [2]

Cohen came back quieter. Since the seventies he had been studying with a Japanese Zen teacher in Los Angeles, Joshu Sasaki, known as Roshi, and one song on his 1979 album Recent Songs was based on Roshi's teaching. He produced that album himself with Henry Lewy, Joni Mitchell's engineer, adding an oud, a Gypsy violin and even a Mexican mariachi band, plus a jazz group from Austin called Passenger, whose bassist Roscoe Beck would stay with him for decades. Jennifer Warnes and a newcomer, Sharon Robinson, sang with him. Cohen later called it his favourite of his albums. The same year he and Suzanne Elrod separated. He admitted that cowardice and fear had kept him from marrying her, and the children spent much of their childhood with her in France.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The early eighties were a strange, scattered time. Cohen wrote and starred in a made for television musical called I Am a Hotel, which won the Golden Rose at Montreux. He co wrote a film musical, Night Magic, with Lewis Furey, and even played a small part in a 1986 episode of Miami Vice. In 1984 he published Book of Mercy, fifty short prose poems he called prayers, which won a Canadian poetry award. His voice was changing too, dropping lower and lower. He once blamed fifty thousand cigarettes and several swimming pools of whiskey, then noted that he had quit smoking and his voice was still getting deeper. That new low voice would define the second half of his career.[1] [2] [3] [4]

When Cohen met John Lissauer again at the Royalton Hotel in New York to play him new songs, he brought not a Spanish guitar but a cheap little Casio keyboard. On it he had written Dance Me to the End of Love, a song that sounds romantic but was inspired by the string quartets forced to play beside the crematoria in the Nazi death camps. The album also held a song he had been wrestling with for years, Hallelujah. Various Positions was finished in 1984, and Columbia's president Walter Yetnikoff refused to release it in America, reportedly telling Cohen that they knew he was great, but did not know if he was any good. A small independent label put it out instead.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The comeback of the golden voice

In Europe Cohen was still loved. On his 1985 tour he played emotional, politically charged concerts in Poland, which had been under martial law only two years earlier, and sang The Partisan, a song fans there linked to the Solidarity movement. In America his revival came through a friend. His longtime backing singer Jennifer Warnes recorded an album of his songs, Famous Blue Raincoat, even though record companies were wary of him. Its producer Roscoe Beck recalled that Cohen seemed to be poison to record labels. The album, released at the end of 1986, featured Stevie Ray Vaughan's guitar on First We Take Manhattan and a duet with Cohen himself. It reached the American charts and reintroduced him to a new audience.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In February 1988 Cohen released I'm Your Man, a record built on synthesizers and drum machines and sung in his new deep growl. It included First We Take Manhattan, Everybody Knows, written with Sharon Robinson, Take This Waltz, adapted from a poem by his hero Lorca, and Tower of Song, a wry song about the craft of songwriting that he first recorded in one take on a toy synthesizer. The album went to number one in Norway for sixteen weeks and topped charts across Europe. Rolling Stone called it the first Cohen album you could listen to in daylight. On the cover he is wearing dark glasses and a pinstriped suit while eating a banana, a photo he felt summed him up perfectly.[1] [2] [3]

When CBS gave him an award for selling more than five million albums outside America, Cohen thanked the company by saying he had always been touched by the modesty of their interest in his work. The songs were spreading anyway. Christian Slater's pirate radio DJ played Everybody Knows in the 1990 film Pump Up the Volume. Bob Dylan had started singing Hallelujah in concert, from 1988. In 1991 a French magazine assembled a tribute album, I'm Your Fan, with R.E.M., the Pixies and Nick Cave. For it, John Cale asked for the words to Hallelujah, and Cohen faxed him about fifteen pages of verses. Cale picked what he called the cheeky ones. That version would change the song's destiny.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

After the I'm Your Man tour, disaster struck at home. His son Adam was badly hurt in a car accident in the West Indies and lay in a coma for four months, and Cohen took a year off to help him recover. He also began a serious relationship with the actress Rebecca De Mornay, star of Risky Business, and they were briefly engaged. She co produced his next album, The Future, released in 1992 and dedicated to her. Written as the Berlin Wall fell and while Los Angeles burned in the 1992 riots, it was dark and prophetic. He wrote about sixty verses for Democracy, filled some sixty notebook pages for the title song, and spent about a decade on another track from the album.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Future went double platinum in Canada, and Oliver Stone used three of its songs in his 1994 film Natural Born Killers. Collecting a Juno award for best male vocalist in 1993, Cohen joked that only in Canada could somebody with a voice like his win vocalist of the year. Yet behind the success he was deeply unhappy. On the 1993 tour, he later admitted, he drank three bottles of Chateau Latour wine before shows, a habit so costly that the wine bill was enormous. His relationship with De Mornay was coming apart. She told his biographer he kept having relationships with women without really committing. He was nearly sixty, exhausted, and about to disappear.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The monk called Silence

In 1994 Cohen went up to the Mount Baldy Zen Center, a former Boy Scout camp in the San Gabriel Mountains east of Los Angeles, and stayed for about five years. He was approaching sixty and his teacher Roshi was approaching ninety. Life there was hard. He rose before three in the morning to light the fires, shovelled snow, cleaned toilets and sat for hours in meditation, and he had the honour of cooking for Roshi. His little cabin held a coffee maker, a keyboard, a laptop and a menorah. In 1996 he was ordained as a Rinzai Zen Buddhist monk, with the Dharma name Jikan, meaning silence. He insisted he was not looking for a new religion, and that he was quite happy with Judaism.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Roshi's story has a dark side. Joshu Sasaki, who came to America in 1962, was later accused by many students of sexually groping and coercing women over decades, sometimes under threat of expulsion. Letters of complaint date back to at least 1982, and in 2012 a former monk went public. His own senior teachers admitted that the community had struggled with his sexual misconduct for much of his career in America, and an independent panel found that people who spoke out had been silenced or punished. It also emerged that in Japan in the fifties he had been jailed for misusing temple funds. Sasaki died in 2014 at the age of one hundred and seven. Cohen did not excuse him, calling him a very naughty guy.[1] [2]

The monastery did not cure Cohen's depression, the companion of his whole adult life. Around 1998 it overwhelmed him, and he told Roshi he was going down the mountain. Just a week after returning home he flew to Mumbai to attend daily talks with an Indian teacher, Ramesh Balsekar, a former bank president who taught a Hindu philosophy. Cohen stayed for most of a year, swimming, writing and wandering the city, and for reasons he said were impossible to penetrate, the depression finally lifted. Earlier, in 1994, when Kurt Cobain took his own life, Cohen had said he was sorry he never got to speak to the young man, because he had seen many people at the Zen centre find a way out.[1] [2]

While Cohen was on the mountain, Hallelujah quietly took on a life of its own. John Cale's 1991 version inspired a young singer, Jeff Buckley, who recorded it on his 1994 album Grace. Buckley drowned in 1997, and his version grew into a legend. In 2001 the animated film Shrek used Cale's recording in a sad scene, while a new version by Rufus Wainwright went on the soundtrack album. That same year Cohen returned with Ten New Songs, made with Sharon Robinson largely in her converted garage and his home studio. It was his first fully digital album. It went to number one in Norway and Poland and won him four Juno awards, and in 2003 he was made a Companion of the Order of Canada.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In 2004 came Dear Heather, a loose scrapbook of an album made largely with his partner, the singer and pianist Anjani Thomas, who had first sung backup on Hallelujah back in 1984. It set a Lord Byron poem to music in honour of his old mentor Irving Layton, included a jazzy recitation recorded shortly after he came down from the mountain, and ended with a live Tennessee Waltz rescued from a 1985 bootleg. He had wanted to call it Old Ideas but feared people would think it was a greatest hits collection. He was also sharing new poems and drawings directly with fans through a website, the Leonard Cohen Files. He sounded lighter than ever. Then he discovered that his money was gone.[1] [2] [3]

Robbed, and back on the road

Before going up the mountain Cohen had handed almost total control of his finances to his manager of seventeen years, Kelley Lynch, a close family friend who had also briefly been his lover. In 2004 a friend tipped off his daughter Lorca that something was wrong. Cohen went to his bank and found he had paid a seventy five thousand dollar credit card bill of Lynch's without knowing it. His retirement fund, once worth millions, held about one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. His publishing had been sold, and a company set up in a royalty deal was almost entirely owned by Lynch. He fired her, and in October 2005 he sued, saying more than five million dollars had been taken. He mortgaged his house to pay the lawyers.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 2006 a Los Angeles court found in Cohen's favour and awarded him around nine million dollars, but Lynch never paid, and he never recovered the money. A former financial adviser sued Cohen in turn. Cohen stayed remarkably calm in public, saying only that it was enough to put a dent in your mood. He kept working. In May 2006 his book of poems and drawings, Book of Longing, went straight to the top of Canadian bestseller lists, and his first public appearance in thirteen years, at a Toronto bookstore, drew about three thousand people and closed the surrounding streets. He sang So Long, Marianne with the Barenaked Ladies and Ron Sexsmith. The composer Philip Glass even set the book to music.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

To rebuild his fortune, Cohen went back on the road for the first time in fifteen years. He rehearsed a superb band for three months, with bassist Roscoe Beck as musical director, Sharon Robinson, the harp and guitar playing Webb Sisters, and the Spanish guitarist Javier Mas. His voice had dropped so far that he tuned his guitar down two whole steps. The tour opened on the eleventh of May 2008 in Fredericton, New Brunswick. On the twenty ninth of June he played the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury, and Hallelujah at sunset became the talk of the festival. That year he was also inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, where he recited the words of Tower of Song. On this tour, he said, he barely drank at all.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

At Christmas 2008 Hallelujah did something no song had done in fifty one years in Britain. The X Factor winner Alexandra Burke went to number one with it, Jeff Buckley's version went to number two after a fan campaign, and Cohen's original reached thirty six. In February 2009 Cohen played his first American concert in fifteen years at New York's Beacon Theatre. On the eighteenth of September 2009, halfway through Bird on the Wire in Valencia, Spain, he collapsed on stage with stomach trouble and was taken to hospital. Three days later, on his seventy fifth birthday, he played Barcelona, where fans lit green candles for him. The 2009 shows alone reportedly earned about nine and a half million dollars.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the twenty fourth of September 2009 Cohen played a sold out stadium in Ramat Gan, near Tel Aviv, pledging the proceeds of forty seven thousand tickets to Israeli and Palestinian peace groups. A matching concert in Ramallah was cancelled after a Palestinian boycott campaign accused him of whitewashing Israel. In Ramat Gan he ended by raising his hands and reciting the ancient priestly blessing in Hebrew. The tour rolled on until December 2010. In January 2012 his album Old Ideas reached number three in America, the highest chart position of his career, and topped the charts in eleven countries. In April that year Kelley Lynch was sentenced to eighteen months in prison for harassing him. His final concert came on the twenty first of December 2013, in Auckland, New Zealand.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

Here I am

Cohen released Popular Problems in September 2014, just after his eightieth birthday, and it went to number one in Canada. One track, Nevermind, became the opening theme of the second season of True Detective. But after years of touring his body was failing. His son Adam said he suffered multiple fractures of the spine, and Cohen described himself as confined to barracks. He lived on the second floor of a modest house in the Mid Wilshire area of Los Angeles, with his daughter Lorca and her child downstairs and Adam two blocks away. When producer Patrick Leonard had to step back from the next album because of personal problems, Adam took over, turning his father's living room into a studio built around a medical chair.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In late July 2016 Cohen learned that Marianne Ihlen was dying of leukaemia in Oslo. He wrote to her straight away, telling her he was just a little behind her, close enough to take her hand, and wishing her a safe journey. A friend read the message to her, and she reached out her hand as she heard it. Two days later she lost consciousness, and she died soon after. The friend wrote back that he had hummed Bird on the Wire at her bedside. Cohen was touched when the letter spread around the world. That October The New Yorker published a long profile in which he said calmly that he was ready to die. At a launch event days later he joked that he intended to live to one hundred and twenty.[1] [2] [3] [4]

For his last album Cohen wanted the sound of his childhood synagogue. He invited Cantor Gideon Zelermyer and the choir of Shaar Hashomayim in Montreal to sing on the title song of You Want It Darker, which echoes the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, and the Hebrew word hineni, meaning here I am, the answer Abraham gave when God called him. That September Cohen asked the cantor to visit his parents' graves before the Jewish New Year, and was deeply moved by the photo he sent back. Adam said that in bursts of joy his father would stand up through the pain in front of the speakers and they would play a song over and over like teenagers. The album came out on the twenty first of October 2016.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Leonard Cohen died at his home in Los Angeles on the seventh of November 2016, at the age of eighty two. According to his manager he had fallen at home that night and died in his sleep, and leukaemia was a contributing cause. His death was kept quiet for three days. On the tenth of November, the same day the news broke, he was buried in Montreal in a simple pine coffin, in a traditional Jewish rite, beside his parents, grandparents and great grandparents on Mount Royal. His son said he died knowing he had completed one of his greatest records. He died the day before Donald Trump won the American presidency, and that weekend Kate McKinnon opened Saturday Night Live by singing Hallelujah at the piano.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Cohen once said he had a huge posthumous career in front of him, and he was right. Hallelujah entered the American Billboard Hot One Hundred for the first time after his death, and the title song of You Want It Darker won a Grammy in 2018. Adam finished a final album from his last sessions, Thanks for the Dance, in 2019, with help from Daniel Lanois, Beck, Feist and Damien Rice. A poetry collection, The Flame, appeared in 2018. Montreal painted giant murals of him, a museum show broke attendance records, and Lithuania, his mother's homeland, unveiled a bronze statue in Vilnius. A documentary about Hallelujah followed in 2021, and in 2024 a television series, So Long, Marianne, dramatised his years on Hydra. As of 2026, Hallelujah alone has been recorded by hundreds of artists around the world.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The people around Leonard Cohen

Leonard Cohen and Marianne Ihlen. They met in a Hydra grocery shop in 1960, when she had just been left by her husband, and lived together on and off for most of the decade in Greece, Montreal and New York. She inspired So Long, Marianne, Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye and Bird on the Wire. Even after they parted in the early seventies, he helped support her and her son for years, and they stayed close until she died in 2016, three months before him.[1] [2] [3]

Leonard Cohen and Suzanne Elrod. An American artist, Elrod was Cohen's partner through the seventies and the mother of his children, Adam and Lorca. She took the cover photo for Live Songs and appears on the cover of Death of a Ladies' Man. She is not the Suzanne of the famous song. They separated at the end of the decade, and Cohen admitted that cowardice and fear had stopped him from marrying her.[1] [2]

Leonard Cohen and Janis Joplin. They spent one night together at the Chelsea Hotel in the spring of 1968 and met only a handful of times afterwards. She once teased him about being in town to read poetry for old ladies. After her death from a heroin overdose in 1970 he wrote Chelsea Hotel Number Two about her, then spent years apologising for revealing that it was about her.[1] [2]

Leonard Cohen and Judy Collins. Collins was the first great champion of his songs. She recorded Suzanne and Dress Rehearsal Rag in 1966, before Cohen had released a record, and was the first to release Bird on the Wire. In 1967 she coaxed the terrified poet onto a New York stage for the first time and walked back out with him when he fled. They remained close friends for life.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Leonard Cohen and Irving Layton. The fiery Montreal poet taught at Cohen's school and at McGill and became his mentor and lifelong friend. Cohen joked that he taught Layton how to dress, while Layton taught him how to live forever. Cohen dedicated Book of Longing to him, set a Byron poem to music in his honour on Dear Heather, and spoke at his funeral in 2006.[1] [2] [3]

Leonard Cohen and Phil Spector. The Wall of Sound producer co wrote and produced Death of a Ladies' Man in 1977. Their writing sessions were friendly, but the studio was full of guns and liquor, Spector once held a loaded pistol to Cohen, and he finally took the tapes and mixed the album without him. Cohen called the result grotesque but semi virtuous, and still said he liked Phil.[1] [2]

Leonard Cohen and Kelley Lynch. His manager for seventeen years and a close family friend, Lynch was trusted with almost all his money while he lived as a monk. In 2004 he discovered his savings were gone, fired her, and won a multimillion dollar judgment that she never paid. Her campaign of threatening calls and emails ended with an eighteen month prison sentence in 2012.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Leonard Cohen and Joshu Sasaki. Cohen studied with the Japanese Zen master for about forty years, served as his personal assistant at Mount Baldy and was ordained a monk under him in 1996. He dedicated Ten New Songs and Popular Problems to him. Late in life Sasaki was accused by many students of sexual abuse, and Cohen, without excusing him, called his teacher a very naughty guy.[1] [2] [3]

Leonard Cohen and Sharon Robinson. She joined his band as a backing singer in 1979 and became one of his most important collaborators. Together they wrote Everybody Knows and Waiting for the Miracle, and she co wrote, produced and sang on Ten New Songs, recorded largely in her garage studio. She was back beside him on stage for the whole 2008 to 2013 world tour.[1] [2] [3]

Leonard Cohen and Jennifer Warnes. Warnes sang backup on his 1972 and 1979 tours and shared vocal credit on Various Positions. Her 1986 album of his songs, Famous Blue Raincoat, helped restore his standing in America just before I'm Your Man. Cohen called her a real friend, someone who had stood by him in the face of great derision.[1] [2] [3]

Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan. The two Jewish poet songwriters, both signed by John Hammond, admired each other for decades. Dylan sang Hallelujah in concert from 1988, long before it was famous. He once told Cohen that Cohen was number one and he himself was number zero, and in 2016 he praised Cohen's melodies as his greatest genius.[1] [2] [3]

Leonard Cohen and Adam Cohen. Born in 1972, his son became a singer songwriter himself, signing to his father's label Columbia. He spent much of his childhood with his mother in France, but in his father's last years they worked side by side. Adam produced You Want It Darker in his father's living room, then finished the posthumous album Thanks for the Dance from the sketches they left behind.[1] [2] [3]

Rare facts about Leonard Cohen

• As a boy, Cohen cut a wing off his late father's bow tie and buried it in the garden with a farewell note. Cohen was nine when his father died. After the funeral he took a ready made bow tie from the closet, cut off one wing, wrote a note, and buried both in the back yard. He called it a ritual response to an impossible event.[1]
• At thirteen, Cohen read a book on hypnotism and practised it on the family housekeeper. Cohen told The New Yorker that as a teenager he studied a book about hypnotism and tried it on the family's housekeeper. According to his story, it worked far better than he expected.[1]
• Cohen's first band was a teenage country and folk group called the Buckskin Boys. At around sixteen, wearing his late father's suede jacket, Cohen played in the Buckskin Boys. He had learned songs from a left wing folk songbook and loved Hank Williams on the radio.[1] [2]
• Cohen said all his songs grew from six flamenco chords taught by a Spanish guitarist who later took his own life. He took a few lessons from a young Spaniard he met by a Montreal tennis court. The man missed the fourth lesson, and Cohen learned he had killed himself. In his 2011 Asturias speech Cohen credited that guitar pattern for all his music.[1] [2]
• Working in the family clothing factory taught him to fold suits without creases, a skill he used on tour. As a young man Cohen worked in an uncle's foundry and at the family clothing business. From the factory he learned how to fold a suit so it would not wrinkle, which proved useful for a lifetime of touring in suits.[1]
• He was one of six poets on a 1957 Folkways record called Six Montreal Poets. Years before he recorded a song, Cohen's voice was on vinyl reading poetry. The Folkways album Six Montreal Poets featured him alongside his mentor Irving Layton, A. M. Klein and others.[1]
• Cohen bought his house on Hydra for fifteen hundred dollars, inherited from his grandmother. In September 1960 Cohen used an inheritance from his grandmother to buy a whitewashed house on the Greek island of Hydra. Before that he had been renting a place for fourteen dollars a month.[1] [2]
• Cohen nearly became the host of a CBC television current affairs show in 1966. Producer Andrew Simon had a contract ready for Cohen to host Seven on Six in Montreal. Then Cohen called late one night, after a marijuana trip, to say he could not do it because he had decided to write songs.[1]
• Writing Beautiful Losers on amphetamines, Cohen fasted until he weighed just one hundred and sixteen pounds. He worked up to fifteen hours a day on Hydra, fasting and taking speed. After finishing, he collapsed with hallucinations. He later said it took him ten years to fully recover.[1]
• In 1968 Cohen refused Canada's Governor General's Award for poetry. His Selected Poems 1956 to 1968 won the Governor General's Award for poetry, which came with a cash prize. Cohen declined it, as did the Quebec novelist Hubert Aquin that same year, causing a stir.[1] [2]
• For his first album sessions, Cohen asked for a full length mirror in the studio. Cohen told Mojo that he had always played guitar in front of a mirror and felt comfortable watching himself. So a mirror was brought into the Columbia studio for the recording of Songs of Leonard Cohen.[1]
• The back cover image of his debut album was found in a religious goods shop near the Chelsea Hotel. The picture shows the Anima Sola, a woman breaking free of chains amid flames. Cohen found it in a botanica near the Chelsea Hotel in 1965 and called it the triumph of the spirit over matter.[1]
• Robert Altman wore out two copies of Cohen's first album before using its songs in McCabe and Mrs. Miller. When Altman called asking for the songs, Cohen had just watched Altman's flop Brewster McCloud twice that afternoon. He loved it, and told the director he could have anything he wanted.[1]
• Cohen once destroyed a Mexican twelve string guitar by jumping on it in a fit of fury. In the notes to his 1975 best of album, Cohen wrote that he used to play Last Year's Man on a Mexican twelve string until he destroyed it by jumping on it in 1967.[1]
• Kris Kristofferson said he wanted the opening lines of Bird on the Wire on his tombstone. Cohen wrote that Kristofferson told him he planned to put the first couple of lines of the song on his gravestone, and joked that he would be hurt if he did not.[1] [2]
• The famous blue raincoat was real, a Burberry Cohen bought in London in 1959. He said it hung more heroically once he removed the lining. It was stolen from Marianne's New York loft in the early seventies, by which time he was not wearing it much anyway.[1] [2]
• Cohen's side won a settlement after a Leo Sayer hit borrowed a Famous Blue Raincoat melody. Cohen said the chorus of When I Need You matched a line of his song, someone sued on his behalf and the other side settled, even though their musicologist traced the motif back to Schubert.[1]
• Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg sang backing vocals on Cohen's Phil Spector album. During the chaotic sessions for Death of a Ladies' Man, Dylan and the Beat poet Ginsberg dropped by and were ordered by Spector to join the chorus of one of the album's rowdiest songs.[1] [2]
• Cohen sang for Israeli troops in 1973 and met the general Ariel Sharon in Sinai. During the Yom Kippur War he toured the front with Israeli musicians, often several times a day. He asked them to call him by his Hebrew name, Eliezer.[1] [2]
• The drum beat on Dance Me to the End of Love comes from a cheap Casio keyboard. Cohen wrote the song on the Casio, and producer John Lissauer said they tried real drums but Cohen preferred the preset. Keeping it meant keeping the key, which is why he strains slightly on the record.[1]
• Cohen had a small acting role in a 1986 episode of Miami Vice. Between records in the mid eighties, Cohen appeared in the Miami Vice episode French Twist, in its second season. Around the same time he co wrote a film musical, Night Magic.[1] [2]
• The banana on the I'm Your Man cover was an accident snapped by his publicist. Sharon Weisz photographed him at a video shoot, in dark glasses and a pinstriped suit, eating a banana. Cohen said it showed a man who thinks he looks cool while everyone else sees a mouth full of banana.[1]
• Winning a Juno for best male vocalist, Cohen joked that only in Canada could someone with his voice win. He collected the award in 1993 for The Future. The same night, his video for Closing Time also won the Juno for best music video.[1]
• Stevie Ray Vaughan played First We Take Manhattan on a borrowed guitar. Producer Roscoe Beck asked Vaughan at the 1986 Grammys to play on Jennifer Warnes's version. Vaughan had no guitar or amp with him, so he used one of Beck's old Stratocasters and finished around four in the morning.[1]
• John Cale woke up to find his floor covered in fifteen pages of Hallelujah verses faxed by Cohen. Cale asked for the lyrics for a tribute album. He chose what he called the cheeky verses and left out the religious ones, creating the version that Jeff Buckley and Shrek made famous.[1] [2]
• Shrek's director cut the racier lines of Hallelujah to keep it family friendly. Director Vicky Jenson said she chose the song for its complex mix of feelings, but trimmed verses about bathing on a roof and being tied to a kitchen chair.[1]
• At Mount Baldy, Cohen's monk name was Jikan, meaning silence. He was ordained a Rinzai Zen monk in 1996 and served as personal assistant to his teacher, even cooking for him. His cabin held a menorah alongside a keyboard and a laptop.[1] [2]
• Cohen once studied Scientology and received a certificate declaring him a Grade Four Release. In the late sixties in New York he briefly studied at a Scientology centre. He later said he tried everything, and even danced and sang with the Hare Krishnas without joining.[1]
• Before the 2008 tour, Cohen tuned his guitar down two whole steps to fit his deepened voice. He had not played his songs in fifteen years and his range had changed. Tuning the low E string down to a low C let him keep his old chord shapes.[1]
• In 2012 Old Ideas made Cohen, at seventy seven, the oldest artist to top the album chart in Finland. Old Ideas debuted at number one in Finland and eleven countries in all, and reached number three in America, the best US chart placing of his career, forty four years after his first album.[1]
• Cohen fainted on stage in Spain during Bird on the Wire, then played Barcelona on his seventy fifth birthday. He collapsed in Valencia in September 2009 with stomach trouble. Three days later fans in Barcelona lit green candles to celebrate his birthday.[1] [2]
• Cohen's granddaughter's father is the singer Rufus Wainwright. His daughter Lorca, a photographer who filmed his tour, had a daughter with Wainwright. Wainwright also sang one of the best known versions of Hallelujah, heard on the Shrek soundtrack album.[1] [2] [3]
• Cohen's love letters to Marianne Ihlen sold at auction in 2019 for about eight hundred and seventy six thousand dollars. Christie's sold more than fifty letters, some for five times their estimates. The top lot was a bronze bell from their Hydra home, which went for over eighty one thousand dollars.[1] [2]
• A species of recluse spider from Iran was named after Cohen in 2021. Arachnologists named it Loxosceles coheni. A South African weevil described the same year, Cervellaea coheni, also honours him.[1]
• Cohen's estate refused permission for Hallelujah at the 2020 Republican convention, but it was played anyway. A cover by Tori Kelly was played after Donald Trump's speech. The estate's lawyer said they had declined the request, adding that they might have approved You Want It Darker instead.[1]
• His last concert ended with the Drifters' Save the Last Dance for Me. On the twenty first of December 2013 in Auckland, his three hundred and eighty seventh show since 2008, Cohen closed with the Drifters song, took off his hat, bowed and walked off smiling. He never played live again.[1] [2]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.