Leonard Cohen

Leonard Cohen was a writer long before he was a singer. Born in Montreal in 1934, he published poetry and two novels first, The Spice-Box of Earth, then Beautiful Losers, and built a reputation on the page before he ever stood in front of a microphone. He came to music late, around 33, an age when most songwriters are already a few albums deep. That lateness shows. He wrote songs the way a novelist writes, slowly, deliberately, turning a single line over for years until it earned its place.

His voice was low and plain and never tried to be pretty, which suited him, because the words were doing the work. Suzanne, Bird on the Wire, So Long Marianne, and later Hallelujah, the song that took on a second life far bigger than his own recording of it, all carry the same fingerprint: literary, exact, unhurried, comfortable sitting with the dark parts.

He kept working into his eighties and died in 2016, still writing, still releasing records that sounded like a man with nothing left to prove and no interest in rushing. Few songwriters were as unembarrassed by depth. Cohen treated a lyric like a sentence that had to be right, and waited until it was.