Leonard Cohen - The Lyrics of Leonard Cohen

Leonard Cohen would go in and out of fashion over the next forty years or so, but he kept making fascinating albums throughout, frequently crafting highly literate songs about love and loss, faith and despair. Despite the occasional musical setting given to an old poem, Cohens best lyrics were no more poems than his poems had been song lyrics; he knew how to write lines whose rhythms matched those of the music. The lyrics to Suzanne (1967) perfectly echo the songs dreamy swirling melody just as, some 25 years later, a comic line in Closing Time would get an extra lift from its staccato foot-stomping melody: The place is dead as Heaven on a Saturday night. And that is another good reason for considering Cohens lyrics on their own. For a man sometimes lazily labelled as a morose prophet of doom (songs to slit your wrists by was an old gag about Cohens uvre) his lyrics are frequently shot through with deadpan humour as well as some highly original ideas. Hallelujah may, in fact, be the only popular song ever written in which the lyric gives a running commentary on the melodic structure (...well it goes like this the fourth, the fifth / the minor fall and the major lift...) while The Tower of Song has Cohen dryly intoning in his imperfect bass baritone I was born like this, I had no choice / I was born with the gift of a golden voice....

In 1987, three years after his record company actually declined to release one of Cohens albums in the US, Jennifer Warnes recorded an entire album of his songs. It looked like a kind but lonely gesture at the time but it helped kickstart a revival in his popularity. These days big names line up to appear on tributes to Leonard Cohen: Bono, Rufus Wainwright, Nick Cave, Willie Nelson, R.E.M., John Cale, Sting, Martha Wainwright and others are more than pleased to reinterpret the songs of Quebecs most unlikely and enduring musical legend. The 100+ Leonard Cohen song lyrics collected here go a long way to explaining why. Graham Vickers