Artist: Leonard Cohen
Genre(s):
Rock
Folk
Folk: Folk-Rock
Rock: Folk
Rock: Folk-Rock
Discography:
Songs of Leonard Cohen
Year: 2007
Tracks: 12
I'm Your Man
Year: 2006
Tracks: 16
Essential Leonard Cohen (cd2)
Year: 2002
Tracks: 13
Field Commander Cohen: Tour Of 1979
Year: 2000
Tracks: 12
Cohen Live
Year: 1994
Tracks: 13
The Future
Year: 1992
Tracks: 9
The Best Of
Year: 1990
Tracks: 12
Greatest Hits
Year: 1989
Tracks: 12
Various Positions
Year: 1985
Tracks: 9
Recent Songs
Year: 1979
Tracks: 10
Death Of A Ladies' Man
Year: 1977
Tracks: 8
New Skin For The Old Ceremony
Year: 1974
Tracks: 11
Live Songs
Year: 1973
Tracks: 10
Songs Of Love and Hate
Year: 1971
Tracks: 8
Songs From A Room
Year: 1969
Tracks: 10
The Songs Of Leonard Cohen
Year: 1968
Tracks: 10
Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967)
Year: 1967
Tracks: 10
The Essential (CD 2)
Year:
Tracks: 13
The Essential (CD 1)
Year:
Tracks: 18
More Best Of
Year:
Tracks: 13
Grand Collection
Year:
Tracks: 12
Dear Heather
Year:
Tracks: 13
One of the most fascinating and enigmatic -- if non the virtually successful -- singer/songwriters of the recent '60s, Leonard Cohen has retained an audience across quaternion decades of music-making fitful by various digressions into personal and creative exploration, all of which have alone added to the mystique circumferent him. Second only to Bob Dylan (and mayhap Paul Simon), he commands the attention of critics and jr. musicians more firmly than any early musical digit from the sixties world Health Organization is silent working at the starting time of the twenty-first century, which is all the more than singular an achievement for individual world Health Organization didn't even aim to a melodic career until he was in his thirties. Cohen was born in 1934, a year ahead Elvis Presley or Ronnie Hawkins, and his background -- personal, social, and intellectual -- couldn't have been more than different from those of any rock stars of any genesis; nor canful he be easily compared even with whatever members of the generation of folksingers wHO came of eld in the 1960s. Though he knew some country music and played it a snatch as a boy, he didn't start out acting on even a semi-regular basis, much less recording, until after he had already scripted several books -- and as an established novelist and poet, his literary accomplishments far transcend those of Bob Dylan or most anyone else wHO one cares to honorable mention in music, at least this side of meat of operatic librettists such as Hugo Von Hoffmanstahl or Stefan Zweig, figures from another musical and cultural macrocosm.He was natural Leonard Norman Cohen into a middle class Jewish family in the Montreal suburbia of Westmount. His father-God, a habiliment merchant (wHO as well held a degree in engineering), died in 1943, when Cohen was nine-spot old age honest-to-god. It was his mother wHO bucked up Cohen as a writer, especially of poetry, during his childhood. This match in with the progressive cerebral environment in which he was raised, which allowed him free enquiry into a huge reach of pursuits. His relationship to music was more provisional -- he took up the guitar at age 13, ab initio as a way to instill a daughter, only was good sufficiency to play land & western songs at local cafes, and he afterward formed a mathematical group called the Buckskin Boys. At 17, he enrolled in McGill University as an English major -- by this time, he was writing verse in businesslike and became character of the university's bantam underground "gypsy" community. Cohen only earned intermediate grades, but was a good sufficiency writer to bring in the McNaughton Prize in originative composition by the time he calibrated in 1955 -- a year later, the ink barely dry on his degree, he published his first-class honours degree bible of verse, Let Us Compare Mythologies (1956), which got great reviews simply didn't sell particularly well.
He was already beyond the age that rock & flap was aimed at -- Bob Dylan, by contrast, was placid Robert Zimmerman, still in his teens, and offspring enough to become a buff of Buddy Holly when the latter emerged. In 1961, Cohen published his second rule book of poetry, The Spice Box of Earth, which became an international success critically and commercially, and established Cohen as a major modern literary number. Meanwhile, he well-tried to join the fellowship business and fatigued some time at Columbia University in New York, writing all the time. Between the modest royalties from gross sales of his secondment book, literary grants from the Canadian regime, and a class legacy, he was able to live comfortably and journey around the reality, share of practically of what it had to offer -- including some use of LSD when it was still legal -- and at long last settling for an extended menses in Greece, on the islet of Hydra in the Aegean Sea. He continued to publish, issuing a pair of novels, The Favorite Game (1963) and Beautiful Losers (1966), with a geminate of poetry collections, Flowers for Hitler (1964) and Parasites of Heaven (1966) around them. The Favorite Game was a very personal work about his early life in Montreal, only it was Beautiful Losers that proven another breakthrough, earning the kind of reviews that authors make bold non fifty-fifty hope for -- Cohen launch himself compared to James Joyce in the pages of The Boston Globe, and across quaternary decades the rule book has enjoyed gross sales totaling well into six figures. It was around this time that he as well started writing music once again, songs being a rude extension of his poesy. His relative isolation on Hydra, coupled with his highly nomadic modus vivendi when he left wing the island, his own natural iconoclastic nature, and the fact that he'd avoided beingness overwhelmed (or tied affected excessively earnestly) by the currents working through democratic music since the forties, combined to give Cohen a unique spokesperson as a composer. Though he did settle in Nashville for a short clock time in the mid-'60s, he didn't compose rather like anyone else in music, in the nation music mecca or anywhere else. This might hold been an baulk merely for the interference of Judy Collins, a folksinger world Health Organization had but affected to the front rank of that field, and wHO had a voice scarce special sufficiency to move her beyond the comparatively haggard ranks of remaining pop folk performers afterwards Dylan shifted to electric music -- she was motionless getting heard, and not merely by the purists left field behind in Dylan's wake. She added Cohen's "Suzanne" to her repertory and place it onto her record album In My Life, a record that was controversial sufficiency in folks circles -- because of her treat of the Beatles song that gave the LP its title -- that it pulled in a lot of listeners and got a wide airing. "Suzanne" received a considerable measure of wireless airplay from the LP, and Cohen was also delineate on the record album by "Get dressed Rehearsal Rag." It was Collins world Health Organization persuaded Cohen to hark back to acting for the number one time since his teens. He made his debut during the summertime of 1967 at the Newport Folk Festival, followed by a pair of sold-out concerts in New York City and an appearance singing his songs and reciting his poems on the CBS network television point Photographic camera Three, in a show entitled Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen. It was about the same clip that actor/singer Noel Harrison brought "Suzanne" onto the pour down charts with a recording of his own. One of those world Health Organization proverb Cohen do at Newport was John Hammond, Sr., the fabled manufacturer whose career went back to the 1930s and the likes of Billie Holiday, Benny Goodman, and Count Basie, and lengthy up through Bob Dylan and, in the end, to Bruce Springsteen. Hammond got Cohen gestural to Columbia Records and he created The Songs of Leonard Cohen, which was released precisely earlier Christmas of 1967. Producer John Simon was able to find a unemotional still appealing approach to recording Cohen's voice, which mightiness have been described as a appealingly sensible near-monotone; yet that voice was perfectly suitable to the material at script, all of which, written in a very personal spoken communication, seemed drenched in in downbeat images and a sprightliness of discovery as a path to unsettling revelation.
Despite its free production and melancholy subject matter -- or, selfsame possibly because of it -- the record album was an immediate hit by the standards of the folk music music earthly concern and the budding singer/songwriter community. In an eRA in which millions of listeners hung on the next albums of Bob Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel -- whose have up-to-the-minute record album had ended with a minor mode rendition of "Still Night" set against a tuner intelligence chronicle of the decease of Lenny Bruce -- Cohen's music quickly constitute a small just dedicated following. College students by the thousands bought it; in its second year of release, the record sold over C,000 copies. The Songs of Leonard Cohen was as come together as Cohen ever so got to mass audience success.
Amid all of this sudden musical bodily function, he scarcely ignored his other committal to writing -- in 1968, Cohen released a new volume, Selected Poems: 1956-1968, which included both old and fresh published work, and earned him the Governor-General's Award, Canada's highest literary honor, which he proceeded to turn down to take. By this time, he was actually nigh more a component part of the rock scene, residing for a time in New York's Chelsea Hotel, where his neighbors included Janis Joplin and former playacting luminaries, some of whom influenced his songs very straight.His next record album, Songs from a Room (1969), was characterized by an even greater spirit of black bile -- even the relatively mettlesome "A Bunch of Lonesome Heroes" was steeped in such cheerless sensibilities, and the unitary song non written by Cohen, "The Partisan," was a grim story around the reasons for and consequences of resistor to shogunate that included lines like "She died without a susurration" and included images of wind blowing past tense robert Ranke Graves. Joan Baez later recorded the song, and in her hands it was a bit more eudaimonia and inspiring to the listener; Cohen's rendition made it much more hard to catch yesteryear the costs presented by the singer's part. On the former mitt, "Seems So Long Ago, Nancy," although as downbeat as anything else here, did present Cohen in his nigh expressive and commercial voice, a nasal simply touching and delicately nuanced performance.
Static, in all, Songs from a Room was less well received commercially and critically -- Bob Johnston's restrained, most minimalist production made it less overtly appealing than the subtly commercial trappings of his debut, though the album did experience a couple of tracks, "Bird on the Wire" and "The Story of Isaac," that became standards rivaling "Suzanne" -- "The Story of Isaac," a musical allegory woven about scriptural imagination roughly Vietnam (which is too relevant to the Iraq War), was one of the most cruel and sharp songs to come out of the antiwar motion, and showed a level of sophistication in its music and lyrics that assign it in a whole split up kingdom of composition; it received an even better ventilation on the Live Songs album, in a performance recorded in Berlin during 1972. Cohen whitethorn non receive been a widely popular performing artist or recording artist, just his unique part and legal, and the index of his writing and its influence, helped give him entrée to rock's front-ranked performers, an funny condition for the today 35-year-old author/composer. He appeared at the 1970 Isle of Wight festival in England, a post-Woodstock gathering of stars and superstars, including tardy appearances by such soon-to-die-or-disband legends as Jimi Hendrix and the Doors; looking nigh as awkward as his cuss Canadian Joni Mitchell, Cohen strummed his acoustic guitar backed by a copulate of distaff singers in front of an audience of 600,000 ("It's a large nation, just still weak"), comprised in equal portions of fans, freaks, and aggressive gatecrashers, just the mere fact that he was in that location -- sandwiched somewhere betwixt Miles Davis and Emerson, Lake & Palmer -- was a shed light on statement of the status (if not the popular success) he'd achieved. One fortune of his localize, "Tonight Will Be Fine," was released on a subsequent resilient album, while his performance of "Suzanne" was unitary of the highlights of Murray Lerner's long-delayed, 1996-issued objective Message to Love: The Isle of Wight Festival.
Already, he had carven out a unparalleled position for himself in music, as a great deal generator as performer and recording artist, lease his songs develop and evolve crossways years -- his clearly noncommercial part became voice of his invoke to the audience he found, giving him a unique corner of the music audience, made of listeners descended from the same people wHO had embraced Bob Dylan's early work in front he'd go a mass-media phenomenon in 1964. In a sense, Cohen bodied a phenomenon mistily standardised to what Dylan enjoyed before his early-'70s tour with the Band -- citizenry bought his albums by the tens and, occasionally, hundreds of thousands, merely seemed to hear him in unambiguously personal terms. He earned his audience seemingly one listener at a time, by holy Scripture of mouth more than by the radiocommunication which, in whatsoever face (especially on the AM dial), was for the most part friendly to covers of Cohen's songs by other artists.Cohen's third album, Songs of Love and Hate (1971), was his most powerful consistence of work to date, brimful with piercing lyrics and music as affectingly poignant as it was minimalist in its advance -- transcriber Paul Buckmaster's work on strings was oddly hushed, and the children's chorus line that showed up on "Last Year's Man" was spare in its presence; balancing them was Cohen's most effective vocalizing to date, brightly expressive around such acclaimed songs as "Joan of Arc," "Dress Rehearsal Rag" (which had been recorded by Judy Collins v years in front), and "Illustrious Blue Raincoat." The bareness of the whole tone and subject matter ensured that he would ne'er become a "pop" performer; tied the beat-driven "Diamonds in the Mine," with its attention-getting children's chorus line accompaniment and all, and with a twangy electric guitar accompaniment to boot, was as dark and venomous-toned a birdsong as Columbia Records put verboten in 1971. And the most compelling moments -- among an embarrassment of riches -- came on lyrics like "Now the flames they followed Joan of Arc/As she came riding through and through the dark/No Moon to keep her armour bright/No man to stupefy her through this nighttime...."; so, hearing Cohen's lyrics 25 long time on, one could nigh find a spoof of Cohen's euphony in the songs of Lisa Kudrow's Phoebe Buffay on Friends -- wHO, even money reckon probably grew up on Songs of Love and Hate in her fictional bio -- and lyrics like "They base their bodies the third day...."
Teenagers of the late '60s (or any eRA that followed) hearing devotedly to Leonard Cohen might have worried their parents, merely too could well have been the smartest or nigh tender kids in their grade and the near well-balanced emotionally -- if they weren't down -- just besides efficaciously well on their way out of beingness teenagers, and likely too advanced for their peers and perhaps most of their teachers (demur mayhap the ones listening to Cohen). Songs of Love and Hate, conjugate with the before reach versions of "Suzanne," etc., earned Cohen a big international cult undermentioned. He as well launch himself in demand in the macrocosm of commercial filmmaking, as theater director Robert Altman used his medicine in his 1971 feature film McCabe and Mrs. Miller, stellar Warren Beatty and Julie Christie, a revisionist period film set at the turn of the 19th century that was savaged by the critics (and, by some accounts, sabotaged by its have studio apartment) just went on to suit one of the director's favourite movies. The undermentioned year, he also published a new poesy aggregation, The Energy of Slaves.As was his won't, Cohen spent years 'tween albums, and in 1973 he seemed to lead stock of himself as a performing artist by issue Elmore Leonard Cohen: Live Songs. Not a conventional live album, it was a compendium of performances from various venues across respective years and focused on highlights of his production from 1969 onward. It showcased his writing as a great deal as his playing, merely too gave a skillful account of his appeal to his well-nigh serious fans -- those still uncertain of where they stood in relation to his euphony wHO could cause past the epic-length "Please Don't Pass Me By" knew for certain they were ready to "conjoin" the intimate round of his legion of devotees afterward that, piece others wHO only when comprehended "Bird on the Wire" or "The Story of Isaac" could stay comfortably on an outer tintinnabulation.
Meantime, in 1973, his music became the fundament for a theatrical production called Sisters of Mercy, conceived by Gene Lesser and loosely based on Cohen's biography, or at least a phantasy adaptation of his life. A three-year lag ensued between Songs of Love and Hate and Cohen's next album, and virtually critics and fans just fictive he'd bump off a dry spell with the live album covering the gap. He was busy concertizing, however, in the United States and Europe during 1971 and 1972, and extending his appearances into Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. It was during this period that he also began working with pianist and adapter John Lissauer, whom he meshed as producer of his next album, New Skin for the Old Ceremony (1974). That album seemed to excuse his fans' continued religion in his work, presenting Cohen in a more lush musical environment. He proved capable of keeping his own in a pop environment, regular if the songs were generally still depressing and raw.
The following class, Columbia Records released The Best of Leonard Cohen, featuring a twelve of his best-known songs -- primarily hits in the hands of other performers -- from his previous four LPs (though it left out "Dress Rehearsal Rag"). It was likewise during the mid-'70s that Cohen first gear crossed paths professionally with Jennifer Warnes, appearing on the same bill with the singer at legion shows, which would lead to a series of key collaborations in the ensuing decade. By this time, he was a pretty less cryptic image, having toured extensively and gotten considerable exposure -- among many early attributes, Cohen became known for his preternatural attraction to women, which seemed to go hand in glove with the romantic subjects of to the highest degree of his songs.In 1977, Cohen reappeared with the ironically titled Death of a Ladies' Man, the about controversial album of his career, produced by Phil Spector. The notion of pairing Spector -- known multifariously as a Svengali-like presence to his female singers and artists and the virtually impenitent (and a great deal justified) over-producer in the theatre of operations of pop music -- with Cohen must have seemed like a good one to person at some point, merely ostensibly Cohen himself had misgivings about many of the resulting tracks that Spector never addressed, having mixed the record completely on his own. The resulting LP suffered from the worst attributes of Cohen's and Spector's act upon, to a fault heavy and self-consciously grand in its sound, and well-nigh bathing the hearer in Cohen's depressive persona, just screening his modified vocal abilities to disadvantage, outstanding to Spector's habit of "scrawl" (i.e., guidebook) vocals and his unwillingness to permission the artist to redo some of his weaker moments on those takes. For the first gear (and only) clock time in Cohen's career, his near-monotone pitch of this period wasn't a positive attribute. Cohen's unhappiness with the album was widely known among fans, wHO by and large bought it with that caveat in nous, so it didn't damage his reputation -- a class subsequently its release, Cohen likewise promulgated a new literary collecting exploitation the title Death of a Ladies' Man. Cohen's next album, Recent Songs (1979), returned him to the unembellished settings of his early-'70s work and showed his singing to some of its topper advantage. Working with veteran producer Henry Lewy (c. H. Best known for his work with Joni Mitchell), the album showed Cohen's singing as attractive and expressive in its quiet way, and songs such as "The Guests" ostensible out-and-out pretty -- he placid wrote around life and erotic love, and especially relationships, in staring footing, but he near seemed to be moving into a pop manner on numbers such as "Low in Love." Frank Sinatra ne'er needed to look over his shoulder at Cohen (at least, as a singer), but he did seem to be trying for a oilskin pop effectual at moments on his record.
Then came 1984, and two key new whole caboodle in Cohen's output -- the poetic/religious volume The Book of Mercy and the record album Several Positions (1984). The latter, recorded with Jennifer Warnes, is arguably his most accessible album of his intact career up to that time -- Cohen's voice, now a peculiarly expressive baritone horn official document, base a beautiful conjugation with Warnes, and the songs were as hunky-dory as ever, steeped in spiritualty and sexuality, with "Dance Me to the End of Love" a killer opener: a ironical, doom-laden still fiery pop-style ballad that is insufferable to forget. Those efforts overlapped with some ventures by the composer/singer into other creative realms, including an award-winning short picture that he wrote, directed, and scored, entitled I Am a Hotel, and the score for the 1985 conceptual film Dark Magic, which earned a Juno Award in Canada for Best Movie Score.Sad to say, Several Positions went comparatively unnoticed, and was followed by another extended sabbatical from recording, which concluded with I'm Your Man (1988). But during his reprieve, Warnes had released her record album of Cohen-authored material, entitled Noted Blue Raincoat, which had sold extremely well and introduced Cohen to a new generation of listeners. So when I'm Your Man did come along, with its electronic production (albeit still rather spare) and songs that added mood (albeit dark wittiness) to his mix of pessimistic and poetic conceits, the resultant role was his best-selling record in more than a decade. The final result, in 1991, was the spillage of I'm Your Fan: The Songs of Leonard Cohen, a CD of recordings of his songs by the likes of R.E.M., the Pixies, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, and John Cale, which lay Cohen as a ballad maker push historic period 60 right back on center stage for the nineties. He rosebush to the occasion, cathartic The Future, an record album that dwelt on the many threats facing world in the coming age and decades, a year later. Not the stuff of pop charts or MTV heavy rotation, it attracted Cohen's usual pack of fans, and enough press interest as well as sufficient sales, to warrant the release in 1994 of his arcsecond concert album, Cohen Live, derived from his deuce most recent tours. A year after came another protection album, Tower of Song, featuring Cohen's songs as taken by Billy Joel, Willie Nelson, et al. In the thick of all of this new bodily process surrounding his composition and compositions, Cohen embarked on a new phase of his life. Religious concerns were ne'er besides far from his thought process and work, even when he was making a bring up for himself authorship songs about passion, and he had focused ever more on this side of living since Assorted Positions. He came to pass time at the Mt. Baldy Zen Center, a Buddhist retreat in California, and eventually became a full-time resident, comme il faut a Buddhist monastic during the late '90s. When he re-emerged in 1999, Cohen had many wads of new compositions in hand, songs and poems alike. His new collaborations were with Sharon Robinson, wHO besides complete up producing the resulting album, Ten New Songs (2001) -- in that location besides emerged during this period a vent called Field of view Commander Cohen: Tour of 1979, comprised of live recordings from his tour of 22 geezerhood earlier. In 2004, the year he turned 70, Cohen released one of the most controversial albums of his career, Devout Heather. It revealed his voice anew, in this phase of his career, as a deep baritone horn more limited in range than on whatever former recording, only it overcame this change in vocal timbre by facing it head-on, just as Cohen had done with his telling passim his career -- it also contained a identification number of songs for which Cohen wrote music simply not lyrics, a decided change of rate for a man who'd started out as a poet. And it was as personal a record as Cohen had e'er issued. His return to transcription was i of the more than positive aspects of Cohen's recommencement of his medicine activities. On some other side, in 2005, he filed courting against his longtime business director and his financial adviser over the alleged larceny of more than cinque 1000000 dollars, at least some of which took place during his years at the Buddhist retreat. Four decades after he emerged as a public literary figure and then a performing artist, Cohen remains unmatched of the most compelling and enigmatical musical figures of his geological era, and one of the very few of that geological era world Health Organization commands as much respect and attention, and credibly as large an audience, in the 21st century as he did in the sixties. As very much as whatsoever survivor of that decade, Cohen has held onto his original audience and has seen it grow across generations, in retention with a body of music that is genuinely timeless and aeonian. In 2006, his long-suffering influence seemed to be acknowledged in Lions Gate Films' freeing of Dutch Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man, theatre director Lian Lunson's concert/portrait of Cohen and his work and life history.
