Leonard Cohen wrote “Hallelujah” in 1984 — and spent two years on the words, filling notebooks with eighty draft verses. He said afterwards: “To write the right song, you have to be broken.”
He was born in Montreal in 1934, into a Jewish family. A poet first — The Favourite Game, Beautiful Losers — he recorded his first album at thirty-three. The voice was low, the words heavy.
“Suzanne,” “Bird on the Wire,” “Famous Blue Raincoat,” “Everybody Knows” — songs that grow more accurate as you age. He spent several years as a monk in a Buddhist monastery on Mount Baldy. Then he came back.
In 2012 his manager stole nearly all his money, and he had to tour again — at eighty. You Want It Darker, his last album, appeared three weeks before his death in 2016.