'I don't think I was quite as sad as that,' Verdal later said of Cohen's portrayal of her, 'albeit maybe I was and he perceived that and I didn't.'Ĭohen composed this sweetly haunting waltz – augmented with calliope and bells – during a blizzard in Edmonton, Canada.

Joined by one of the female choruses that would accompany him through his career, 'Suzanne' chronicles his real-life relationship with the artist/dancer Suzanne Verdal near Montreal's St.

Comparing it to a great Bordeaux, he has deemed this immaculate conflation of the spiritual and the sensual to be his best work. The opening track of Leonard Cohen's debut album became his career-making signature. Cohen's songs, both old and new, sounded deeper, richer, and more important than ever, as this sampling demonstrates. But touring rejuvenated our hero, not to mention his reputation. While early songs like 'Suzanne,' 'Sisters of Mercy' and 'Bird on a Wire' made him a college-dorm fixture, later masterpieces like 'Everybody Knows,' 'I'm Your Man' and 'The Future' introduced him to a new generation of post-punks and fellow travelers.Īnd then, in his 70s, he had to do it all over again, thanks to a larcenous manager. His rumbling voice, Spanish-y guitar lines and deeply poetic lyrics transubstantiated the sacred into the profane and vice versa. After mastering the mystical power of melody, Cohen went on to enjoy a long, fruitful career marked by spiritual hiatuses, reinvention and a surprising late-career second act unprecedented in American entertainment.Ĭohen was the sexy, late-blooming gloom-monger among a small, elite coterie of singer-songwriters who came to define the Sixties and early Seventies. Poetry, fiction and songwriting were more or less equal forms of expression to Leonard Cohen – although one paid a hell of a lot better than the others.

Lenny cohen