Leonard Cohen's 15 greatest songs, ranked

19 September 2024, 15:07

Leonard Cohen through the years. Picture: Getty Images

By Mayer Nissim

No-one wrote about love and sex and life and god and death like Leonard Cohen.

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Leonard Cohen was a poet and novelist before he ever became a musician.

Indeed, it wasn't until he was the grand old age of 33 that he released his first ever album, the beautifully understated Songs of Leonard Cohen.

He continued in a stripped-back folky vein till the late 1970s, when he shifted his sound. He embraced electricity and even drum machines, as well as leaning into his deepening voice and incorporating female backing vocals.

In every era, Leonard proved to be an absolute master – and we're not just talking about his remarkable lyrics.

Below we round up just 15 of his very greatest songs. We've had to leave off a number of stone cold classics (No 'Tower of Song', 'Death of A Ladies' Man', 'Democracy', 'Almost Like The Blues' or countless others), but what's left is the ultimate beginner's guide.

Puppets

Leonard Cohen - Puppets (Official Video)

When Leonard Cohen died just three weeks after the release of his stunning You Want It Darker album, it was fair to assume that would be his last ever record of new material.
But three years on, Leonard's son Adam took the sketches they had made but not quite finished – with completed vocals from his dad – and filled them out with an all-star cast of musicians, including Daniel Lanois, Beck, Jennifer Warnes, Sharon Robinson, Damien Rice and Leslie Feist.
What could have felt cheap or exploitative was in fact a beautifully realised tribute, and among its standouts was this harrowing musing on life, death, free will and the horrors of history ("German puppets burned the Jews / Jewish puppets did not choose").
Famous Blue Raincoat

Leonard Cohen - Famous Blue Raincoat (Live in Dublin - short)

Leonard Cohen has a(n unfair) reputation for being a bit of a miserabilist from those who miss or don't understand his often wry humour, but at times it's fair to say that both musically and lyrically he can explore the depths.
'Famous Blue Raincoat' from his third album Songs of Love and Hate felt like a deliciously dreary trudge through the weather in the very best way.
Apparently the title was a nod to his own stylish-if-battered Burberry jacket, while the lyric about going "clear" was a nod to the Church of Scientology.
"We played that song a lot before it ever went to tape," said guitarist and Cohen bandleader Ron Cornelius told Songfacts.
"We knew it was going to be big. We could see what the crowd did—you play the Royal Albert Hall, the crowd goes crazy, and you're really saying something there."
So Long, Marianne

Leonard Cohen - So Long, Marianne (Live in London)

"I didn’t think I was saying goodbye but I guess I was," said Leonard in his best-of about the song written for Marianne Jensen, who he had met on the Greek island of Hydra in 1960.
"She gave me many songs, and she has given songs to others too. She is a Muse."
The song was included on Leonard's first album in 1967 and remained a favourite.
Shortly before the real-life Marianne died in 2016 at the age of 81, Leonard wrote her letter as tender and beautiful as the song he had written for her all those years earlier.
"I'm just a little behind you, close enough to take your hand," he wrote, just three months before his own passing.
"I've never forgotten your love and your beauty. But you know that."
Waiting For The Miracle

Leonard Cohen - Waiting for the Miracle (Audio)

There's a myth that Leonard Cohen lost it at some point in the 1980s, having been knocked off course somewhat by his Death of a Ladies Man collaboration with Phil Spector in 1977.
A total nonsense of course. Not only is Death of a Ladies Man not without its pleasures, his three 1980s albums were packed with bona fide classics (more on them very shortly).
With all that said, 1992's The Future, released after a four-year gap, is one of the all-time great comeback records.
After its stomping opener (which we'll get to), it had this swirling, cinematic epic, co-produced by Yoav Goren. Oliver Stone was so taken by the album that he included THREE of its songs on his controversial Natural Born Killers, and this one memorably opened the film.
A Thousand Kisses Deep

Leonard Cohen - A Thousand Kisses Deep (Audio)

After The Future.... nothing for nine long years. Apparently Leonard didn't particularly enjoy the trappings of success that had come with that album and its predecessor I'm Your Man and instead of resting and drying out at home, he went to the Mt. Baldy Zen Center near LA to spend time with his Zen Master Joshu Sasak. For five years.
'When I finished my tour in '93 I was approaching the age of 60 and my old friend and teacher Roshi was approaching the age of 90, and I thought it would be the right moment to spend some more time with him," he explained to Sylvie Simmons. "I wasn't looking for a new religion or another list of dogma."
He returned in 2001 with another classic Leonard Cohen album with another classically understated title: Ten New Songs, written and recorded with Sharon Robinson.
Among its many tender moments was this deceptively gentle metaphor-heavy powerhouse of a song.
I’m Your Man

Leonard Cohen - I´m Your Man (1988)

No, nothing to do with the Wham! song from three years earlier.
By the late 1980s, Leonard Cohen was settling nicely into his suave lothario era in his mid-50s, and there's no better example than slick, sexy, jazzy 'I'm Your Man'.
It's all in the delivery ("And if you want a doctor / I'll examine every inch of you"). The music is unfussy and uncluttered, letting Leonard's now-deep, breathy voice and words do all the talking.
Who By Fire

Leonard Cohen - Who By Fire (Live in London)

Of all the Jewish musicians and songwriters who have revolutionised pop over the last three quarters of a century, none have explored their faith and culture in their actual work as deeply as Leonard Cohen.
Sung with Janis Ian, 'Who By Fire' takes its title and some of its lyrics from Yom Kippur prayer Unetanneh Tokef, which ponders the divine judgement facing us all in the year ahead. Leonard of course put his own modernist, poetic twist on things ("And who in her lonely slip, who by barbiturate").
"The melody is, if not actually stolen, is certainly derived from the melody that I heard in the synagogue as a boy," Cohen confessed. "But, of course, the conclusion of the song as I write it is somewhat different."
Chelsea Hotel #2

Leonard Cohen Chelsea Hotel #2 Live

"It's an indiscretion for which I'm very sorry, and if there is some way of apologising to the ghost, I want to apologise now, for having committed that indiscretion," said Leonard in 1994 of revealing in concert that the explicit lyrics of 'Chelsea Hotel #2' ("Givin' me head on the unmade bed") were about Janis Joplin.
It's a shame that the anecdote has come to overshadow this beautifully delicate love song from New Skin for the Old Ceremony, which has much witter turns of phrase throughout "You told me again, you preferred handsome men / But for me you would make an exception".
Why 'Chelsea Hotel #2'? Because a longer, more rambling 'Chelsea Hotel #1' with different lyrics preceded it. It wasn't recorded in the studio, but was sometimes played live.
First We Take Manhattan

Leonard Cohen - First We Take Manhattan (Official Video)

The first released version of this storming track wasn't actually on his 1988 I'm Your Man album, but actually by Jennifer Warnes on her tribute album Famous Blue Raincoat: The Songs of Leonard Cohen two years earlier.
Warnes's version was a slick bit of 1980s guitar rock/pop, with Stevie Ray Vaughan's lead guitar prominent in the arrangement. Leonard's on the other hand was a harsh, almost discordant parody of synthpop.
"I think it means exactly what it says. It is a terrorist song. I think it's a response to terrorism," he said around the time of its release.
"There's something about terrorism that I've always admired. The fact that there are no alibis or no compromises. That position is always very attractive.
"I don't like it when it's manifested on the physical plane – I don't really enjoy the terrorist activities – but Psychic Terrorism."
The concept was inspired by fellow Canadian-born poet Irving Layton's poem Terrorists which contrasted the physical terrorism of Black September with "Jewish terrorists" like Maimonides, Spinoza, Freud and Marx, his poem ending: "The whole world is still quaking."
Bird on the Wire

Leonard Cohen Bird on the Wire (Live 1979)

Another song that was first recorded by someone other than Leonard himself, when Judy Collins recorded 'Bird on the Wire' for her 1968 album Who Knows Where the Time Goes.
A previous Leonard version was produced by David Crosby, but the version immortalised on Songs from a Room was recorded in Nashville with Bob Johnston.
"I always begin my concert with this song," Leonard said in the liner notes of a best-of. "It seems to return me to my duties
"I can't seem to get it perfect. Kris Kristofferson informed me that I had stolen part of the melody from another Nashville writer. He also said that he's putting the first couple of lines on his tombstone, and I'll be hurt if he doesn't."
It remained one of Leonard's best-known, best-loved and most performed songs of his career.
Hallelujah

Leonard Cohen - Hallelujah (Live at Glastonbury) (Official Lyric Video)

"There's been a couple of times when other people have said can we have a moratorium please on 'Hallelujah'?" Leonard Cohen admitted to The Guardian in 2012.
"Must we have it at the end of every single drama and every single Idol? And once or twice I've felt maybe I should lend my voice to silencing it but on second thought no, I'm very happy that it's being sung."
If there's ever a sense that 'Hallelujah' had been dulled both by ubiquity of the original and covers that ranged from the sublime (John Cale) to ridiculous (Alexandra Burke), it dissipates pretty quickly as soon as you hear Leonard Cohen sing those first few words.
A classic Leonard tale of sex and death and god all wrapped up together, it laughably comes slap bang in the middle of his supposed creative decline on 1984's Recent Songs.
The arrangement isn't to everyone's tastes, which is perhaps why some go for Cale or Jeff Buckley or Rufus Wainwright's versions, but those stop-start dynamics really do provide the dram. And if they're a bit too much for you, Leonard's later live versions strip thing the song down to its heavenly core.
Avalanche

Leonard Cohen - Avalanche (Official Audio)

More than 'Famous Blue Raincoat' even, perhaps Leonard Cohen's most relentlessly and powerfully bleak bit of songwriting and performance.
The fast classical guitar chords are offset by gentle bass but it's all drawn into the mire by swirling strings and Leonard's own unsettling croon, as well as the chilling lyrics that appropriately bury you ("Your pain is no credential here / It's just a shadow, shadow of my wound").
Something of a touchstone for Leonard Cohen superfan Nick Cave, who opened the first Bad Seeds album From Her To Eternity with a cover, before reworking it once more as a solo song years later, too.
The Future

Leonard Cohen The Future Official Music Video

The standout song from a standout album, the title track and opener ofThe Future felt less like a song and more like something crossed between a state of the nation address to America, a dark prophecy of the end times ("Things are going to slide, slide in all directions") and a blistering statement of personal return and intent.
And crucially, for all the darkness, as always with Leonard, there's still the hope of salvation ("love's the only engine of survival"). A storming piece of work and one that brought Leonard Cohen to a whole new audience.
You Want It Darker

Leonard Cohen - You Want It Darker (Audio)

'You Want It Darker' was the title track of the last Leonard Cohen album released during his lifetime and it's up there in the conversation as his very greatest.
More Jewish than 'Hallelujah' or even 'Who By Fire', it not only borrows from the Kaddish ("Magnified, sanctified / Be the holy name") and invokes the Holocaust ("A million candles burning / For the help that never came"), it even has Cantor Gideon Zelermyer and the Shaar Hashomayim Choir singing the Hineni.
"I'm ready, my Lord," echoes his final letter to Marianne. Not a meek acceptance of death, but a warm embrace of it, perhaps, at the right time.
Suzanne

Leonard Cohen - Suzanne (Audio)

As we've already mentioned, Leonard Cohen was already an acclaimed and successful poet before he ever was considered a musician, and – inspired by his friendship with dancer Suzanne Verdal – 'Suzanne' was published as a poem called 'Suzanne Takes You Down' in 1966 before it was a song.
Like 'Bird on a Wire', it was recorded and released by Judy Collins before Leonard actually released it, featuring on her 1966 album In My Life. That album also included Leonard's future 1971 song 'Dress Rehearsal Drag'.
Before Collins even, 'Suzanne' song was actually first recorded by little known folk group The Stormy Clovers, who had been playing it around the Montreal area in 1966.
But even though it failed to chart, released as his debut single in 1967 Suzanne' marked the transition for Leonard Cohen from writer to world-famous musician.
Leonard would come to be self-deprecating about his own singing. The self-mocking "I was born with the gift of a golden voice" in 'Tower of Song' always raises a smile. He later joked at the 1993 Juno Awards: "Only in Canada could somebody with a voice like mine win Vocalist of the Year."
But while the growl of Cohen's later years is perhaps an acquired taste, on 'Suzanne' and his earlier work it's perfectly pitched, with a lightness that captures the wonder and fragility of his words. A classic.