Background

Ethnicity: Leonard Cohen was of Polish Jewish, Lithuanian Jewish, and Russian Jewish descent.

Leonard Cohen was born on September 21, 1934, in Westmount, Quebec, Canada, to Nathan Cohen and Marsha Klonitsky. Nathan was a clothing business owner and Marsha was a nurse. His father died when he was only nine. Cohen’s Polish-born grandfather, Lyon Cohen, was an important figure in Montréal’s Jewish community. He ran the Freedman Company, one of the city’s largest clothing corporations, co-founded The Jewish Times, the first English language Jewish newspaper in Canada, and was the first president of the Canadian Jewish Congress. He also helped settle Jewish refugees who fled to Canada from the Russian Empire. Klinitsky-Klein’s father, religious scholar Rabbi Solomon Klinitsky-Klein, was one of the refugees he helped settle in Montréal.

Education

After receiving elementary education at the Roslyn Elementary School in 1948, Cohen joined the Westmount High School. Cohen also attended Hebrew school at the Shaar Hashomayim synagogue, where his family was actively involved. During high school, he learned poetry and music and took a special interest in the compositions of Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca. He also had a friend whose father played guitar and sang folk songs to the boys; this man taught Cohen to play the instrument. After he got acquainted with a flamenco guitarist, he soon made a shift from acoustic to classical guitar.

He joined McGill University in 1951, where he was the president of the McGill Debating Union. The poems Sparrows and Thought of a Landsman, which he composed during his university days made him the winner at the Chester MacNaghten Literary Competition. The year 1954, witnessed the publication of his first poems in the CIV/n magazine.

He completed his bachelor’s degree in arts in the year 1955. He was inspired by literary stalwarts like Walt Whitman, William Butler Yeats, Henry Miller, Irving Layton, and Federico Garcia Lorca. In 1956, he published a book of his poems written during his teenage, named Let Us Compare Mythologies. This poet dedicated the book to the memory of his late father.

Cohen also attended the McGill University Faculty of Law and then he moved to New York where he joined the School of General Studies at Columbia University.

Career

In 1957, Leonard Cohen went back to Montreal, Canada, where he engaged in some jobs and simultaneously, continued his literary works penning poems and fictional stories. When his next book, The Spice-Box of the Earth, was published in 1961, it marked the beginning of what would be one of Cohen’s most fruitful periods.

Both a critical and commercial success, Spice-Box established Cohen as an important literary voice and also earned him enough royalties that combined with the proceeds from a Canadian writing grant and a small family inheritance allowed him to buy a modest house on the Greek island of Hydra, where he would live on and off for much of the next seven years and "write and swim and sail."

Cohen’s output from this time includes the poetry collections Flowers for Hitler (1964) and Parasites of Heaven (1966), as well as the novels The Favorite Game (1963) and Beautiful Losers (1966), the latter earning Cohen lofty comparisons to James Joyce, and public outrage in Canada for the book's overtly sexual content.

Despite all of the attention, Cohen was beginning to feel that he would not be able to make his living as a writer alone, and he began to explore music again, seeing it not only as a natural vehicle for his poetry but also a potentially more lucrative one. He would not be wrong on either count.

Returning to the United States, Cohen settled in New York and began to explore the city’s music scene. By this time well into his 30s, Cohen was significantly older than his contemporaries and was on more than one occasion discouraged by agents from attempting a career as a performer. However, fellow folk singer Judy Collins had already recognized Cohen’s significant talents, performing covers of his songs Suzanne and Dress Rehearsal Rag on her popular 1966 album In My Life.

With her encouragement, Leonard Cohen made his debut at the 1967 Newport Folk Festival, where, among the audience members, was A&R rep John Hammond, who quickly added Cohen to his impressive roster - which already included such superstars as Aretha Franklin and Bob Dylan - by signing him to Columbia Records.

Cohen’s first recording, Songs of Leonard Cohen, was released in 1967. Though musically rudimentary in the context of its era, the album was extremely influential. It included several of his most enduring songs, including Suzanne, The Stranger Song, So Long, Marianne, and Hey, That's No Way To Say Goodbye. The album was certified gold in Canada for sales of more than 50,000 copies.

After publishing a new poetry collection in 1968, Leonard Cohen released his second album, Songs from a Room (1969), which included one of his most popular songs, Bird on a Wire. The album reached No. 2 on the UK charts, No. 63 on the Billboard 200 chart and was certified gold in Canada.

In 1970, Cohen embarked on his first tour across the United States and Europe. At the Isle of Wight festival, Cohen captivated an audience estimated at 600,000 people. His performance was released in 2009 as part of the live CD/DVD, Live at the Isle of Wight 1970. Also in 1970, Brian Macdonald choreographed the ballet The Shining People of Leonard Cohen, which interpreted verses of Cohen’s poetry and incorporated an electronic score by Harry Freedman.

In 1971, Cohen released Songs of Love and Hate, which includes Joan of Arc, Avalanche, and one of his most influential songs, the haunting and eerie Famous Blue Raincoat. Like his previous studio album, Songs of Love and Hate was very well received in the United Kingdom and peaked at No. 4 on their album chart. Cohen released his first live album Live Songs in 1973, which included recordings from European shows in 1970 and 1972.

In 1974, Cohen returned to studio recordings with New Skin for the Old Ceremony, which while maintaining Cohen’s characteristically downbeat mood also featured fuller arrangements than his previous albums. Among the standout tracks from this offering are Who by Fire, Take This Longing, and Chelsea Hotel No. 2, about a romantic encounter that Cohen once had with singer Janis Joplin. Cohen toured in support of New Skin before releasing a 1975 best-of album and hitting the road once again, enjoying the adoration of a devoted core of fans, if not the commercial success that his label might have hoped for.

But if Columbia was expecting different results with his next album, they were to be disappointed, as would be his fans and, indeed, Cohen himself. Working with legendary and notoriously troubled producer Phil Spector, Cohen’s Death of a Ladies’ Man was problematic from the start, with Spector’s erratic behavior culminating in him holding a gun to Cohen’s head.

Spector also mixed the recording without Cohen’s input, resulting in the overblown end product that Cohen himself has described as "grotesque" and identified as his least favorite album. Perhaps hoping to right his ship, the following year Cohen released the similarly titled collection of poetry and prose Death of a Lady’s Man, followed by 1979’s Recent Songs, which, although it saw Cohen return to the sparser arrangements of his earlier work, failed to perform well commercially.

In 1983, Cohen co-wrote and starred in I Am a Hotel, a half-hour CBC TV musical that dramatizes five of Cohen’s songs. I Am a Hotel won the Golden Rose international television award in Montreux, Switzerland in 1984. Also in 1984, Cohen received PROCAN’s William Harold Moon Award, which honors artists who promote Canadian music internationally.

On Cohen’s seventh studio album, Various Positions (1984), he returned to his country music roots, experimented with synthesizers, and continued to explore aspects of spirituality. Additionally, the album, which also prominently featured Warnes, revealed that Cohen’s singing voice had deepened and provided the first examples of what would become his signature gravelly baritone.

Columbia Records declined to release the album in the United States, which forced American retailers to import the album from CBS Canada. Various Positions had mixed reviews and generally low sales but later received renewed interest due to the inclusion of what became one of Cohen’s signature songs, Hallelujah.

Counted among Cohen’s best-known, best-loved, and most-often-performed songs of all time, Hallelujah has been covered by hundreds of artists since, including Jeff Buckley and Rufus Wainwright. The album, however, failed to gain much recognition, and it would be another five years before Cohen would release anything new.

Resurfacing in 1988, Cohen released the synth-heavy I’m Your Man, which although failed to chart in the United States, was a smash in Canada and Europe and features the notable tracks Everybody Knows and First We Take Manhattan, as well as the memorable title song. Introducing Cohen to a new generation of fans, the album was followed by 1992’s The Future, from which several songs were included in the Oliver Stone film Natural Born Killers, which also helped establish his standing with a younger audience.

In 1991, Cohen was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame and made an Officer of the Order of Canada, a title that would be elevated to Companion in 2003. In 1992, he released his ninth studio album, The Future, which includes the popular song Closing Time. Like I’m Your Man, The Future contained darker lyrical content that focused on the global unrest of the time.

By 1993, The Future was certified double platinum in Canada for sales of more than 200,000 copies. That year Cohen received the Governor General’s Performing Arts Award and won two Juno Awards: Male Vocalist of the Year and Best Video for Closing Time. He was also nominated for Producer of the Year.

He also conducted extensive tours of Europe and North America in 1988 and 1993, which resulted in a new live album, Cohen Live: Leonard Cohen in Concert (1994). In 1994, Cohen was awarded a Juno for Songwriter of the Year, The Future was nominated for Album of the Year and the video for the title track was nominated for Best Video. In 1997, Cohen released another greatest hits collection, More Best of Leonard Cohen. The album included songs from I’m Your Man, The Future, and Cohen Live and two previously unreleased songs, Never Any Good and The Great Event.

Leonard Cohen reemerged in 1999, and two years later released his first album in nearly a decade, the plainly titled Ten New Songs, as well as the live recording Field Commander Cohen, which documented performances from a 1979 hour. Next came Dear Heather, something of a departure for Cohen, in that it included songs for which he did not write lyrics, followed by the 2005 tribute album and movie Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man, which featured performances by Cave, Wainwright, U2, Antony, Beth Orton, and many others.

Unfortunately for Cohen, while he was being celebrated, he also discovered he was being ripped off, and he filed suit against former manager Kelley Lynch, who had embezzled millions of dollars from him over the years. Though Cohen won a $7.9-million-dollar in 2006, he was never able to recoup the money, and the now-72-year-old bard was left without his retirement funds.

In 2006, Cohen also published a new collection of poetry, Book of Longing, and in 2008, after being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, he embarked on a two-year-long world tour to rebuild his finances, which was chronicled on the albums Live in London (2009) and Songs from the Road (2010). In the midst of the tour, Cohen received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and was inducted into the Songwriters’ Hall of Fame, and the following year Columbia Records released The Complete Studio Albums Collection, gathering together all of Cohen’s studio work into one box set.

By this point a grandfather and nearing his 80s, Cohen was, however, no mere relic of the past, and in early 2012, he released a new album of songs titled Old Ideas, which saw him return to the folk arrangements of his earlier and arguably best work. Reaching No. 3 in the United States and No. 1 in Canada and several European countries, it was the highest-charting album of Cohen’s career, rivaled only by his 2014 album Popular Problems.

Prolific until the end, three weeks before his death, Cohen released You Want It Darker, recorded in his home while his health was rapidly declining. His son Adam produced the album, and told Rolling Stone magazine, "At times I was very worried about his health, and the only thing that buoyed his spirits was the work itself."

Cohen died on November 7, 2016, at the age of 82. At the time of the public announcement of Cohen’s passing on November 10, few details were revealed as to the circumstances. A week later, his manager Robert B. Kory stated the songwriter had fallen on the evening of November 7 and died in his sleep that night. "The death was sudden, unexpected, and peaceful," said Kory.

Fans and celebrities reacted to the music legend's passing on social media, often quoting his profound and poetic lyrics. In January 2018, Cohen was posthumously awarded a Grammy for Best Rock Performance, for You Want It Darker. It was his first competitive Grammy win in a career that spanned a half-century.

Achievements

• 

  Cohen is one of Canada’s most beloved poets and musicians. He is considered by many to be one of the greatest songwriters of all time. In 2008, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by Lou Reed. The same year, he was made the Grand Officer of the National Order of Quebec.
  
  In 2010, Cohen was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. The same year, he was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. Following his death, tributes from around the world poured in highlighting Cohen’s artistic legacy.
  
  Cohen’s illustrious and extensive body of work has inspired generations of artists. As a result, his songs have been covered by countless musicians from around the world. Early in Cohen’s career, his music reached a broader audience when Judy Collins covered a number of his songs, most notably Suzanne, and when Nina Simone put her own spin on Suzanne.
  
  Some other well-regarded covers include The Neville Brothers’ and Johnny Cash’s separate versions of Bird on a Wire, Roberta Flack’s Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye, Lana Del Rey’s Chelsea Hotel No. 2, and Tori Amos’s Famous Blue Raincoat.
  
  Cohen’s Hallelujah has also been covered extensively - some would say exhaustively - by artists from around the world, including Jeff Buckley, k.d. lang, and Rufus Wainwright.
  
  Leonard Cohen is pictured on a set of nine Canadian commemorative postage stamps, using three designs, issued 21 September 2019, the 85th anniversary of his birth.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Spice-Box of Earth

    (To mark the publication of Leonard Cohen's final book, Th...)

    1961
  • Book of Longing

    (This dazzling collection is enhanced by the author's play...)

    2006
  • Death of a Lady's Man

    (Death of a Lady's Man reinvented Cohen on the printed pag...)

    1978
  • Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs

    (In the decades since he recorded his first album, Leonard...)

    1993
  • Flowers for Hitler

    (Haunted by the image of the Nazi concentration camps, the...)

    1964
  • Fifteen Poems

    (This selection of poems by Leonard Cohen, one of the most...)

    2012
  • The Flame

    (The Flame is the final work from Leonard Cohen, the rever...)

    2018
  • Book of Mercy

    (Popular since its original publication more than 25 years...)

    1984
  • Let Us Compare Mythologies

    (Let Us Compare Mythologies is the first poetry book by Ca...)

    1956
  • Parasites of Heaven

    (Parasites of Heaven came in the wake of the success of Co...)

    1966
  • The Energy of Slaves

    (The Energy of Slaves is Cohen's fifth collection, and one...)

    1972
  • Leonard Cohen: Selected Poems 1956-1968

    (Leonard Cohen poet-novelist-songwriter-singer. In his elo...)

    1968

• music

  • Songs of Leonard Cohen 1967
  • Songs From a Room 1969
  • Songs Of Love And Hate 1971
  • New Skin For The Old Ceremony 1974
  • Death Of A Ladies' Man 1977
  • Recent Songs 1979
  • Various Positions 1984
  • I'm Your Man 1988
  • The Future 1992
  • Ten New Songs 2001
  • Dear Heather 2004
  • Old Ideas 2012
  • Popular Problems 2014
  • You Want It Darker 2018
  • Thanks for the Dance 2019

Religion

Cohen was raised in a traditional Jewish family. His maternal grandfather was a rabbi and Jewish scholar with whom the songwriter studied in his childhood. He’s carried his Jewish faith with him throughout his life, regularly observing the Sabbath. Even after he started studying Zen Buddhism he said: "I’m not looking for a new religion. I’m quite happy with the old one, with Judaism." He lived at a Buddhist monastery for five years and became a fully ordained monk in 1996.

About reconciling Buddhism and Judaism, Cohen said: "Well, for one thing, in the tradition of Zen that I’ve practiced, there is no prayerful worship and there is no affirmation of a deity. So theologically there is no challenge to any Jewish belief."

Politics

As far as politics go, Cohen did not often insert himself overtly into political discourse, but he hadn’t completely removed himself either. His song Story of Isaac is commonly viewed as a criticism of the Vietnam War, admonishing fathers for sacrificing their sons to the war just as Abraham was willing to sacrifice his son: "You who build these altars now/ To sacrifice these children,/ You must not do it anymore./ A scheme is not a vision."

His most overtly political song, Democracy, which came out in 1992, is a tribute to the messy, ugly, and beautiful process that is a modern democracy. Cohen manages to stay neutral to partisanship, however: "I’m sentimental if you know what I mean/ I love the country but I can’t stand the scene./ And I’m neither left or right/ I’m just staying home tonight,/ getting lost in that hopeless little screen."

Cohen’s most focused political action is centered on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. The musician spent time with the Israeli army playing performances for troops during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. Then in 2009, he returned to the country to play a show billed as A Concert for Reconciliation, Tolerance, and Peace. Cohen donated the proceeds from his concert to groups working to promote peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

Views

Although Cohen’s poems were often about love, his imaginative vision in both his literary and musical work could also be dark and despairing. Cohen was always acutely aware of the Holocaust, and images of the Nazi genocide permeate and condition his writing. Poetry, religion, sex, death, beauty, and power form interlocking patterns in his work, heightened by the sensuousness of his language and by his wild, black sense of humor.

Quotations: "I didn't want to write for pay. I wanted to be paid for what I write."

"We used to play music for fun. Much more than now. Now nobody picks up a guitar unless they're paid for it."

"I like the life on the road because it is so regulated and deliberate. Everything funnels down to the concert. You know exactly what to do during the day and you don't have to improvise."

"There is no difference between a poem and a song. Some were songs first, and some were poems first and some were simultaneous. All of my writing has guitars behind it, even the novels."

Personality

From 1965 to 1968 Leonard Cohen was a vegetarian. A few years later, he took up yoga. Cohen's hero was Federico Garcia Lorca. Cohen named his daughter after him: "She’s a lovely creature, and very inventive. She really deserves the name." He translated a poem of Lorca’s into the song Take This Waltz, which took him 150 hours.

Quotes from others about the person

• "This was a man where, within a Pop Song, there were some big ideas." - Bono
  
  "He's of almost Biblical importance. I don't think there's going to be another Leonard Cohen." - The Edge

Interests

• yoga

• Writers

  Jack Kerouac, Federico Garcia Lorca, Walt Whitman, William Butler Yeats, Henry Miller, Irving Layton

• Music & Bands

  Fats Domino, Jennifer Warnes

Connections

Throughout his life, Cohen was romantically linked to numerous women, including Joni Mitchell, Janis Joplin, Nico, and Anjani Thomas. In the 1960s, Cohen had a relationship with a Norwegian woman, Marianne Ihlen, whom he met when living in Hydra, Greece. The pair lived together at Cohen’s home for a number of years and Cohen helped care for her son.

In the 1970s, Cohen was in a relationship with artist Suzanne Elrod until they separated in 1978. The couple had two children: Adam, born in 1972, and Lorca, born in 1974.

In the 1980s, Cohen was in a relationship, personally and professionally, with French photographer Dominique Issermann. In the 1990s, he was linked to American actor Rebecca De Mornay, who co-produced Cohen’s album The Future.

Father:

Nathan Cohen

Mother:

Marsha Klonitsky

ex-girlfriend:

Janis Joplin

Cohen recalled his brief encounter with Janis in his song Chelsea Hotel No.2: "I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel / You were famous, your heart was a legend / You told me again you preferred handsome men / But for me you would make an exception."

Cohen later said: "She wasn't looking for me, she was looking for Kris Kristofferson; I wasn't looking for her, I was looking for Brigitte Bardot. But we fell into each other's arms through some process of elimination."

ex-girlfriend:

Joni Mitchell

For a few months in 1967 and 1968, Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen had a fling, the consequences of which continue to echo in their work. Introduced to each other backstage at Judy Collins’ songwriter’s workshop at the 1967 Newport Folk Festival by Judy Collins herself, who was, in large part, responsible for jump-starting the musical careers of both singer-songwriters, Cohen and Mitchell were officially an item by the time the two of them co-hosted a workshop at the Mariposa Folk Festival. Their romance ignited, flared, and exhausted itself within months.

ex-girlfriend:

Anjani Thomas

ex-girlfriend:

Marianne Ihlen

Ihlen and Cohen met in 1960 on Hydra, which at that time was forming as a hub of literary hippies with full subscriptions to the sexual revolution. The two had in common uncommon physical beauty and a sense of themselves as refugees, she from an abusive partner, he from the Orthodox Jewish family that both confined and inspired him. They became lovers, and Ihlen sustained Cohen through the writing of his early novel Beautiful Losers.

ex-girlfriend:

Suzanne Elrod

In 1969, a 35-year-old Cohen met 24-year-old Suzanne Elrod. They had two children together, Adam and Lorca, before separating in the mid-'70s.

Daughter:

Lorca Cohen

Lorca was raised primarily by her mother, Suzanne Elrod, while visiting Leonard Cohen in New York City, Los Angeles, and Hydra, Greece. Her first name is taken in honor of Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, who was an influence on her father.

Son:

Adam Cohen

Cohen was born September 18, 1972, in Montreal, but spent many years of his childhood living with his American mother, Suzanne Elrod, in Paris and in the south of France, after his parents separated. He spent parts of his childhood on the Greek island Hydra, in Greenwich Village, and in Los Angeles. Though he is attached to different parts of the world, he considers Greece to be his home.

ex-girlfriend:

Dominique Issermann

ex-girlfriend:

Rebecca De Mornay

colleague:

Elton John

colleague:

Phil Spector

References

• I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen In I’m Your Man, journalist Sylvie Simmons, one of the foremost chroniclers of the world of rock ’n’ roll and popular music, explores the extraordinary life and creative genius of Leonard Cohen.
  2011
• A Broken Hallelujah: Rock and Roll, Redemption, and the Life of Leonard Cohen A Broken Hallelujahrings to life a passionate poet-turned-musician and what compels him and his work. Why is it that Leonard Cohen receives the sort of reverence we reserve for a precious few living artists? Why are his songs, three or four decades after their original release, suddenly gracing the charts, blockbuster movie soundtracks, and television singing competitions?
  2014
• Matters of Vital Interest: A Forty-Year Friendship with Leonard Cohen A memoir of the author's decades-long friendship and spiritual journey with the late singer, songwriter, novelist, and poet Leonard Cohen passed away in late 2016, leaving behind many who cared for and admired him, but perhaps few knew him better than longtime friend Eric Lerner. Lerner, a screenwriter, and novelist, first met Cohen at a Zen retreat forty years earlier.
  2015