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 "It is with profound sorrow we report that legendary poet,
songwriter and artist, Leonard Cohen has passed away," a
statement on the Facebook page said. "We have lost one of
music's most revered and prolific visionaries."
The statement did not provide further details on Cohen's death,
and representatives for the singer could not be reached
immediately for comment. It said a memorial was planned in Los
Angeles, where Cohen had lived for many years.
"R.I.P. Leonard Cohen," singer-songwriter Carole King said on
Twitter.
Singer Roseanne Cash echoed the lyrics from Cohen's song
"Anthem" when she said in a tweet: "Leonard Cohen is dead.
There's a crack in everything. No light yet."
Cohen, a native of Quebec, was already a celebrated poet and
novelist when he moved to New York in 1966 at age 31 to break
into the music business.
Before long, critics were comparing him to Bob Dylan for the
lyrical force of his songwriting.
Although he influenced many musicians and won many honors,
including induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and the
Order of Canada, Cohen rarely made the pop music charts with his
sometimes moody folk-rock.
But Cohen's most famous song, "Hallelujah," in which he invoked
the biblical King David and drew parallels between physical love
and a desire for spiritual connection, has been covered hundreds
of times since he released it in 1984.
"Hallelujah's" long road to mass appeal was matched by Cohen's
own painstaking approach to writing it. He spent five years
penning drafts, at one point banging his head on the floor of a
hotel room in frustration.
THE SACRED AND PROFANE
Many of Cohen's songs became hits for other artists, including
Judy Collins, who helped Cohen gain fame by recording some of
his early compositions in the 1960s.
Cohen's most ardent admirers compared his works to spiritual
prophecy. He sang about religion, with references to Jesus
Christ and Jewish traditions, as well as love and sex, political
upheaval, regret and what he once called the search for "a kind
of balance in the chaos of existence".
His lyrics were deeply personal and at times took on an element
of prayer, as in 1969's "Bird on the Wire" in which he sang: "I
swear by this song/And by all that I have done wrong/I will make
it all up to thee."
Cohen's other well-known songs include "Suzanne," "So Long,
Marianne," "Famous Blue Raincoat" and "The Future," an
apocalyptic 1992 recording in which he darkly intoned: "I've
seen the future, brother/It is murder."
The inspiration for "So Long, Marianne" was Cohen's longtime
romantic partner and muse Marianne Ihlen, a Norwegian woman he
met while living on the Greek island of Hydra in the 1960s.
A New Yorker profile of Cohen last month recounted how, after
being told in July she had only a few days left to live, he
emailed her: "Well Marianne, it’s come to this time when we are
really so old and our bodies are falling apart and I think I
will follow you very soon."
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Two days later, he learned in an email she had died after reading
his note.
Cohen toured extensively from 2008 to 2013 after being unable to
collect most of a $9 million judgment against his former manager and
lover, Kelley Lynch, whom he accused of draining his savings.
He released an album, "You Want It Darker," just last month. But the
New Yorker described him as ailing, quoting him as saying he was
more or less "confined to barracks" in his Los Angeles residence.
MEANING AMID LOSS
Cohen's nasal voice and deep-bass, conversational vocals were
criticized by some as being monotone. British musician Paul Weller
once called his melancholy style "music to slit your wrists to".
But his work was also suffused with irony and self-deprecating
humor, often touching on his relationship with fame and his
reputation for romantic entanglements.
"I got this rap as a kind of ladies' man," Cohen told Canada's Globe
and Mail in 2007. "And as I say in one of the poems, it has caused
me to laugh, when I think of all the lonely nights."
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau described Cohen as "a most
remarkable Montrealer" who had "managed to reach the highest of
artistic achievement, both as an acclaimed poet and a world-renowned
singer-songwriter".
Born into a Jewish family in 1934 and raised in an affluent
English-speaking neighborhood of the city, Cohen read Spanish poet
Federico García Lorca as a teenager, learned to play guitar from a
flamenco musician and formed a country band called the Buckskin
Boys.
He attended McGill University in Montreal and published his first
book of poetry shortly after graduation. Living on grant money
from the Canadian government and an inheritance from his family,
Cohen published in the 1960s the poetry collections "The Spice-Box
of Earth" and "Flowers for Hitler" and novels "The Favourite Game"
and "Beautiful Losers."
But disillusioned with his meager income, Cohen turned to
songwriting and landed an audition in 1967 with John Hammond, the
producer who had discovered Dylan. Hammond signed him to Columbia
Records, which would remain Cohen's label for five decades.
Cohen toured widely but also sought solace in meditation, far from
the public eye. For part of the 1990s, Cohen lived in a Zen Buddhist
monastery in the San Gabriel Mountains just outside Los Angeles,
where he handled tasks as menial as cleaning toilets.
Cohen, who never married, is survived by his daughter, Lorca, and
his son, Adam.
(Additional reporting by Dan Whitcomb; Editing by Catherine Evans)
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