Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen started out as a poet and novelist before turning to music as the main vehicle for expressing his literary, darkly romantic vision. In songs hushed and brooding, with stark musical accompaniment, Cohen explored such themes as betrayal and loss, seduction and redemption, with a voice unlike anyone else’s and lyrics that recall Dylan at his most cutting and personal. There’s a savage frankness to his discussions of interpersonal relations that is almost unparalleled in popular music.
Playlist 1
Playlist 1 covers Cohen’s first four albums. Lots of great stuff here, but don’t include any of it on your party mix.
Note: In listening to these four albums more extensively as a collective whole, changing sequences and comparing tracks from different albums side-by-side to select my absolute favorites, I was a bit surprised at which songs made the cut. As a result, I’ve had to realign my preferences among his early albums. I now feel even more strongly that his debut was his best, and I’ve lowered my estimation slightly of the two albums that followed (Songs from a Room and Songs of Love and Hate, both of which seem to have been the favorites of many a Cohen fan). From his early work, I’d actually rate the oft-dismissed New Skin for the Old Ceremony (1974) the next most essential, after his first.
I had at one point near the end of my selection process created two LP-length playlists from this time period, which included the fan favorites “Bird on the Wire” (one of his most famous songs), “Tonight Will Be Fine,” and “Last Year’s Man.” But in the end, I decided I liked the single-CD length playlist better., without those tracks.
***UPDATE*** 2025/06/24
Playlist 2
After his early work, I’d say the most essential Leonard Cohen album came with I’m Your Man (1988) and The Future (1992), which find Cohen moving from the personal toward the public, with more full arrangements. Here’s a sampling from those two albums.
More Leonard Cohen
Leonard Cohen returned in 1977 after a three-year stint without a record release (other than a best-of) with Death of a Ladies’ Man and a shift in musical style. I’ll update this post at a later date with songs from Leonard Cohen’s late-‘70s work and beyond.
Cover Art:
- The Best of Leonard Cohen and Ween’s The Pod: Source, Discogs.com, Fair use.
Note: I first discovered Cohen a year or so after picking up a 1991 Ween album that parodied the cover of the 1975 The Best of Leonard Cohen compilation, quite amusingly turning Cohen’s rather stiff, intellectual pose into something that looks like some sort of DIY gas-mask bong hit. I picked up Cohen’s latest release The Future after hearing a song somewhere; when I liked it and went looking for more, I saw the greatest hits package, recognized it as the source of the Ween cover, and snapped it up. Excellent stuff—although I can certainly appreciate why the mad satirists in Ween chose the cover as a source of parody.
Recent Comments