Leonard Cohen

Leonard Cohen
Leonard Norman Cohen, is a famous Canadian singer and Song writer, he is also a poet and a novelist too. He was born on September 21, 1934 in Westmount, Quebec. Cohen got his first book of poetry, being published in Montreal in 1956 and his first novel in 1963.

Cohen had a deep influence of the European folk music and the old melodies and the same reflected in his music, at earlier times. He had adopted the generic restlessness of the era of 70s; he had broadened his musical style to include pop, cabaret and world music.

But he has been shifted to the lower registers, using bass baritone and bass, with accompaniment from electronic synthesizers and female backing singers, from the 60s. There is a strong sense of exploration of the themes like religion, isolation, sexuality, and complex interpersonal relationships in his later music.

Cohen has a characteristic quality, to influence the other singers and songwriters with his songs and poetry. There are more than a thousand renditions of his work, which have been recorded. He has been inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame and the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame and is also a Companion of the Order of Canada, the nation's highest civilian honour. He was added to the American Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with a speech by Lou Reed on March 10, 2008 for his status among the highest and most influential batch of songwriters.

Cohen was born in a middle-class Jewish family, his father was of a Polish ancestry, and his mother was Lithuanian Jewish. He had passed the earlier days of his life in Westmount on the Island of Montreal. He had attended Herzliah High School, where he studied with poet Irving Layton. As a teenager he learned to play the guitar, which helped in forming a country-folk group called the Buckskin Boys. His father's business had provided him with a normal amount of trust income, sufficient to allow him to pursue his literary ambitions.

He had got admission at McGill University in 1956; there he became the president of the McGill Debating Union. He had a high level of literary influence from the works of Yeats, Whitman and Henry Miller, during the same time. He got his first book of poetry named 'Let Us Compare Mythologies', being published in the year of 1956. The second book was titled as 'The Spice-Box of Earth', being published in 1961. It made him well known in poetry circles, especially in his own country. Cohen had worked on ethic to his early and keen literary ambitions.

He wrote poetry and fiction through much of the 1960s, and preferred to live in quasi-reclusive circumstances. Later he had moved to Hydra, a Greek island, then he had published the poetry collection Flowers for Hitler in 1964, and the novels like 'The Favorite Game' in 1963 and 'Beautiful Losers' in 1966.

He had moved to the United States, to pursue a career as a folk singer-songwriter. His song "Suzanne" became a hit for Judy Collins. As he was performing at some of the folk festivals, Columbia Records had signed him as a potential singer. His first album came to market in 1967with a title of 'Songs of Leonard Cohen'. The album was very pessimistic and could not get a commercial success, but was widely acclaimed by folk music buffs. He became a cult name in the UK, where the album spent over a year on the album charts.

The music by Cohen was used to great effect in the soundtrack to Robert Altman's film McCabe & Mrs. Miller. The songs were taken from the earlier works of him, but the songs melded so seamlessly with the story that many believed they had been written for the film. Cohen had toured the United States, Canada and Europe in the whole eras of 60s and 70s.