A Beginners Guide to Leonard Cohen: Where to Start
From tortured love songs to reflections on faith and mortality, here’s where to start with Leonard Cohen.
Canada has graced the world with a giant catalogue of unforgettable musical icons, from the versatile genius of Joni Mitchell to the teenage hysteria surrounding Justin Bieber, who somehow managed to promise every girl in the world he could be her boyfriend through just one song. But before all of them came Leonard Cohen, Canada’s original musical poet, whose words have travelled far beyond his generation and the country that first heard them.
Leonard Cohen is a faultless musician for the philosophers of our world, weaving together motifs of faith, mortality, depression, betrayal, political conflict and, of course, romantic love. He captures not just the beauty of desire, but the regret, pain and loss that so often follows it. Whatever it is you’re yearning for, chances are Cohen has already written a song about it.
SONG: Famous Blue Raincoat
‘Famous Blue Raincoat’ is the perfect place to start with Cohen. For a man who later claimed he didn’t particularly dwell on regret or nostalgia, the song feels almost contradictory. It is Cohen at his most reflective, melancholic and emotionally complicated, unpacking love, betrayal and longing through what feels like a letter to an old friend. If there is such a thing as peak Leonard Cohen, this might just be it.
There is something almost voyeuristic about listening to ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’. Written as a letter to an unnamed entity, we are plonked straight into the middle of a story with no explanation of how we have gotten there. There is a woman, a lover and an eventual betrayal, yet also a begrudging sense of forgiveness. However, since we are not Cohen himself, we are never given enough information to decide who is truly at fault. We are simply left to listen in, piecing together a relationship that feels as though it existed long before we arrived.
ALBUM: New Skin for the Old Ceremony
For me, Cohen’s supreme being is New Skin for the Old Ceremony, an album like a cup of black tea, steeped in desire, intimacy and disillusionment. It is where Cohen’s fascination with the contradictions of human connection feels most prominent, constantly wavering between tenderness and resentment, otherworldly devotion and painful detachment. New Skin for the Old Ceremony is intoxicating. Cohen explores the complexities of love without ever attempting to justify them with a romantic explanation or dull them down.
‘Is This What You Wanted’ questions the worth of passion in a haunted domestic life when the desire turns to detachment, and ‘Chelsea Hotel #2’, a song inspired by his encounter with Janis Joplin, makes a thrilling sexual encounter more intimate and melancholy. Both capture Cohen’s ability to find the beauty and poetry in the uncomfortable reality of love.
SONG: I’m Your Man
Now you have met the tortured poet, it is time to introduce Cohen’s seductive, cheeky and slightly unhinged alter ego, so you can get a more rounded perspective of him. ‘I’m Your Man’ reveals a far more playful and self-assured side to his writing. However, even here, love isn’t as straightforward as it appears. You know that feeling when you catch a couple on the train looking completely consumed by each other and, for a brief moment, convince yourself that they must have figured love out? Cohen seems to take that fantasy and completely dismantle it.
Perhaps that is why ‘I’m Your Man’ fits so perfectly into Secretary (2002). Cohen’s promises of becoming whatever his lover desires, however strange or demanding, mirror the film’s own exploration of devotion, submission and desire. There is something almost masochistic about the way Cohen presents love here, as if being completely at someone else’s mercy is not a weakness but the ultimate romantic gesture. The song’s recent resurgence through TikTok edits of Secretary only seems to emphasise this, introducing a new generation to Cohen through one of his most absurdly devoted performances. It is funny, slightly uncomfortable and completely sincere all at once, which is perhaps the most Leonard Cohen thing imaginable.
SONG: You Want It Darker
Lastly, if you’ve ever listened to David Bowie’s Blackstar, You Want It Darker is Cohen’s version. Cohen has outlived the romances, the heartbreak, the lust and the excess; he is wiser and more experienced. We are left with a man who is now confronting the final challenge of life head-on: mortality.
Released just weeks prior to his death, You Want It Darker is enriched in religious imagery, doubt and resignation in the face of death. Even here, Cohen refuses to offer a conclusion. He is less interested in answering the questions of love, life and faith; he would rather sit comfortably with their uncertainty.
You Want It Darker is the perfect final chapter for a poet who spent his entire life and career exploring everything that makes us so deeply human, even right up until the very end.
Leonard Cohen in Venice, 1988. Photo: Gorupdebesanez / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0