By his third record, Cohen had stopped softening anything. Songs of Love and Hate, released in 1971, is darker and starker than the two albums before it, less the gentle troubadour, more a man writing from somewhere colder. He cut most of it in Nashville with producer Bob Johnston, the same hands behind some of Dylan’s records, and the room shows in the spareness: voice forward, arrangements that stay out of the way until they don’t.

It holds some of his most lasting writing. Famous Blue Raincoat, the four-in-the-morning letter, sits alongside Avalanche, the slow grim climb later picked up by Nick Cave, and Joan of Arc, where Cohen turns a saint’s death into a conversation. Diamonds in the Mine cuts the gloom with something rougher. The title is not a metaphor. The record really does live in both places, the love and the hate, and refuses to pick a side.