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Leonard Cohen , CC (born September 21, 1934 in Montreal, Quebec, CanadaLeonard Cohen is a poet, novelist, and singer-songwriter. His musical career has largely overshadowed his prior work as a poet and novelist, although he has continued to publish poetry sporadically after his breakthrough in the music industry.

Musically, Cohen's early songs are based in folk music, both for melodies and instrumentation, but, beginning in the 1970s, his work shows the influence of various types of popular music and cabaret music. Since the 1980s he typically sings in a deep bass register, with synthesizers and female backing vocals.

Cohen's songs are often emotionally heavy and lyrically complex, owing more to the metaphoric word play of poetry than to the conventions of song craft. His work often explores the themes of religion, isolation, and complex interpersonal relationships.

Cohen's music has become very influential on other singer-songwriters, and more than a thousand cover versions of his work have been recorded. He is also popular in his native land, having been inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame and awarded the Order of Canada, the nation's highest civilian honor.

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Cohen was born to a middle-class Jewish family in 1934 in Montreal, Quebec. He grew up in Westmount on the Island of Montreal. His father, who owned a substantial Montreal clothing store, died when Leonard was nine years old. They made a proud claim of descent from the priestly Kohanim: "I had a very Messianic childhood," he told Richard Goldstein in 1967, "I was told I was a descendant of Aaron, the high priest." [1] As a teenager he learned to play the guitar and formed a country-folk group called the Buckskin Boys. His father's will provided Leonard with a modest trust income, sufficient to allow him to freely pursue his literary ambitions for some time without risking economic ruin.

Cohen idealized his father and his death threw him into a deep depression. As he grew older he began taking the then legal drug LSD as a treatment. Cohen has said that he believes the drug opened his awareness to the "hypocrisy" and "self-delusion" that are "common traits of humanity," ideas which are prominent themes in his songs. His depression did not lift until the late 1990s.

In 1951, Cohen enrolled at McGill University, where he was president of the McGill Debating Union and pursued a career as a poet. His first poetry book, (1961) made him well-known in poetry circles, especially in his native Canada.

Cohen applied a strong work ethic to his early and keen literary ambitions. He wrote poetry and fiction through much of the 1960s, and preferred even as a young man to live in quasi-reclusive circumstances. After moving to Hydra, a Greek island, Cohen published the poetry collection can be considered as an 'anti-bildungsroman' since it — in an early postmodern fashion — deconstructs the identity of the main characters by combining the sacred and the profane, religion and sexuality in a rich, lyrical language. Reflecting Cohen's , greeted initially with shock by Canadian reviewers (who berated it for its explicit sexual content), is today considered by many critics to be among the finest literary novels of the 1960s. For a good early survey of Cohen's written work, see

In 1967, Cohen relocated to the United States to pursue a career as a folk singer-songwriter. His song "Suzanne" became a hit for Judy Collins, and after performing at a few folk festivals, Cohen was discovered by John H. Hammond, the same Columbia Records representative who discovered Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, among others.

The sound of Cohen's first album (1967) was much too downtrodden to be a commercial success but was widely acclaimed by folk music buffs and by Cohen's peers. He followed up with (1974). His recorded sound became a bit more accessible through the use of background vocalists.

Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, Cohen toured the United States, Canada and Europe. In 1973, Cohen toured Israel and performed at army bases during the Yom Kippur War. Beginning around 1974, his collaboration with pianistarranger John Lissauer created a live sound that was almost universally praised by the critics, but never really captured on record. During his time, Cohen often toured with Jennifer Warnes as a back-up singer. Warnes would become a fixture on Cohen's future albums and would even record an album of Cohen songs in 1987, (note the plural possessive case; one year later in 1978, Cohen released a volume of poetry with the coyly revised title, ). The album was produced by Phil Spector, well known as the inventor of the "wall of sound" technique, in which pop music is backed with thick layers of instrumentation—an approach much different from Cohen's usually minimalistic instrumentation. The recording of the album was a complete fiasco. Spector reportedly mixed the album in secret studio sessions and Cohen said that Spector once threatened him at gunpoint. The end result was a sound critics considered gaudy and ostentatious and Cohen's songs were considered some of his weakest as well. In 1979, Cohen returned with the more traditional , featuring the oft-covered "Hallelujah," but Columbia declined to release the album in the United States, where Cohen's popularity had declined in recent years. (Throughout his career, Cohen's music has sold better in Europe and Canada than in the U.S.—he once satirically expressed how touched he is at the modesty the American company has shown in promoting his records.)

In 1986 he made a guest appearance in an episode of the TV series , which marked a drastic change in his music. Synthesizers ruled the album, although in a much more subdued manner than on , and Cohen's lyrics included more social commentary and dark humour. The album was Cohen's most acclaimed and popular since , and "First We Take Manhattan" and the title song became two of his most popular songs. The use of the album track "Every helped to expose Cohen's music to a younger audience.

He followed with another acclaimed album, is his most political album to date, articulating a leftist politics to urge (more often than not in terms of biblical prophecy) perserverance, reformation, and even hope in the face of prospects ranging from the grim to the dire. In the title track Cohen prophecies impending political and social collapse, reportedly as his response to the L.A. unrest of 1992: "I've seen the future, brother: It is murder." But in "Democracy," Cohen, while insisting that the United States is not a democracy, confidently prays—prays to the American Ship of State itself—that it will be: "I'm junk but I'm still holding up this little wild bouquet: Democracy is coming to the USA." Cohen's humility also shines through "Waiting for the Miracle," where he lampoons his own severity (along perhaps with his religious austerity and even his instrumentation), singing: "There ain't no entertainment and the judgements are severe When you're waiting for the miracle to come." And in "Closing Time", Cohen gives the dire prophecies of "The Future" as forgiving and humble a reworking as is perhaps imaginable, observing biblical, personal, and political "end times" from the perspective of an old guy being kicked out of a sleazy but jubilant bar. The album ends with "Anthem" where in perhaps the album's best-loved and most-often-quoted passage, he urges perseverance and faith in the face of broken Liberty: "Ring the bells that still can ring, Cohen retreated to the Mount Baldy Zen Center near Los Angeles, beginning what would become five years of seclusion at the center. In 1996, Cohen was ordained as a Rinzai Zen Buddhist monk and took the Dharma name , meaning silent one. He left Mount Baldy in 1999 and has since released two more albums (discussed below).

, featuring a heavy influence from producer and co-composer Sharon Robinson. With this album, Cohen sheds the relatively extroverted, engaged, and even optimistic outlook of (the sole political track, “The Land of Plenty,” abandoning stern commandment for yearning but helpless prayer) to lament and seek acceptance of varieties of personal loss: the approach of death and the departure of love, romantic and even divine. ) owes much to Robinson’s involvement. Although not Cohen’s bitterest album, it may rank as his most melancholic.

In October 2004, he released , largely a musical collaboration with jazz chanteuse (and current Cohen partner) Anjani Thomas, as light as the previous album was dark. In has lifted (along, Cohen relates, with much of his own lifelong depression, a positive change he attributes to neurological processes of aging). It is perhaps his least cohesive, and perhaps his most experimental, most playful album to date. Sharon Robinson returns to collaborate on two quite memorable tracks.

Cohen has been under new management since April 2005. He recently wrote and produced an album () for former-background singer and jazz chanteuse Anjani Thomas (scheduled to first quarter of 2006). Cohen's new book of poetry and drawings () will also be published in September 2006, and his new album is slated for mid-2006 with subsequent touring.

This recent activity has been necessary—Cohen states—because his financial resources, including the publishing rights to his songs, reportedly have been gutted, leading Cohen to file suit against his longtime former manager, Kelley Lynch, for gross misappropriation of funds [2]. Cohen states that he has been deprived of over 5 million USD placed in a fund for his retirement, leaving only $150,000. Cohen is being sued in turn by other former business associates. These events have put him in the public spotlight, including a cover feature on him with the headline "Devastated!" in Canada's

Cohen has never married. In the 1960s, during his stay at Hydra, Cohen befriended the Scandinavian novelists Axel Jensen and Göran Tunström. Leonard lived there with Axel's wife Marianne Jensen (now: Ihlen) and their son Axel after they broke up. The song "So Long, Marianne" is about her. For a long time it was believed that the character Lorenzo in Jensen's novel (1961) was based on Cohen, but Axel told him it was influenced by Tunström.

He fathered two children with artist Suzanne Elrod. A son, Adam, was born in 1972 and a daughter, Lorca, named after poet Federico García Lorca, was born in 1974. Adam Cohen began his own career as a singer-songwriter in the mid-1990s.

Contrary to popular belief, "Suzanne," one of his best-known songs, refers to Suzanne Verdal, the wife of his friend, the Québécois sculptor Armand Vaillancourt, rather than Elrod.

Around 1990, Cohen was romantically linked, and by some accounts formally engaged, to actress Rebecca De Mornay. He is now seeing and working with Anjani Thomas.

Recurring themes in Cohen's work include love and sex, religion, psychological depression, and music itself. He has also engaged with certain political themes, though sometimes ambiguously so.

Love and sex are common enough themes in popular music; Cohen's background as a novelist and poet brings an uncommon sensibility to these themes. "Suzanne," probably the first Cohen song to gain broad attention, mixes a wistful type of love song with a religious meditation, themes that are also mixed in "Joan of Arc." "Famous Blue Raincoat" is from the point of view of a man whose marriage has been broken (in exactly what degree is ambiguous in the song) by his wife's infidelity with his close friend, and is written in the form of a letter to that friend, to whom he writes, "I guess that I miss you) found in a hotel room encounter with two Edmonton women, whereas "Chelsea Hotel #2" treats his Janis Joplin one-night stand rather unsentimentally, and the title of "Don't Go Home with Your Hard-On" speaks for itself.

Cohen comes from a Jewish background, most obviously reflected in his song "Story of Isaac" and in "Who by Fire," whose words and melody echo the Unesaneh Tokef, an 11th century liturgical poem recited on Rosh Hashanah. Broader Judeo-Christian themes are sounded throughout the album : "Hallelujah", which has music as a secondary theme, begins by evoking the biblical king David composing a song that "pleased the Lord"; "Coming Back to you" and "If It Be Your Will" are clearly addressed to a Judeo-Christian God. In his early career as a novelist, Iroquois Katherine Tekakwitha. Cohen has also been involved with Buddhism at least since the 1970s and in 1996 he was ordained a Buddhist monk. However, he still considers himself also a Jew: "I'm not looking for a new religion. I'm quite happy with the old one, with Judaism." [3]

Having suffered from psychological depression during much of his life (although less so with the onset of old age), Cohen has written much (especially in his early work) about depression and suicide. The wife of the protagonist of commits a gory suicide; "Seems So Long Ago, Nancy" is about a suicide; suicide is mentioned in the darkly comic "One of Us Cannot Be Wrong"; "Dress Rehearsal Rag" is about a last-minute decision not to kill oneself; a general atmosphere of depression pervades such songs as "Please Don't Pass Me By" and "Tonight Will Be Fine." A reviewer once remarked tongue-in-cheek that Cohen's albums should be sold with razor blades.

As in the aforementioned "Hallelujah", music itself the subject of many songs, including "Tower of Song", "A Singer Must Die", and "Jazz Police".

Social justice often shows up as a theme in his work, where he seems, especially in later albums, to expound a leftist politics, albeit with culturally conservative elements. In "Democracy" lamenting "the wars against disorder … the ashes of the gay," he concludes that the United States is actually not a democracy: A specifically (and classically) leftist position, as is his practically Chomskyan observation (in "Tower of Song") that "the rich have got their channels in the bedrooms of the poor But love's the only engine of survival." In "Anthem," he promises that "the killers in high places [who] say their prayers out loud … [are] gonna hear from me." In "The Land of Plenty," he characterizes the United States (if not the opulent West in general) of benightedness: "May the lights in The Land of Plenty Shine on the truth some day." And in "On That Day," in a sincere and genuine lament for the 9-11 tragedy, he nevertheless, startlingly, raises (and takes an agnostic position on) the question of whether "It's what we deserve For crimes in the world."

War is an enduring theme of Cohen's work which in his earlier songs, as indeed in his early life, he approached ambivalently. In "Field Commander Cohen" he (perhaps metaphorically) imagines himself as a soldier beard and military fatigues. This song was actually written immediately following Cohen's front-line stint with the Israeli air force, the "fighting in Egypt" documented in an (again perhaps metaphorical) passage of "Night Comes On:" In 1973, Cohen, who had travelled to Jerusalem to sign up on the Israeli side in the 1973 war with Egypt, had instead been assigned to a USO- entertainer tour of front-line tank emplacements in the Sinai Desert, at one of which he both came under fire and reportedly shared cognac with an unlikely self-professed fan, then-General Ariel Sharon. Claiming ambivalence from the start about the causes of the conflict, Cohen eventually left, disillusioned with combat by encounters with captured and wounded enemy troops.

His recent politics continue a lifelong predilection for the underdog, the "beautiful loser," whether the WWII French resister of Anna Marly and Hy Zaret's (which he covered) or the royalist of his own "The Old Revolution," although Cohen's fascination with war is often as metaphor for more explicitly cultural and personal issues, as in , by this measure his most "militant" album.

Several of Cohen's songs apparently oppose abortion. "Story of Isaac" leaves completely unclear whether those "who build these altars now To sacrifice these children" are sacrificing young soldiers, or the unborn, or neither or both. But "Diamonds in the Mine" explicitly and enragedly declaims, "The only man of energy Just to kill an unborn child," and in "The Future", Cohen sings sarcastically "Destroy another fetus now We don't like children anyhow." Some manner of social conservatism may be a subtext in "Stories of the Street," where "The age of lust is giving birth From both sides of the glass," and in songs where Cohen and various women seem to be on either sides of a war: as in "There is a War," and "First We Take Manhattan."

Cohen blends a good deal of pessimism about politicalcultural issues with a great deal of humor and (especially in his later work) gentle acceptance. His wit contends with his stark analyses, as his songs are often verbally playful and even cheerful: In "Tower of Song," the famously raw-voiced Cohen sings ironically that he was "… born with the gift Of a golden voice"; the generally dark "Is This What You Wanted?" nonetheless contains playful lines "You were the whore and the Beast of Babylon I was Rin Tin Tin"; in concert, he often plays around with his lyrics (for example, "If you want a doctor I'll examine every inch of you" from "I'm Your Man" will become "If you want a Jewish doctor …"); and he will introduce one song by using a phrase from another song or poem (for example, introducing "Leaving Green Sleeves" by paraphrasing his own "Queen Victoria": "This is a song for those who are not nourished by modern love").

Some of his songs, such as "Ballad of the Absent Mare" and "Hallelujah" are simply beautiful, and "Democracy" looks at a future as hopeful as that of "The Future" is bleak.

Cohen has also covered such love songs as Irving Berlin's "Always" or the more obscure soul number "Be for Real" (originally sung by Marlena Shaw), presumably chosen in part for their unlikely juxtaposition to his own work.

In 1968, Cohen refused Governor General's Award (in category for English language poetry or drama) for was chosen for inclusion in Canada Reads 2005. It was selected and originally to be championed by singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright; however, tour commitments meant that Wainwright had to be replaced by singer Molly Johnson. with a voice like mine win 'Vocalist of the Year'."—first words of his speech accepting the Juno Award for "I don't consider myself a pessimist at all. I think of a pessimist as someone who is waiting for it to rain. And I feel completely soaked to the skin."—from interview with "Now, I don't want to give you the impression that I'm a great musicologist, but I'm a lot better than what I was described as for a long, long time; you know, people said I only knew three chords when I knew five."—from interview with BBC Radio 1FM (1994)"I feel that, you know, the enormous luck I've had in being able to make a living, and to never have had to have written one word that I didn't want to write, to be able to have satisfied that dictum I set for myself, which was not to work for pay, but to be paid for my work—just to be able to satisfy those standards that I set for myself has been an enormous privilege."—(same interview with BBC Radio 1FM (1994))"It was only when you walked away I saw you had the perfect ass. Forgive me for not falling in love with your face or your conversation."—from "You say I took the name in vain. I don't even know the name. But if I did, well really, what's it to you? There's a blaze of light in every word; it doesn't matter which you heard: the holy or the broken hallelujah." (same): "Stranger Song" is McCabe's theme, "Winter Lady" is Mrs. Miller's, and "Sisters of Mercy" is the theme of the prostitutes who work in their establishment. He also composed some incidental music for the movie. (2001) uses a slightly censored version of John Cale's recording of "Hallelujah." The soundtrack album, however, replaces this with a version by Rufus Wainwright., from 1991, features Cohen's songs interpreted by a variety of folk and alternative rock acts, including R.E.M., Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Pixies, The Lilac Time and Geoffrey Oryema,, released in 1995, has a more mainstream pop-rock program that includes Sting, Jann Arden, Willie Nelson and Elton John.

Many of Cohen's songs have been interpreted (and sometimes translated in other languages) by other artists, occasionally receiving more popular attention than Cohen's own, typically minimalistic arrangements. Some of Cohen's most covered songs include:

"Bird on the Wire," covered (often as "Bird on a Wire") by Johnny Cash, Joe Cocker, Judy Collins, Fairport Convention, Tim Hardin, k.d. lang, Willie Nelson, The Neville Brothers, and Our Lady Peace (at Live 8)."Famous Blue Raincoat," covered by Judy Collins, Tori Amos, Joan Baez, Lloyd Cole, Hayden, and Jennifer Warnes"Hallelujah," covered by Bono, Jeff Buckley, John Cale, Allison Crowe, k.d. lang, Bob Dylan, Rufus Wainwright, Elisa and Gavin DeGraw. Cale's version (slightly edited) was featured in the movie , but Wainwright's replaced it on the soundtrack album, apparently because Wainwright is signed with Dreamworks SKG and Cale is not. The . Cale's version also appears in Julian Schnabel's film "Basquiat", about New York artist Jean Michel Basquiat."Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye," covered by Judy Collins, Roberta Flack, Claudine Longet, and Ian McCulloch"Suzanne," covered by Graeme Allwright, Judy Collins, Fabrizio de André, Neil Diamond, Fairport Convention, Roberta Flack, Peter Gabriel, Noel Harrison, Geoffrey Oryema, and Nina Simone. R.E.M. recorded a song called "Hope" which they admit was indebted to "Suzanne;" Cohen gets co-songwriting credit for the song.

As of December 18, 2005, the site www.leonardcohenfiles.com had counted a total of 1105 published cover versions of Cohen's songs.

The Leonard Cohen Files – the most comprehensive Cohen site on the net; the next international convention will take place in Berlin in August 2006Speaking Cohen; a large archive of interviews and the "master" site for many of the sites about recent specific albums listed belowDiamonds in the Lines (Leonard Cohen In His Own Live Words), includes Cohen's comments on many individual songsI'm Your Live Man (Leonard Cohen Concerts and Live Recordings Database), dedicated to the research of concerts and public recordings by CohenLeonard Cohen Nights Festival, an annual tribute in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. The site contains both material about Cohen and about the history of the event.