With news last night of Leonard Cohen’s death at age 82, less than a month after releasing his new album You Want It Darker, the air will be thick with the many powerful covers of Cohen’s songs. So many heard the influential singer-songwriter’s words and melodies first through other people’s voices, not only the rightly ubiquitous “Hallelujah,” known from Jeff Buckley and Shrek, but also in versions of other Cohen songs by artists including Nina Simone, Nick Cave, Johnny Cash, R.E.M., Tori Amos, Anohni, and Lana Del Rey. Cohen may have sung that he “was born with the gift of a golden voice” and added a wink, but he did, indeed, have the music.
And yet it would be a mistake to celebrate other artists’ interpretations of Cohen’s work without examining how he, too, drew inspiration from those around him. Far from any stereotype of the solitary troubadour in his bedsit, Cohen in recent decades collaborated with a handful of co-songwriters, most prominently Sharon Robinson (“Everybody Knows,” Ten New Songs, “On the Level”) and Patrick Leonard (“You Want It Darker,” “Nevermind”). And if you’ve never heard his lone songwriting collaboration with Wall of Sound mastermind Phil Spector, “Memories,” its uncanny-valley Righteous Brothers-ness is something to behold. But Cohen also understood on a deeper level that creativity flows in a continuum, whether he was searching for King David’s “secret chord” on that most famous L. Cohen song, or listening for Hank Williams’ lonesome reply as a fellow resident in a “Tower of Song.” On Cohen’s final live recordings, he can sound almost like he’s covering his own hits.
Cohen didn’t do many covers, but the ones he did perform were often astonishing in their own right, and they also help to illuminate the enigmatic allure of his originals. Though he deservedly became a hero to goths, punks, and the entire realm of what has at times been considered “alternative” or even “indie” music, Cohen’s catalog is steeped in pre-rock sounds. No surprise, really, that he would’ve enjoyed the idea of working with a teen-pop svengali like Spector. Online, at varying levels of quality, there are clips of Cohen covering Elvis’s “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” the Western standard “Red River Valley,” and even the Bee Gees’ “To Love Somebody.” Focusing only on tracks Cohen officially released, here are seven times Cohen proved that the Tower of Song has a two-way elevator, and that the great songwriter was also, in his own way, a great interpreter.
“The Partisan” (1969; written by Emmanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie and Anna Marly)
As a Jewish cosmopolitan from multilingual Montreal, Cohen learned firsthand the illusory nature of borders and language gaps. Throughout his career, he didn’t just cover songs, he translated them. The lyrics to “Take This Waltz,” from 1988’s I’m Your Man, put to English a Spanish-language poem by Federico García Lorca. “The Lost Canadian,” from 1979’s Recent Songs, translates the 1842 Canadian anthem “Un Canadien errant” (which also lends its tune to “The Faith,” from 2004’s Dear Heather). “The Partisan,” from 1969’s Songs From a Room, is Cohen’s wonderfully affecting take on "La Complainte du Partisan,” a 1943 song about the French Resistance in World War II that had been adapted into English by Hy Zaret. Cohen’s haunting version became one of his signature songs, leading to renditions by Joan Baez, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Electrelane, First Aid Kit, and many others. The crack in our understanding, Cohen knew, was where the light gets in. (By 2004’s Dear Heather, meanwhile, Cohen was intoning others’ words with no translation required, channeling English-language poems by Lord Byron and F.R. Scott.)
“Passing Through” (1973; written by Richard C. Blakeslee)
An American professor of English named Dick Blakeslee fell into folk music as a student at the University of Chicago, and in the late 1940s he wrote the earnestly liberal “Passing Through.” Though folkies like Pete Seeger, the Highwaymen, and Cisco Houston recorded the song before Leonard Cohen did, as a single from 1973’s Live Songs, Cohen regularly performed it in his shows well into the ’90s. With its biblical lyrics and wryly fatalistic humor, “Passing Through” could easily be mistaken for own of Cohen’s own creations, though as such it would be uncharacteristically optimistic. Small wonder he added sardonically, “Ah, the fool,” after an upbeat line about FDR, and cut the original’s closing verse, where Lincoln proclaims, “All men must be unconditionally free / Or there is no reason to be passing through.” Cohen had seen the future, brother: It was murder.
“Be for Real” (1992; written by Frederick Knight)
Though Cohen would continue incorporating the occasional cover into his sets over the decades, he rarely recorded them. An exception came with 1992 studio album The Future, which included not one but two covers. “Be for Real,” a 1976 R&B ballad written for Marlena Shaw by Frederick Knight, who’d had a minor early-’70s hit for Stax Records with “I’ve Been Lonely for So Long,” illustrates Cohen’s affection for a soul deep cut. His rendition was strikingly faithful in its arrangement, aside from that deadpan baritone vocal, which in its own sense seems as sincere-sounding, as from the heart—as much “for real”—as the original’s handsomer, more melismatic vocals. Fittingly, another genre-blurring band, the Afghan Whigs, recorded its own cover, for the 1996 film Beautiful Girls.
“Always” (1992, written by Irving Berlin)
Cohen was also clearly versed in what’s commonly known as the Great American Songbook. Irving Berlin wrote the schmaltzy waltz “Always” as a wedding present for his wife in 1925. It has been recorded by some of the greats: Billie Holliday and Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra and Patsy Cline—um, even Phil Collins and Billy Corgan. On The Future, Cohen sets an ironic frame around the song (in a spoken-word intro, he remarks, “These are the words that you got to learn to say…”), and then he lurches through a bar-band arrangement like someone who knows that, as American Songbook aficionado Stephin Merritt’s Magnetic Fields would later observe, love is like a bottle of gin. At an epic eight minutes, Cohen’s “Always” is an unrelentingly odd cover that renders so many of the overly earnest ones frankly ridiculous. It’s easy to imagine him still smiling down about this.
“Tennessee Waltz” (1992, written by Redd Stewart and Pee Wee King)
Nor was “The Stranger Song” singer any stranger to country music. In fact, on the day George Jones died, Cohen covered Jones’s 1999 single “Choices,” originally written by Billy Yates and Mike Curtis, during a gig in Winnipeg, releasing a live recording on 2015’s Can’t Forget: A Souvenir of the Grand Tour Live. An even better demonstration of Cohen’s grounding in the genre, though, is in his version of “Tennessee Waltz,” a 1950 hit for Patti Page. Cohen’s live performance from the 1985 Montreux Jazz Festival appears as the last song on 2004’s Dear Heather. It’s twangy and weeping with steel guitar, but in the context of Cohen’s vast repertoire, it’s somehow naturally at home. From good old Rocky Top to the beach of Malibu…
“Whither Thou Goest” (2009, written by Guy Singer)
David Bowie’s death earlier this year gave music fans another chance to remember that the supposed divide between rock’n’roll and popular ditties like “(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window?” was always more myth than reality; the best artists borrowed from both. Cohen was clearly no exception, as “Whither Thou Goest” shows perhaps best of all. Written in 1954, with lyrics drawn from the Old Testament, the waltzing ballad charted highest in the hands of Les Paul and Mary Ford, but others recording it ranged from crooners Perry Como and Bing Crosby to gospel powerhouse Mahalia Jackson. Cohen covered this song more than any other in Setlist.fm’s database, from at least 1988 until 2009, when he issued it as the finale for that year’s Live in London concert recording. This version, centered around the angelic harmonies of his backing vocalists, packs all the ritual majesty of a perfect hymn. Right now, especially, it’s an emotional listen.
Save the Last Dance for Me (2014; written by Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman)
Doc Pomus, who co-wrote this 1960 pop and R&B hit for the Drifters, had polio. His wife at the time was a Broadway performer. The song, it has been said, was inspired by Pomus watching others dance with his bride on their wedding night. The tale would be touching enough, but with Ben E. King’s effortless vocal and the delicate, lightly Spanish-tinged arrangement, the record is a classic, too. “Save the Last Dance for Me” was the last song Cohen performed live, and it’s the final song on 2014’s Live in Dublin, a triple album and concert film. What I love most about the Dublin version is how he turns this into a crowd clap- and sing-along. He’s the man who wrote “Hallelujah,” and he saved the last dance for us.
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