Leonard Cohen

Leonard Cohen is on tour again!
Accompanied by great musicians like Roscoe Beck, Sharon Robinson, Neil Larsen, the Webb sisters and Javier Mass.
Check for details: The Leonard Cohen 2008-2009 Tour

Legendary poet, singer/songwriter and alleged ladies man Leonard Cohen is interviewed in his L.A. home about his extraordinary life and times, interspersed with old footage from his private photo collection and lavish praise plus elaborately performed Cohen cover songs from a motley crew of colleague musicians, amongst whom Kate & Anna McGarrigle, Rufus & Martha Wainwright, Nick Cave, Jarvis Cocker and U2's Bono and The Edge. By way of dessert the latter two and their band mates even get to back up the man for a special performance of his own.

Leonard Norman Cohen, CC (born September 21, 1934 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada) is a poet, novelist, and singer-songwriter. His musical career has largely overshadowed his prior work as a poet and novelist, although he has continued to publish poetry sporadically after his breakthrough in the music industry.

Musically, Cohen's early songs are based in folk music, both for melodies and instrumentation, but, beginning in the 1970s, his work shows the influence of various types of popular music and cabaret music. Since the 1980s he typically sings in a deep bass register, with synthesizers and female backing vocals.

Cohen's songs are often emotionally heavy and lyrically complex, owing more to the metaphoric word play of poetry than to the conventions of song craft. His work often explores the themes of religion, isolation, and complex interpersonal relationships.

Cohen's music has become very influential on other singer-songwriters, and more than a thousand cover versions of his work have been recorded. He is also popular in his native land, having been inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame and awarded the Order of Canada, the nation's highest civilian honor.

For four decades, Leonard Cohen has been one of the most important and influential songwriters of our time, a figure whose body of work achieves greater depths of mystery and meaning as time goes on. His songs have set a virtually unmatched standard in their seriousness and range. Sex, spirituality, religion, power - he has relentlessly examined the largest issues in human lives, always with a full appreciation of how elusive answers can be to the vexing questions he raises. But those questions, and the journey he has traveled in seeking to address them, are the ever-shifting substance of his work, as well as the reasons why his songs never lose their overwhelming emotional force.

His first album, Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967), announced him as an undeniable major talent. It includes such songs as "Suzanne," "Sisters of Mercy," "So Long, Marianne" and "Hey, That's No Way to Say Good," all now longstanding classics. If Cohen had never recorded another album, his daunting reputation would have been assured by this one alone.

However, the two extraordinary albums that followed, Songs From a Room (1969), which includes his classic song, "Bird on the Wire," and Songs of Love and Hate (1971), provided whatever proof anyone may have required that that the greatness of his debut was not a fluke. (All three albums are reissued in April, 2007.)

Part of the reason why Cohen's early work revealed such a high degree of achievement is that he was an accomplished literary figure before he ever began to record. His collections of poetry, including Let Us Compare Mythologies (1956) and Flowers for Hitler (1964), and his novels, including Beautiful Losers (1966), had already brought him considerable recognition in his native Canada. His dual careers in music and literature have continued feeding each other over the decades - his songs revealing a literary quality rare in the world of popular music, and his poetry and prose informed by a rich musicality.