LEONARD COHEN (1934-2016) - THE MASTER OF EROTIC DESPAIR. .

Leonard Cohen, the Canadian poet and novelist who abandoned a promising literary career to become one of the foremost songwriters of the contemporary era, has died. He was 82. Adam Cohen, his son and producer, said: "My father passed away peacefully at his home in Los Angeles with the knowledge that he had completed what he felt was one of his greatest records".
More than 200 recordings of his songs have been made, initially by the folk-pop singers, like Judy Collins and Tim Hardin, and later by performers from across the spectrum of popular music like U2, Aretha Franklin, REM, Jeff Buckley, Trisha Yearwood and Elton John. Cohen's best known song may well be "Hallelujah", a majestic, meditative ballad infused with both religiosity and earthiness. It was written for a 1984 album that his record company rejected as insufficiently commercial and popularised a decade later by Jeff Buckley. Since then some 200 artists, from Bob Dylan to Justin Timberlake, have sung or recorded it.
Cohen's sophisticated, magnificently succinct lyrics, with their meditations on love sacred and profane, were widely admired by other artists and gave him a reputation as, to use the phrase his record company concocted in the early 1970s, "the master of erotic despair". Leonard Norman Cohen was born in Montreal on 21st September, 1934. His first book of poetry, "Let Us Compare Mythologies", was published in May 1956, while he was still an undergraduate. A period of drift followed graduation from college. Eventually, he ended up living in a house on the Greek island of Hydra, where he wrote a pair of novels: "The Favourite Game" and "Beautiful Losers".
"Beautiful Losers" gained a cult following and eventually sold more than three million copies, but the initial lack of commercial success was discouraging, and he turned to songwriting. Within months, Cohen had placed two songs on Judy Collins's album "In My Life". But he was extremely reluctant to take the next step and sing his songs himself. Cohen released his first album, "Songs of Leonard Cohen", in 1967. His second album, "Songs From a Room" cemented his reputation as a songwriter. To the end, Cohen took a sardonic view of both his craft and the human condition. In "Tower of Song" he brought the two together, making fun of being "born with the gift of a golden voice" and striking the same biblical tone apparent on his first album.
"The changeless is what he's been about since the beginning", the writer Pico Iyer argued in the liner notes for the anthology "The Essential Leonard Cohen". "Some of the other great pilgrims of song pass through philosophies and selves as if through the stations of the cross. With Cohen, one feels he knew who he was and where he was going from the beginning, and only digs deeper, deeper, deeper". 
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