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The Life of Leonard Cohen
Ecco Press
September 2012
On Sale: September 18, 2012
576 pages
ISBN: 0061994987
EAN: 9780061994982
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography
The legend behind such songs as “Suzanne,” “Bird on the
Wire” and “Hallelujah” and the poet and novelist behind such
groundbreaking literary works as Beautiful Losers and Book
of Mercy, Leonard Cohen is one of the most important and
influential artists of our era, a man of powerful emotion
and intelligence whose work has explored the definitive
issues of human life—sex, religion, power, meaning, love.
Cohen is also a man of complexities and seeming
contradictions: a devout Jew, who is also a sophisticate and
ladies’ man, as well as an ordained Buddhist monk whose
name, Jikan—“ordinary silence”—is quite the appellation for
a writer and singer whose life has been anything but ordinary. I’m Your Man is the definitive account of that extraordinary
life. Acclaimed music journalist Sylvie Simmons crafts a
portrait of Cohen as nuanced as the man himself, drawing on
a wealth of research that includes Cohen’s personal archives
and more than a hundred exclusive interviews with those
closest to Cohen—from his lovers, friends, monks,
professors, rabbis and fellow musicians to his muses,
including Rebecca De Mornay, Marianne Ihlen, Suzanne Elrod
and Suzanne Verdal—and most important, with Cohen himself,
whose presence infuses these pages. Starting in Montreal, Cohen’s birthplace, where he first
found fame as a poet in the fifties, Simmons follows his
trail, via London and the Greek island of Hydra, to New York
in the sixties, where he launched his music career. From
there she traces the arc of his prodigious achievements to
his remarkable retreat in the mid-nineties—when on the cusp
of marriage to a beautiful actress and enjoying the success
of his best-selling album to date, he entered a monastery on
a rocky mountaintop above Los Angeles—and finally to his
reemergence for a sold-out world tour almost fifteen years
later. Whether navigating Cohen’s journeys through the back
streets of Mumbai or the countless hotel rooms where he has
stayed along the way, Simmons explores with equal focus
every complex, contradictory strand of Cohen’s life—from the
halls of academia to the arenas of rock ’n’ roll—and
presents a deeply insightful portrait of both the artist and
the man whose vision, spirit, depth and talent continue to
move people like no one else.
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