Michael Hann and Claire Phipps 

World mourns the death of Leonard Cohen – as it happened

Leonard Cohen has died aged 82. Here we round up tributes and reaction as they flood in for Canada’s cultural icon
  
  

Leonard Cohen: see you down the road - video obituary

And that’s it

Thank you for your company. To conclude, a lyric. But not one of those ones that are all deep about existence. Instead, let’s place Leonard Cohen with his peers among the great songwriters of the English language. He’s 100 floors up now, with Hank.

I said to Hank Williams: how lonely does it get? Hank Williams hasn’t answered yet
But I hear him coughing all night long
A hundred floors above me
In the Tower of Song.”

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Cohen covers – a Spotify playlist

So why didn’t we just do a Cohen playlist? Because if you love Leonard Cohen, you’re likely to be listening to those albums already. Because we wanted to show how much he meant to so many people of so many different musical outlooks. Because we wanted to celebrate not just the man, but his songs. So here are some of the songs you nominated – if it’s missing, it’s because I couldn’t find it on Spotify.

Key Cohen songs No 5

And to round his list off, Alexis Petridis has picked the title track of You Want It Darker.

The triumphant, rapturously-received live shows Cohen undertook between 2008 and 2013 might have been forced upon him by prosaic financial pressures, but the final trio of albums Cohen made were clearly the work of a man who’d realised he still had something to say: about life, about religion, about ageing and the experience of facing death. In his final public appearance to promote this year’s You Want It Darker, he seemed at pains to dismiss suggestions that it some kind of musical last will and testament: ‘I intend to live forever.’ But there’s a lovely sense of closure about its title track, on which, as his friend and biographer Sylvie Simmons put it, ‘he sang himself back home’, supported by the choir from the Montreal synagogue where he worshipped as a child and that his ancestors had built, offering up a characteristic mix of wracked despair and wry humour: ‘I wrestled with some demons,’ he shrugged at one point. ‘They were middle-class and tame.’ But the song’s most potent and affecting lines came in the chorus. ‘Hineni, hineni,’ Cohen sang, a Hebrew word meaning: ‘Here I am’, ‘I am ready, Lord.’”

Updated

Nick Cave has issued a statement on Facebook

For many of us Leonard Cohen was the greatest songwriter of them all. Utterly unique and impossible to imitate no matter how hard we tried. He will be deeply missed by so many. - Nick Cave”

More tributes

Daryl from The Walking Dead is coping with his incarceration by evil Negan by consoling himself with Cohen.

And another actor …

And the voice of bondage …

And Beck …

Time for some more of your Cohen cover suggestions …

• This one is much nominated: Anohni (then still Antony Hegarty) singing If It Will Be Your Will
• Also very popular with you is Jennifer Warnes’s Famous Blue Raincoat
• Have a listen to to Trisha Yearwood’s Coming Back to You
• And back to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds for Avalanche

Updated

Remembrance Day, and the day we learned of Leonard Cohen’s death. Something fitting then: Cohen reciting John McCrae’s In Flanders Fields.

Key Cohen songs No 4

As chosen by Alexis Petridis. This time it’s The Future.

Never a model of over-productive industry to start off with, Cohen’s musical output slowed considerably in the 90s and noughties: he released three albums in 20 years, one of them, Dear Heather, essentially a collection of outtakes from previous work. The title track of his 1992 album might be the pick of his material during this period. Audibly the work of a deeply troubled man – he later claimed to have been drinking three bottles of wine a night during the subsequent tour – it’s as dark and terrifying and potent as anything in his catalogue, an apocalyptic vision of a world in which ‘things are going to slide in all directions, won’t be nothing you can measure anymore’. Without wishing to overegg the pudding, a quarter of a century on, with talk of a ‘post-truth’ era abroad, there’s a definite hint of the grimly prophetic about it: a world without privacy, increasingly numb to horror, where what Cohen described as ‘mass culture’ has stamped out individual identity.”

The best-known short order chef in the world

Earlier this year, the Guardian ran extracts from the book My Old Man, in which people talked about their relationships with their fathers. One of the pieces came from Adam Cohen, talking about Leonard …

I’ve had a very normal relationship with my father, with the exception that he’s terribly well known and, so it’s said, one of the most important writers in his domain.

Like all sons, I have found the relationship has added layers to itself over time. These days, my relationship with him is just looking in a mirror and consulting with him. Hearing the timbre of his voice in my own. Body posture, mannerisms, ethics, morals, linguistics. All the deep imprintings that are there either from socio-genetics or, if you were to be cruel, parroting. Whatever the reason, I throw my arms around the lifestyle I was given.

My father made a remarkable effort – and one that I am much more impressed with now as a family man myself – to remain in his children’s lives despite a less-than-perfect breakup with my mother. I always saw him. He was always around. He always made gigantic efforts. There was even a time when he wasn’t allowed on the property; to circumnavigate that, he bought a trailer and put it at the T where the dirt road of our house in the south of France connected to the municipal road, and we would walk up the dirt road. A lot was imparted by that. From Los Angeles to the south of France was no small journey. We spent all our holidays with him. Every winter we would go to Montreal and every summer we would go to Greece.

There was always laughter. Despite his notoriety for, I quote, “having a voice like the bottom of an ashtray”, for being “the prince of darkness”, for being famed for his lugubriousness, he is one of the most quick-witted men, and he is generous with his humour. The guy is hilarious. I’ve gone into the family business, and we get a tremendous amount of laughter out of that. Hanging out with him is the best, whether it’s over a tuna sandwich or on the front stoop of his house. He doesn’t like to move much, having been a touring man his whole life. He does love being sedentary.

I’ve learned a lot from him on that stoop. The main inspiration that his life provides is a dedication to his craft. He has an old-world view of it. It’s not the notion of instantaneous success that exists in new generations. His whole life has been a demonstration of the opposite. I remember something he told me when I was 16 and starting to take songwriting seriously. He said there’s a moment when you’re blocked on a song, or on any work, and it’s only when you’re about to quit having put much, much more time than you planned into it that the work begins. That’s when you’ve crossed the threshold of being on the right track. But the nature of my dialogue with him is nearly always instruction. From the manner in which we should greet someone about whom we have reservations, to gender relationships, to the proper dosage of mustard and mayonnaise. We talk about women all the time, too, and, if I may, out of privacy, I’ll keep that princely wisdom to myself. It’s a long-running and possibly incomplete transmission.

We’ve never really fallen out. We’ve had a series of minor misunderstandings that were corrected, and actually served to provide better understanding in the long run. When you have someone in your family who is in such demand, and from whom you derive a sense of identity because of the nature of your relationship, you can start to become covetous of the amount of time spent with that person. There are times when, no question, I wish we had been able to spend more time together.

You want to know some secrets about Leonard Cohen? Here’s the dirt. He loves George Jones and Hank Williams. He travels with one small suitcase. Many of his impeccable suits are actually threadbare. He’s only about 5ft 8in, despite that giant baritone. He awakens at four in the morning and blackens pages every single day of his life. He cuts his own hair. He will find a patch of sun anywhere and sit in it, like a big cat, following that sliver wherever it goes. Although he no longer smokes, there is nothing he would rather do. He makes the best tuna salad I’ve ever had – he seems to have a knack for that. He loves making food for people, in fact. He spends a lot of time in the kitchen. He’s probably the best-known short-order chef in the world.”


Updated

If there’s one voice you wanted to hear on the subject of Leonard Cohen, it would almost certainly be that of Louise Mensch. So what did she have to say via the medium of Twitter?

Because that was the whole point of Leonard Cohen’s life. To be a Canadian fighting the cold war.

A nice Facebook post from Beth Orton about Cohen …

Leonard Cohen dying this week is a grief I can process. His leaving makes perfect sense when so little else does. One last poetic statement. A full stop. He is our spiritual leader and one I can follow. In his death, he feels closer than ever. He embodies love and kindness, peace and power. His voice has always been the salve for my broken spirit. His final act of kindness was to be present by his passing this week when we need a voice of reason in the face of mounting insanity and confusion. To remind us of the beauty that exists alongside the imperfection in this world. I am eternally grateful for his existence and his music. He has always resonated on the astral and the earthly planes. Now more so than ever. Beautiful man … you will be deeply and endlessly missed and you will always be with us.”

Updated

Key Cohen songs No 3

This time, Alexis Petridis has chosen Hallelujah.

The afterlife of Hallelujah is one of the more startling episodes in Leonard Cohen’s career. As he was given to wryly pointing out after it attained something approaching omnipresence – ‘at the end of every single drama, every single Idol’ as he put it – his American record label thought so little of the song, and indeed the rest of the material on 1984’s Various Positions, that they refused to release it; it wasn’t until a younger generation of artists, notably Jeff Buckley and Rufus Wainwright, began covering it that it started to outstrip the rest of Cohen’s 80s oeuvre. It wasn’t until its deeply improbable appearance, sung by John Cale, at the end of the animated film Shrek that it started to become ubiquitous. You could argue all night about whether it’s actually a better song than the other masterpieces with which Various Positions and I’m Your Man were liberally studded – Dance Me to the End of Love or First We Take Manhattan or Tower of Song – but Hallelujah certainly seemed symbolic of a kind of creative rebirth for its author, after his disastrous collaboration with Phil Spector on Death of a Ladies’ Man, and 1979’s undervalued Recent Songs. Perhaps its longevity has something to do with the song’s malleability, its openness to interpretation. He laboured so intensively over the lyric that, at one juncture, he literally ended up banging his head against the floor, but ended up with something that can be viewed as euphoric or despairing, solemnly religious or carnal, ambiguous or sincere. It’s even survived an unprovoked assault by ghastly operatic man-band Il Divo, the mauling compounded by that fact that, brilliantly, someone in their Simon Cowell-helmed operation took it upon themselves to change the lyrics.”

Time for some more Cohen covers – as nominated by readers

You can tweet me your suggestions: @MichaelAHann

Updated

Cohen on depression

You may well have read Dorian Lysnkey’s beautiful tribute, which we published earlier. He also encountered Cohen four years ago, and wrote about it at the time.

‘When I speak of depression,’ he says carefully, ‘I speak of a clinical depression that is the background of your entire life, a background of anguish and anxiety, a sense that nothing goes well, that pleasure is unavailable and all your strategies collapse. I’m happy to report that, by imperceptible degrees and by the grace of good teachers and good luck, that depression slowly dissolved and has never returned with the same ferocity that prevailed for most of my life.’ He thinks it might just be down to old age. ‘I read somewhere that as you grow older certain brain cells die that are associated with anxiety so it doesn’t really matter how much you apply yourself to the disciplines. You’re going to start feeling a lot better or a lot worse depending on the condition of your neurons.’”

Read the full piece here.

If you haven’t yet looked at our gallery of Cohen’s life and career, please do so. If only for the conclusive proof that there was at least one man in the world who could look good in a safari suit.

Updated

Leonard Cohen was someone who appreciated the power of music, even the music one doesn’t necessarily like. He was interviewed for the Guardian by Mat Snow in 1988. In the conversation, Mat quoted Martin Amis’s description of Simon & Garfunkel’s music being not so much art as therapy, prompting this response from Cohen:

I think that’s a rather mean-spirited approach to a man’s work. Everything can be diminished from this point of view. If you don’t like something and think it’s cheap, unless you really have a great sense of responsibility for your culture, I think it’s best to keep it to yourself. That might be the song that gets someone through a dark hour. He wouldn’t say that about Bach. There’s something elitist and snotty about that kind of remark.”

Updated

Time for some more tributes to the great man.

Here’s the second of Alexis Petridis’s key Cohen songs: Famous Blue Raincoat.

Understandably, given that he was a poet long before he picked up the guitar – and that his words are so rich and rewarding – attention tends to focus on Leonard Cohen’s lyrics, which occasionally means that his skill as a writer of music tends to get overlooked. But he was a brilliant melodicist: all those talent show contestants belting out Hallelujah aren’t doing so because they’re enraptured by its references to the Book of Judges. Famous Blue Raincoat, form his stark, intense third album, 1971’s Songs of Love and Hate, is a perfect example: the dark, epistolary evocation of a love triangle is perfectly augmented by a tune rooted not in rock or pop or folk music, but in the French chanson tradition. The moment where the melody rises up on the line ‘Jane came by with a lock of your hair’ is one of the loveliest in Cohen’s catalogue. He clearly knew the song’s power. It was still unreleased when he chose it to end his set at the 1970 Isle of Wight festival, perhaps the most famous and celebrated live performance of his career, during which he singlehandedly mesmerised a restless audience of half a million.”

Updated

Time for some more Cohen covers …

It’s Hallelujah, as performed by Susanna and the Magical Orchestra
Bill “Smog” Callahan takes on So Long, Marianne
Billy Joel’s cover of Light As the Breeze
Teddy Thompson playing Tonight Will Be Fine

Updated

And from another generation, my colleague Alexandra Topping recalls another appearance at a festival …

I remember the first time I heard Leonard Cohen. My dad was doing his tax return late at night when I got in, crouched over his desk, almost in the dark. I was just transfixed. What’s this, I asked? He looked at me like I was an imbecile: ‘This, megirl, is Leonard Cohen.’ He mocked, but lent me the CD Songs of Leonard Cohen. I played it on repeat for about two weeks solid.

Eight years after my dad died, me and my mum were lucky enough to go to Glastonbury at the same time. Leonard Cohen had been ripped off by his former manager and so had to tour again. We were lucky enough to wait in front of the Pyramid stage from the morning, taking it in turns to go for drinks and keeping our spot. When he came on stage, my mum turned into a young girl again. And as those songs of poetry and passion came forth, we clung on to each other, singing every word along with him, like the thousands of others around us. We cherished every word, every bow, every tip of the hat. We were so elated.

It is – and I’m sure it will remain – one of my most cherished memories. I feel so sad today, but so thankful that this artist helped me create these moments with my parents. RIP Leonard Cohen.

Updated

Here’s a lovely memory from the Observer reporter Ed Vulliamy of seeing Cohen at the Isle of Wight festival in 1970.

We’ll all have our memories and associations. I remember seeing him play at the Isle of Wight, August 1970. Shortly before dawn with 600,000 other people: a scene of vast, exhausted elation along ‘Devastation Hill’ (we’d had Miles Davis, the Who, Doors, Joni Mitchell, Hendrix, Joan Baez, etc) … Leonard Cohen recalled a time his father took him to the circus as a boy, where a clown had asked everyone in the audience to light a match – and he bade Devastation Hill to do just that: so that a sea of little flames illuminated the night, along the escarpment, far as the eye could see from among the grime, soiled sleeping bags and euphoria. Then he played: The Partisan, Suzanne, the lot.”

Updated

John Cale was the man who took Hallelujah, altered its arrangement, and turned it into the song that took over the world. Here’s his reaction.

Alexis Petridis has been picking five key Leonard Cohen songs

We’re going to roll them out gradually. His first is Suzanne …

There’s a sense in which the contents of 1967’s The Songs Of Leonard Cohen attested to the fact that its author was already 33 years old when it was released. For all Cohen’s apparent inexperienced discomfort in the studio (and subsequent dismissal of its ‘overproduced’ arrangements, possibly influenced by the fact that, incredibly, it received a lukewarm critical response on release), it sounded more like a mature record than a neophyte’s debut; it came packed with tracks that would go on to become standards, covered by everyone from Beck to Nina Simone: Sisters of Mercy; Hey, That’s No Way To Say Goodbye; So Long Marianne;, Suzanne. For decades, it seemed like the latter would always be Cohen’s most famous and definitive song. What’s striking about it now is how little over-familiarity has dulled its impact: its subtly infectious mood of small hours introspection, its understated depiction of the broiling emotions lurking beneath a platonic but charged relationship with someone else’s partner have never lost their potency.”

Updated

The story of Leonard Cohen and his muse, Marianne Ihlen, has been well told. Earlier this year, he wrote a letter to her, as she was dying. The reply is beautiful and moving.

The tributes to Leonard Cohen keep coming in …

A while back, Laura Barton wrote about Hallelujah, the much covered song that has come to define Cohen through the countless cover versions.

It was always the John Cale version that did it for me; his voice seemed to bring a more ecclesiastical quality to those lines. For a long while I clung to that and resisted the prettiness of Jeff Buckley’s version, but Buckley’s is undoubtedly the most sensual interpretation, breathing life into the song with a short exhalation even before he plays, bringing out the texture of Cohen’s lyrics, the feel of lips and hair and coldness. He takes its holiness and renders it physical, earthly. “Whoever listens closely to Hallelujah will discover that it is a song about sex, about love, about life on earth,” Buckley once explained. “The hallelujah is not a homage to a worshipped person, idol or god, but the hallelujah of the orgasm. It’s an ode to life and love.” After all, what is a minor fall if not a petite mort?”

Read the full article here.

Share your memories

You can share your own memories of and tributes to the great man here …

Leonard Cohen died on Monday

According to the well-informed folks of the Leonard Cohen forum, he passed away on Monday, and has been buried in a private ceremony in Montreal.

More Cohen covers:

Very much liking Madeleine Peyroux tackling Dance Me to the End of Love
Here’s Pixies doing I Can’t Forget and the Jesus and Mary Chain doing Tower of Song
And another Tower of Song from Martha Wainwright
Ane Brun’s Ain’t No Cure for Love is pretty lovely, too.

Keep them coming. It’s nice to remember how much these songs meant to so many people.

Updated

‘He knew things about life, and if you listened you could learn’

The truth was that Cohen felt as lost as anybody. What gave his work its uncommon gravitas wasn’t that he knew the answers but that he never stopped looking. He searched for clues in bedrooms and warzones, in Jewish temples and Buddhist retreats, in Europe, Africa, Israel and Cuba. He tried to flush them out with booze and drugs and seduce them with melodies. And whenever he managed to painfully extract some nugget of wisdom, he would cut and polish it like a precious stone before resuming the search. Funny about himself but profoundly serious about his art, he liked to describe his songs as “investigations” into the hidden mechanics of love, sex, war, religion and death – the beautiful and terrifying truths of existence. A Leonard Cohen song is an anchor flung into a churning sea. It has the kind of weight that could save your life.

Do have a read of Dorian Lynskey’s beautiful tribute to Cohen.

Leonard Cohen recap

My father passed away peacefully at his home in Los Angeles with the knowledge that he had completed what he felt was one of his greatest records. He was writing up until his last moments with his unique brand of humour.”

  • Musicians, celebrities, politicians and fans are all paying tribute.

Updated

Some nice nominations coming through for the Cohen covers playlist …

James’s version of So Long Marianne
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds turning Tower of Song into feral swamp rock
Feist taking on Closing Time
Martin Gore doing Coming Back to You
The Broken Family Band offering a UK country take on Diamonds in the Mine (that one was nominated by the former singer of the Broken Family Band)

The Blogging Goth tweets me to point out Cohen’s influence on goth music. Sisters of Mercy took their name from him, and covered Teachers very early on.

Many more to come.

The legendary record mogul Clive Davis has paid tribute, in Billboard:

Leonard Cohen was truly a master songwriter. No one sounded like him either vocally or lyrically. He penetrated your soul with his haunting voice and his piercing words. Leonard was absolutely one-of-a-kind, a poet and an artist who put you under his spell time and time again. Suzanne, So Long, Marianne, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye, Hallelujah, Bird on a Wire. Each is unforgettable and each will live on forever as will Leonard Cohen, the Canadian poet laureate.”

In an interview last month, Cohen said he was “ready to die”.

He told the New Yorker:

I am ready to die. I hope it’s not too uncomfortable. That’s about it for me.

In the same interview, he said he had a vault of unpublished poems and unfinished lyrics to finish and record or publish:

The big change is the proximity to death. I am a tidy kind of guy. I like to tie up the strings if I can. If I can’t, that’s OK.

But my natural thrust is to finish things that I’ve begun.

Good morning, everyone. Michael Hann here, in London, taking over from Claire Phipps in Australia, on another sobering and sad morning in music – there have been rather too many sober days in the last 12 months, what with Lemmy, Bowie, Prince and now Leonard Cohen. Alongside the mourning, I’d like to celebrate Leonard Cohen’s life and music. So would you help me with compiling a playlist of the best covers of Cohen songs? I’ll kick us off with REM. Tweet me your nominations: @MichaelAHann

Updated

You Want It Darker, the album released only weeks ago, won rave reviews, including from the Observer, which gave it five stars. Reviewer Kitty Empire said it was:

an album of killer couplets, even the bleakest delivered with a half-smile. Finality is a theme.

The Guardian’s Alexis Petridis also gave it five stars:

Throughout, he sounds wise and honest, and – despite the occasional lyrical protestations of weariness – full of life. Last week in LA, Cohen talked about making two more albums, about following the musical path sketched out on the album’s finale, String Reprise/Treaty.

It’s hard not to hope it works out that way – the man behind You Want It Darker does not seem like someone running short on inspiration – but if circumstances dictate otherwise, there are worse ways to bow out than this.

Cohen's letter to Marianne

Marianne Ihlen, Cohen’s most famous muse, died in July this year.

Jan Christian Mollestad, a documentary maker and friend of Ihlen, shared a letter Cohen had written to her shortly before she died:

Well Marianne, it’s come to this time when we are really so old and our bodies are falling apart and I think I will follow you very soon.

Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine.

And you know that I’ve always loved you for your beauty and your wisdom, but I don’t need to say anything more about that because you know all about that.

But now, I just want to wish you a very good journey. Goodbye old friend. Endless love, see you down the road.

Two days after the letters was read to her, Ihlen, immortalised by Cohen in So Long, Marianne and Bird on a Wire, died. She was 81.

Updated

Fans have been gathering outside Cohen’s home in Montreal – it’s past 2am there now – to place messages and candles for the singer.

One reader sends this photo from the city:

Sylvie Simmons, Cohen’s biographer, has posted her goodbye to him on Facebook:

I was just on NPR radio, giving the most moronic answers to questions I’ve ever given anyone about Leonard Cohen, because I didn’t want to talk. It’s still sinking in. My brain is numb. In this year of losses, so many losses, in this black week for the world, this tops them all.

I’m writing this with constant interruptions, calls and texts from radio and newspapers wanting to know this and that. Everyone wants details, how and where and why he died. Well, he went out in a blaze of glory. Died with his boots on – or his suit on – having delivered a masterpiece before he left. You Want It Darker is one of his richest, deepest and most beautiful albums in a lifetime of rich, deep and beautiful work.

He sang himself back home in that album, to Montreal, where they held the memorial today. When at the age of 15 Leonard first encountered the poetry of Lorca he heard the music of the synagogue his ancestors founded.

So many stories about musicians and poets have an unhappy ending but not Leonard, he was ready, and he didn’t linger once his work was done. He knew darkness, looked right into its eyes, could even see the funny side.

“This world is full of conflicts and things that cannot be reconciled but there are moments,” he said, “when we can embrace the whole mess.”

God, I am going to miss this man.

Everything.

The whole mess.

I’m so very grateful to have known him, to have had his support and friendship.

So grateful to have his words and music to go back to again and again.

Hey that’s no way to say goodbye, but it’s the best I can do for now.

What we know

  • Leonard Cohen, one of Canada and the world’s greatest singer-songwriters, has died.
  • A post on his official Facebook page broke the news and said a memorial service would take place at a later date in Los Angeles. It did not say when or how Cohen had died.
  • Cohen’s son Adam told Rolling Stone his father died peacefully at home:

My father passed away peacefully at his home in Los Angeles with the knowledge that he had completed what he felt was one of his greatest records. He was writing up until his last moments with his unique brand of humour.

  • Tributes have poured in from musicians, writers, poets and politicians. Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, whose father Pierre was a longtime friend of the singer, said:

His ability to conjure the vast array of human emotion made him one of the most influential and enduring musicians ever.

  • Fans have left messages and candles at the Chelsea Hotel in New York and outside Cohen’s Montreal home.
  • In an interview last month, Cohen said he was “ready to die”.He told the New Yorker:

I am ready to die. I hope it’s not too uncomfortable. That’s about it for me.

Updated

As well as musicians, tributes have come from writers and poets:

Agence France-Presse posts these 10 key moments from Leonard Cohen’s life:

  • 21 September 1934: Cohen is born in Montreal to a Jewish family of Polish origin. His father dies when he is nine years old.
  • 1956-1961: After studying history at McGill University, Montreal, and spending a year at Columbia University in New York, he publishes his first poetry volumes – Let Us Compare Mythologies then The Spice-Box of Earth - before heading to Europe on a scholarship.
  • 1963: During a seven-year spell living on the Greek island of Hydra, he writes Flowers for Hitler, one of his most controversial poetry collections; his first novel, The Favorite Game; and Beautiful Losers, a book about religion and sexuality that prompts the Boston Globe to compare him to fellow novelist James Joyce.
  • Early 1968: His musical career begins with his first album Songs of Leonard Cohen, a year after the success of Suzanne performed by American singer Judy Collins.
  • 1970: He begins his first tour of the United States, Canada and Europe, participating in the Isle of Wight music festival.
  • 1988: The huge success of I’m Your Man, an album in a new style using synthesisers and more sombre lyrics, is recorded in Los Angeles where Cohen is now living.
  • 1994: Cohen retires to a Buddhist monastery on Mount Baldy, California, and in August 1996 is ordained as a Zen monk with the name Jikan, meaning “The Silent One”.
  • 1999: Defrauded and almost bankrupted by his former manager, he begins performing again and releases a new album, Ten New Songs.
  • 2010: Already firmly established in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in New York, Cohen receives a Grammy lifetime achievement award. He is also made a Companion to the Order of Canada (2003) and given the Prince of Asturias award for letters (2011).
  • 2016: For his 82nd birthday, he makes his 14th album together with his son Adam and the choir of Montreal synagogue, adding to the intensity of his voice that is now darker than ever as he sings “Hineni, hineni, my Lord”, meaning “I’m ready, my Lord” in Hebrew.

Another giant of music has gone and his fans are in mourning.

There were hints that Leonard Cohen would not live much longer, but in a year that has already taken away Prince, David Bowie and George Martin, his death – announced via a Facebook post on Thursday – still came as a shock.

“It is with profound sorrow we report that legendary poet, songwriter and artist Leonard Cohen has passed away. We have lost one of music’s most revered and prolific visionaries,” the post said.

Twitter was soon awash in tributes from singers, writers, poets and public figures mourning the loss of a musical giant.

Musicians across all genres, from hip-hop to pop to rock, tweeted out their condolences, including Ben Folds, Peter Hook from Joy Division and New Order, KD Lang, Slash, Lily Allen and Bette Midler.

“Another magical voice stilled,” wrote Midler.

A handful more of the comments readers have shared with me on Twitter:

Canada mourns

Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, has published a longer statement on Cohen’s death. The singer was a longtime friend of Trudeau’s father, Pierre, also a former Canadian PM:

It is with deep sorrow that I learned today of the death of the legendary Leonard Cohen.

A most remarkable Montrealer, Leonard Cohen managed to reach the highest of artistic achievement, both as an acclaimed poet and a world-renowned singer-songwriter. He will be fondly remembered for his gruff vocals, his self-deprecating humour and the haunting lyrics that made his songs the perennial favourite of so many generations.

Leonard Cohen is as relevant today as he was in the 1960s. His ability to conjure the vast array of human emotion made him one of the most influential and enduring musicians ever. His style transcended the vagaries of fashion.

Leonard Cohen was made a Companion of the Order of Canada in 2003 and received many artistic honours during his lifetime, including being inducted into the Canadian Music hall of fame, the Canadian Songwriters hall of fame, and the American Rock and Roll hall of fame.

He received a lifetime achievement Grammy in 2010 and was awarded the Glenn Gould prize for lifetime achievement in the arts in 2011. In 2013, with a career already spanning more than fifty years, he won Junos as Artist of the Year and Songwriter of the Year for his 2012 album Old Ideas. His music had withstood the test of time.

On behalf of all Canadians, Sophie and I wish to express our deepest sympathies to Leonard Cohen’s family, friends, colleagues and many, many fans.

Leonard, no other artist’s poetry and music felt or sounded quite like yours. We’ll miss you.

Updated

Cohen’s son Adam has told Rolling Stone that his father died peacefully at home:

My father passed away peacefully at his home in Los Angeles with the knowledge that he had completed what he felt was one of his greatest records.

He was writing up until his last moments with his unique brand of humour.

His manager Robert Kory also told the magazine:

Unmatched in his creativity, insight and crippling candour, Leonard Cohen was a true visionary whose voice will be sorely missed.

I was blessed to call him a friend, and for me to serve that bold artistic spirit firsthand, was a privilege and great gift. He leaves behind a legacy of work that will bring insight, inspiration and healing for generations to come.

With thanks again to readers who are sharing memories and tributes on our news story:

User avatar for UnitedundertheSun

Leonard, my dear old friend of 40 years or more, you've finally taken the plunge into The Great Unknown.

What sadness and joy this brings me, your sweet melancholy has helped me through the low points in my life, and your human understanding has shown me a way to understand how we as humanity fit together in this life's journey.

You are gone but you are here. Safe journey old friend, report on conditions over the other side, a few lines in dreams will do. Thank you.

User avatar for wicklowclash

Leonard found words for every thought and emotion possible: I can find none to express my deep sadness at the passing of a minstrel poet who surpassed all others. WE are only four years apart in age and he has been my life's solace and inspiration all down the years. There is a gap now that will not be filled.

User avatar for Chris Egginton

There is something intensely good,holy about L Cohen which he would gently dismiss which pervades all that he says,writes,sings and does. Essentially a great self knowledge and humility tempered with a warm intelligent humour . Sang to me when I was young and carefree, when I was devastated by a child's accident,when I was at my happiest and at my most sad. A great human being. Go Leonard. Millions mourn your passing.

You can read the Guardian’s full obituary of Cohen here.

Here’s a snippet:

Early in his career, his novel Beautiful Losers (1966) caused the Boston Globe to declare that “James Joyce is not dead. He is living in Montreal under the name of Cohen.” Yet Cohen was determined to establish himself as a songwriter, having been smitten as profoundly as any of his contemporaries by the emergence of rock’n’roll music.

“I always loved rock,” he said. “I remember the first time I heard Presley, how relieved and grateful I was that all this stuff he and all of us had been feeling for so long had finally found a particular kind of expression.”

His debut album, Songs of Leonard Cohen, was released in December 1967, and while not everybody loved its funereal tone, the songs it contained, such as Suzanne, So Long, Marianne and Sisters of Mercy, would prove to be cornerstones of his repertoire for the rest of his long musical career.

In his later years he became a Zen monk and spent much of the 1990s sequestered in a monastery on Mount Baldy in California, where he was known as Jikan (the Silent One). Fans often seek spiritual guidance from their idols, but Cohen was a rare example of one who might actually have been capable of providing it.

Cohen on Dylan, Dylan on Cohen

Last month’s interview by David Remnick in the New Yorker – worth a read even before today’s news broke – dealt, among other things, with the relationship between Cohen and Bob Dylan, the artist with whom he is most often compared:

Even before three hundred other performers made Hallelujah famous with their cover versions … Dylan recognized the beauty of its marriage of the sacred and the profane. He asked Cohen how long it took him to write.

“Two years,” Cohen lied.

Actually, Hallelujah had taken him five years. He drafted dozens of verses and then it was years more before he settled on a final version. In several writing sessions, he found himself in his underwear, banging his head against a hotel-room floor.

Cohen told Dylan, “I really like I and I,” a song that appeared on Dylan’s album Infidels. “How long did it take you to write that?”

“About 15 minutes,” Dylan said.

When I asked Cohen about that exchange, he said: “That’s just the way the cards are dealt.”

Dylan also spoke to Remnick for the article, telling him:

When people talk about Leonard, they fail to mention his melodies, which to me, along with his lyrics, are his greatest genius. Even the counterpoint lines – they give a celestial character and melodic lift to every one of his songs. As far as I know, no one else comes close to this in modern music …

I see no disenchantment in Leonard’s lyrics at all. There’s always a direct sentiment, as if he’s holding a conversation and telling you something, him doing all the talking, but the listener keeps listening.

As promised, some of the comments readers have shared with me on Twitter:

(You can read the lyrics to Take This Longing here.)

At the Chelsea Hotel in New York – scene for some of Cohen’s more notorious lyrics – fans are leaving notes and memorials:

Some readers have been contacting me via Twitter – for which thank you – to add their own tributes. I’ll add more to the live blog shortly, but first wanted to showcase these images sent by the Ensemble Scholastica in Montreal:

Grammys: 'revered pop poet and musical touchstone'

Neil Portnow, president of the Recording Academy – home of the Grammys, which gave Cohen a lifetime achievement award back in 2010 – has issued a statement on the “cherished artist”:

We are deeply saddened to learn of the passing of Grammy award winner and 2010 Recording Academy lifetime achievement award recipient Leonard Cohen.

During an influential career that spanned more than five decades, Leonard became one of the most revered pop poets and a musical touchstone for many songwriters.

His extraordinary talent had a profound impact on countless singers and songwriters, as well as the wider culture.

We have lost a cherished artist and our sincerest condolences go out to Leonard’s family, friends and collaborators. He will be missed terribly.

Leonard Cohen, poet

Cohen will, of course, be remembered primarily for his music. But his writing extended far beyond that.

In this Guardian article in 2008, Alex Larman argued that Cohen the poet deserved as much appreciation as Cohen the songwriter:

We shouldn’t forget that Cohen is as strong a poet as he is a musician. Since the publication of his first collection in 1956, Let Us Compare Mythologies, in the prestigious McGill Poetry series, Cohen has established himself as a writer with a distinctive voice in the canon of Canadian and American poetry.

Cohen would still be highly thought of if he’d never written a song in his life but had stuck to writing his wry, ironic, tender verse. His poetry often talks of love, but it is never straightforwardly romantic …

As Cohen’s musical career acquired momentum, many of his collections were either compilations of earlier poems or collections of lyrics. Nevertheless, the writing elevates Cohen into that rare pantheon where a musician’s lyrics are actually poetry.

Flags in Montreal, Canada, where Cohen was brought up, are flying at half-mast.

The Montreal mayor, Denis Coderre, said the city had “lost one of our greatest ambassadors and icons”.

Through 14 albums, from the 1960s to 2016: Cohen’s life in pictures.

Some tributes from readers (you can add your own here on our main news story):

User avatar for chephren

This is a heavy blow to Canadians. Leonard Cohen quickly became an international star after he began performing his own songs, but he was a well-known poet and novelist before that. He was part of a generation of mostly Jewish writers who came out of Montreal in the 50s, including Irving Layton and Mordechai Richler. He published four volumes of poetry (plus a collection of his poems) and two novels before recording his first album in 1966. In 1968, he won the Governor-General's Award for poetry and drama (which he refused for some reason).

He lived mostly in the US in later years, but retained his strong connections to Montreal and Canada.

Probably the greatest of Canadian songwriters, along with Joni Mitchell.

RIP, Leonard, you will be missed.

User avatar for Lagatta de Montréal

As I'm Lagatta de Montréal, you can imagine how I feel. I listened to Suzanne by Cohen, and in French by the passionaria Pauline Julien, and after effing Trump, I'm overcome by sadness.

In the spirit of resistance, I'm listening to his rendering of The Partisan...

User avatar for CroneRanger

Closing Time for a haunting, luminous and often wryly funny poet and singer. I first became a fan in high school about 40+ years ago. My fondest memory was of him phoning my school after I had written a poem featuring him and my teacher had sent it to his publisher. Somehow they read it to him over the phone and he contacted me for a chat. A kind, human gesture.

In recent years, I was lucky to see him on his long 2008-2013 tour several times. What set him apart from so many others of his generation was that he actually got better over 60 with such brilliant songs as The Future and Almost Like the Blues; he didn't just churn out his back catalogue. Thank you and bless you, Leonard.

Cohen spoke about his health just weeks prior to his death during a promotional interview for his 14th album, You Want it Darker:

Leonard Cohen talks about his musical legacy and jokes about his health

Just letting a little light in:

For many people – not least because of the many, many cover versions – Hallelujah will be the song they most associate with Cohen.

In 2008, a backlash to a cover of the song by that year’s UK X-Factor winner, Alexandra Burke, sparked a campaign to get Jeff Buckley’s famed version to the top of the charts. It was a one-two – though Burke triumphed.

Cohen’s original charted at number 36.

Asked about it the following year, Cohen suggested he had heard enough covers of the song:

I was happy that the song was being used, of course. There were certain ironic and amusing sidebars, because the record that it came from which was called Various Positions – [a] record Sony wouldn’t put out. They didn’t think it was good enough. It had songs like Dance Me to the End of Love, Hallelujah, If It Be Your Will. So there was a mild sense of revenge that arose in my heart.

But I was just reading a review of a movie called Watchmen that uses it, and the reviewer said ‘Can we please have a moratorium on Hallelujah in movies and television shows?’

And I kind of feel the same way. I think it’s a good song, but I think too many people sing it.

Updated

Leonard Cohen RIP

A photo posted by Slash (@slash) on

Cohen, who was born in Quebec in Canada, came to prominence in the 1960s as a poet, novelist and singer-songwriter. Originally focusing on literary pursuits, he shifted his attention to music in the late 60s when he moved to New York. His first album, Songs of Leonard Cohen, was released in 1967 and became a cult hit.

Cohen’s influence on the music industry has been likened to that of his contemporaries Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell.

Despite his immense popularity, Cohen often appeared to be shy of the stage. Judy Collins, who found success with his song Suzanne, once described how she had to coax him back on stage after he quit halfway through a performance.

He came out of retirement in his late 70s to embark what would end up being a five-year, worldwide tour, after his former manager, Kelley Lynch, was found guilty of stealing millions of dollars from him.

Justin Trudeau: 'Canada will miss him'

Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, has commented on the loss of one of the country’s greatest cultural icons:

Updated

Last year, Guardian music colleagues compiled a list of Cohen’s 10 best songs.

At number one? Suzanne.

Check your own list against the Guardian’s here:

As well as musing on mortality, Cohen recently weighed in on Bob Dylan’s surprise Nobel prize win, the art of songwriting and the constant presence of religious themes in his work.

Speaking at a Q&A and playback session for his latest and now final album in Los Angeles, Cohen said that giving the award to Dylan “is like pinning a medal on Mount Everest for being the highest mountain”:

I think that Bob Dylan knows this more than all of us: you don’t write the songs anyhow.

So if you’re lucky, you can keep the vehicle healthy and responsive over the years. If you’re lucky, your own intentions have very little to do with this. You can keep the body as well-oiled and receptive as possible, but whether you’re actually going to be able to go for the long haul is really not your own choice.

He also spoke about religion’s impact on his work. Cohen was an ordained Zen Buddhist who was given the Dharma name of Jikan – which means “silence” – after taking up the religion and kicking his habit of drinking four bottles of wine a day.

I’ve never thought of myself as a religious person. I don’t have any spiritual strategy. I kind of limp along like so many of us do in these realms. Occasionally I’ve felt the grace of another presence in my life. But I can’t develop any kind of spiritual structure on that.

This biblical landscape is very familiar to me, and it’s natural that I use those landmarks as references. Once they were universal references, and everybody understood and knew them. That’s no longer the case today, but it is still my landscape.

I try to make those references. I try to make sure they’re not too obscure. But outside of that, I can’t – I dare not – claim anything in the spiritual realm for my own.

You Want It Darker was co-produced by Leonard Cohen’s son, Adam. Speaking recently with CBC radio host Tom Power, Adam talked about working with his father on the album many believed would be his last.

This old man, who was truly in pain and discomfort, would at some intervals get out of his medical chair and dance in front of his speakers.

And sometimes, we would put on a song and listen to it on repeat just like teenagers with the help of medical marijuana.

I think in states of pain and discomfort, what do you seek with more energy and more clarity than joy and jubilance?

Adam described his father as “the last of his kind”:

Unlike so many from that golden era, from which he comes, he’s not a nostalgia act.

This guy is speaking from his particular vantage point, he’s speaking about things that are meaningful to him at his particular rung in life — he will be leaving a giant void when he leaves us.

So long, Marianne

Cohen’s comments after the death of his most famous muse Marianne Ihlen, who died in August, now strike a particularly prophetic tone.

Jan Christian Mollestad, a documentary maker, read a letter Cohen wrote to her before she died:

Well Marianne, it’s come to this time when we are really so old and our bodies are falling apart and I think I will follow you very soon.

Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine.

Ihlen, whom Cohen wrote about in So Long, Marianne and Bird on a Wire, died in Norway on 29 July, aged 81.

You Want It Darker, the album released only weeks ago, won rave reviews, including from the Observer, which gave it five stars. Reviewer Kitty Empire said it was:

an album of killer couplets, even the bleakest delivered with a half-smile. Finality is a theme.

The Guardian’s Alexis Petridis also gave it five stars:

Throughout, he sounds wise and honest, and – despite the occasional lyrical protestations of weariness – full of life. Last week in LA, Cohen talked about making two more albums, about following the musical path sketched out on the album’s finale, String Reprise/Treaty.

It’s hard not to hope it works out that way – the man behind You Want It Darker does not seem like someone running short on inspiration – but if circumstances dictate otherwise, there are worse ways to bow out than this.

In an interview last month, Cohen said he was “ready to die”.

He told the New Yorker:

I am ready to die. I hope it’s not too uncomfortable. That’s about it for me.

In the same interview, he said he had a vault of unpublished poems and unfinished lyrics to finish and record or publish:

The big change is the proximity to death. I am a tidy kind of guy. I like to tie up the strings if I can. If I can’t, that’s OK.

But my natural thrust is to finish things that I’ve begun.

Updated

Leonard Cohen has died

Leonard Cohen has died at the age of 82.

A post to his official Facebook page today announced the musician’s passing.

It is with profound sorrow we report that legendary poet, songwriter and artist, Leonard Cohen has passed away. We have lost one of music’s most revered and prolific visionaries.

A memorial will take place in Los Angeles at a later date. The family requests privacy during their time of grief.

We will have tributes and reaction to his death as they come in.

 

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