ON THIS DAY: Legendary musician and poet, Leonard Cohen is born (1934)

On 21 September 1934, Leonard Cohen was born in Montreal, Canada, beginning a life that would eventually produce some of the most haunting poetry and music of the modern era.

A poet before he was a singer, a novelist before he became a recording star, Cohen spent more than half a century exploring love, faith, desire, loneliness, mortality and the search for meaning. His unmistakable baritone and meticulously crafted words made songs including Suzanne, Bird on the Wire, So Long, Marianne, Dance Me to the End of Love, I’m Your Man and Hallelujah enduring parts of popular culture.

Yet one of the most important chapters of his life unfolded far from Montreal or the recording studios of New York and Los Angeles, on the Greek island of Hydra, which became his home, refuge and creative sanctuary.

From Montreal to poetry

Leonard Norman Cohen was born into a Jewish family in Westmount, Montreal. His upbringing exposed him from childhood to Jewish scripture, ritual and music, influences that would remain visible throughout his writing.

His father, Nathan Cohen, died when Leonard was nine. By his teenage years, Cohen was writing poetry and learning guitar, while developing the fascination with literature that would shape his life.

He studied at McGill University, graduating in 1955, and had already begun establishing himself within Montreal’s literary circles. His first poetry collection, Let Us Compare Mythologies, appeared in 1956, when he was just 22. Themes that would follow him throughout his career were already present: religion, sexuality, death, love and Jewish identity.

Among his most important literary influences was Spanish poet Federico García Lorca. Decades later, while accepting the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature, Cohen said discovering Lorca as a young man had helped him find his own voice as a writer. His admiration was so deep that he later named his daughter Lorca.

Long before the world knew Cohen as a singer, he was recognised in Canada as a serious poet and novelist. His poetry collections included The Spice-Box of Earth and Flowers for Hitler, while his novels The Favourite Game and the experimental Beautiful Losers established his reputation as an ambitious literary writer.

Hydra: the Greek island that became home

In 1960, Cohen arrived on Hydra, then a relatively inexpensive haven for writers and artists in the Saronic Gulf.

He fell in love with the island and bought a modest whitewashed house there in September 1960 for around $1,500. It would remain in his family for decades.

Hydra offered Cohen something he had struggled to find elsewhere: simplicity, distance and the time to write.

There were no cars, electricity was still unreliable in parts of the island and life moved at a radically different pace from Montreal or London. Cohen settled into a routine of writing, swimming, drinking coffee in the harbour and spending long hours working in the island’s quiet heat.

It was there that he met Norwegian Marianne Ihlen, who became his partner and one of the central figures of his life. Their relationship would later be immortalised in So Long, Marianne, while she remained closely associated with the creative mythology surrounding Cohen’s years in Greece.

Hydra was not simply the backdrop to a romance. It was a place where Cohen developed as a writer, working on poetry and fiction, including Beautiful Losers. The island remained emotionally important to him throughout his life.

It also left its mark on his music.

Cohen later connected the beginnings of Bird on the Wire with the arrival of telephone lines on Hydra. Seeing birds perched on the newly installed wires cutting across the island’s previously uninterrupted landscape helped inspire the song that became one of his best known.

Even decades later, Hydra continued to appear in work associated with Cohen. After his death, his son Adam described the island as a beloved refuge, and the video for the posthumous song Moving On was created as a tribute to Cohen’s memories of Hydra and Marianne.

The poet becomes a singer

By the mid-1960s, Cohen was an established writer but was struggling to earn enough from literature alone.

He turned increasingly towards songwriting and moved into New York’s Greenwich Village music scene. Judy Collins recorded Suzanne, originally written as a poem, in 1966, helping introduce Cohen’s writing to a much wider audience.

Cohen was already in his early thirties when he launched his recording career, unusually late for a new popular musician.

His debut album, Songs of Leonard Cohen, appeared in 1967. Quiet and stark in a year dominated by psychedelic rock, it contained Suzanne, Sisters of Mercy, So Long, Marianne and Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye.

Two further albums, Songs from a Room in 1969 and Songs of Love and Hate in 1971, cemented his reputation as one of his generation’s most distinctive songwriters.

Cohen never possessed a conventional pop voice. Instead, his restrained singing and careful phrasing placed the words at the centre. As he grew older, his voice deepened dramatically into the grave, almost spoken baritone that became one of his defining characteristics.

His writing repeatedly blurred the boundaries between poetry and song. Biblical imagery could sit beside erotic longing; spiritual devotion beside romantic failure; despair beside dry humour. Love, sex and faith were rarely separate subjects in Cohen’s world.

From Hallelujah to I’m Your Man

Cohen continued experimenting throughout the 1970s and 1980s, refusing to remain confined to the acoustic folk style of his early records.

In 1984, he released Various Positions, containing a song that would eventually eclipse almost everything else he had written: Hallelujah.

The song was not initially a major hit. Its transformation into a modern standard came gradually, helped by interpretations from other musicians, most famously Jeff Buckley. Hundreds of artists subsequently recorded it, and it became a song used at concerts, weddings, funerals, memorials and moments of collective grief.

The albums I’m Your Man in 1988 and The Future in 1992 introduced another version of Cohen: older, darker, ironic and increasingly comfortable with synthesisers and electronic production.

Songs such as First We Take Manhattan, Everybody Knows, Tower of Song, I’m Your Man and The Future showed that Cohen could continually reinvent his sound without abandoning the literary voice beneath it.

Faith, Zen and years away from the spotlight

Spiritual searching was never merely a subject for Cohen’s songs.

Although deeply connected to his Jewish heritage, he also spent years studying Zen Buddhism. During the 1990s he withdrew from much of public life and lived for extended periods at the Mount Baldy Zen Center in California.

In 1996, he was ordained as a Zen Buddhist monk, taking the name Jikan, often translated as “silence”. His interest in Buddhism did not mean abandoning Judaism; throughout his life, the two traditions existed alongside one another in his spiritual thinking and writing.

After years of relative seclusion, Cohen returned with Ten New Songs in 2001 and Dear Heather in 2004.

Then came an unexpected final act.

After discovering that millions of dollars had disappeared from his retirement savings while under the control of his former manager, Cohen returned to extensive touring in 2008 after about 15 years away from the concert stage.

What began partly out of financial necessity became one of the great late-career revivals in popular music. Performing concerts lasting several hours, Cohen found a new generation of listeners and received some of the warmest reviews of his career.

Recognition and final years

By then, the writer who had once struggled to make a living from poetry had become an internationally recognised cultural figure.

Cohen was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2008 and received the Recording Academy’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010. Canada had appointed him an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1991 before promoting him to Companion, one of the country’s highest civilian distinctions, in 2002.

In 2011, he received Spain’s Prince of Asturias Award for Literature. The jury honoured a body of work in which poetry and music had fused and influenced generations around the world.

Cohen remained remarkably productive into his late seventies and eighties, releasing Old Ideas in 2012, Popular Problems in 2014 and You Want It Darker in October 2016.

The final album sounded increasingly preoccupied with death, surrender and faith.

Leonard Cohen died in Los Angeles on 7 November 2016, aged 82, only weeks after You Want It Darker was released.

His work did not end there. His son Adam Cohen later completed recordings his father had been working on, resulting in the posthumous album Thanks for the Dance in 2019.

A poet who happened to sing

Cohen’s influence is difficult to separate into “literature” and “music” because he rarely treated the two as different worlds.

His first identity was that of a poet, and even at the height of his musical fame he continued publishing poetry. Book of Longing, released in 2006 after more than two decades without a new poetry collection, brought his literary work to another generation, while The Flame, published posthumously in 2018, gathered poems, notebook writings and lyrics from his final years.

Across six decades, Cohen returned obsessively to the same great human questions: how to love despite loss, how to believe amid doubt, how to find beauty within suffering, and how to accept the passing of time.

And amid Montreal, New York, Los Angeles, monasteries and concert halls, there remained Hydra: the small Greek island where a young Canadian poet bought a house, fell in love, wrote books and began creating the work that would eventually be heard around the world.

More than a decade after his death, Cohen’s songs, poems and unmistakable voice continue to travel far beyond the quiet Hydra home where so much of his story began.

Also read: ON THIS DAY: Federico García Lorca is born (1898)