In 1984, Leonard Cohen recorded a song that would eventually accompany weddings, funerals, television talent contests and a lovelorn green ogre. His American record company declined to release the album containing it. “Hallelujah” began its public life with a commercial judgement that now looks splendidly unfortunate. Yet the mistake also suited its author. Cohen spent much of his career making work that needed time to find its audience. He was a published poet before he became a recording artist, and an elderly man before he became a concert attraction on a scale his younger self had never enjoyed.
Born on 21 September 1934, Cohen grew up in a Jewish family in Westmount, Montreal. Religion gave him a vocabulary he would spend decades questioning, borrowing and rearranging. His first poetry collection, Let Us Compare Mythologies, appeared in 1956. Two novels followed: The Favourite Game in 1963 and Beautiful Losers in 1966. These were not the literary sidelines of a musician waiting for a record deal. Writing was his original occupation. Before anyone expected him to stand before a microphone, he had already committed himself to the awkward business of putting private thoughts into public circulation.
During the 1960s, the Greek island of Hydra became an important base for that work. There he lived among an international community of writers and artists and formed a relationship with the Norwegian Marianne Ihlen. Her name would travel considerably further than either could have anticipated through “So Long, Marianne”. The setting encourages an easy postcard version of Cohen: sunshine, whitewashed walls, a beautiful woman and a notebook. His writing supplies a less comfortable picture. Love rarely settles anything in a Cohen song. It creates obligations, exposes vanity and leaves somebody examining the evidence long after the other person has gone.
His route into recorded music also complicates the familiar solitary-genius portrait. Judy Collins recorded “Suzanne” on her 1966 album In My Life, helping establish an audience for his songwriting. Cohen released Songs of Leonard Cohen in December 1967, aged 33. The debut included “Suzanne”, “Sisters of Mercy” and “So Long, Marianne”. He entered a business strongly associated with youth carrying the habits of an established writer. Those songs offered characters, unresolved encounters and emotional qualifications. They required attention, but they also had melodies that allowed the words to travel beyond the relatively small world of poetry publishing.
Cohen’s reputation for gloom can make that first encounter unnecessarily forbidding. There is sadness, certainly, but also appetite, mischief and an alert understanding of human absurdity. Listen to the title song of I’m Your Man, released in 1988. Its extravagant willingness to become whatever a lover requires makes devotion sound both seductive and faintly ridiculous. The singer understands how much dignity desire can cost. Cohen’s humour often works through this gap between an elegant presentation and an undignified predicament. His characters can recognise their own foolishness without becoming noticeably better at avoiding it.
His musical development deserves attention too. The acoustic arrangements of the early records can obscure how willingly he later used synthesisers, programmed rhythms and polished backing vocals. I’m Your Man places that low voice inside an electronic setting, producing an unusual combination of intimacy and artificial sheen. The effect suits songs concerned with manipulation, longing and uncertain authority. Cohen did not need every recording to resemble a man alone in a room with a guitar. He could make modern equipment sound like the furniture of a slightly disreputable nightclub, then conduct a theological argument from the stage.
“Hallelujah” followed its own unpredictable route. It appeared on Various Positions in 1984, the album Columbia declined to issue in the United States. John Cale recorded a stripped-back interpretation for the 1991 tribute album I’m Your Fan, selecting from Cohen’s numerous verses. Jeff Buckley subsequently recorded his version for Grace in 1994. Each performance helped reshape the song’s public identity. Later, Shrek brought it to another audience, using Cale’s recording in the film while the soundtrack album featured Rufus Wainwright. Many listeners encountered Cohen’s best-known composition through someone else’s voice, sometimes without knowing whose composition it was.
That circulation helped make “Hallelujah” familiar while leaving its ambiguities intact. Biblical references sit beside sexual disappointment, damaged relationships and the stubborn act of singing anyway. Its refrain sounds immediately suitable for collective uplift. The verses are considerably less obliging. A performance can emphasise reverence, grief or desire without exhausting what the song contains. This helps explain its adaptability, although familiarity can soften its awkward edges. Cohen wrote something capable of entering a ceremony while quietly disturbing its assumptions. The guests may recognise the chorus before noticing quite what has accompanied them into the room.
In the 1990s, Cohen spent several years at the Mount Baldy Zen Center in California and became an ordained Buddhist monk. His religious searching never required him to discard his Jewish identity. That refusal to tidy everything into a single position runs through his work. Prayer can contain resistance; discipline can coexist with unruly thoughts. Financial losses later helped prompt his return to touring in 2008, at 73. What began partly from necessity became a celebrated late chapter. Age gave his performances a different weight: familiar songs now came from someone visibly further along the road they described.
His last studio album released during his lifetime, You Want It Darker, appeared on 21 October 2016, produced by his son Adam. Cohen died on 7 November, aged 82. The title track brought his voice together with Cantor Gideon Zelermyer and the choir of Montreal’s Congregation Shaar Hashomayim, connecting the final work with the religious sounds of his youth. It makes a fitting place to leave him: still working, still addressing difficult questions, still unwilling to substitute reassurance for an honest line. The voice had grown rougher, but it could make a listener lean closer. Even at the end, Cohen knew how to hold a room.
