Some voices do not demand attention. They make you lean in.
Leonard Cohen had one of those voices. Deep, gravelly, and unhurried, it sounded less like a singer performing for an audience and more like a slightly tipsy, wise but playful old man sitting across from you late at night, speaking only when he had something worth saying.
I first encountered Cohen in 2015 through some of his best-known songs, including "Suzanne," “Famous Blue Raincoat," "Hallelujah," “I’m Your Man," and “Bird on the Wire."
I was drawn to the quiet arrangements, the delicate guitar, and, above all, the melancholy in his melodies.
But it was his lyrics that kept pulling me back. I began listening to his albums one after another, moving through records such as Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967), Songs of Love and Hate (1971), New Skin for the Old Ceremony (1974), Various Positions (1984), I’m Your Man (1988), The Future (1992), Ten New Songs (2001), Popular Problems (2014), and You Want It Darker (2016). At first, I thought I had discovered a remarkable singer-songwriter.
Then came the COVID-19 lockdown.
With the world outside suddenly quiet, I started reading his work rather than simply listening to him. That was when I realized I had not merely discovered a musician. I had discovered a poet who happened to make music.
That changed the way I heard his songs.
Cohen was already an established Canadian writer before he became a singer. Born in Montreal on 21 September 1934, he published his debut poetry collection, Let Us Compare Mythologies, in 1956 at the age of 21, while still an undergraduate at McGill University.
He later published The Spice Box of Earth (1961), Flowers for Hitler (1964), Book of Mercy (1984), Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs (1993), Book of Longing (2006), and The Flame (2018), among other poetry collections, as well as the novels The Favourite Game (1963) and Beautiful Losers (1966).
In the early 1960s, he moved to the Greek island of Hydra, where he devoted himself to writing.
Yet despite gaining recognition as a writer, making a living from literature proved difficult.
By the mid-1960s, he turned towards music. He arrived in New York around 1966, hoping that songwriting and performing might provide the financial stability his books could not.
Judy Collins recorded "Suzanne," helping bring his writing to a wider audience. Eventually, he began performing his own songs.
His first album, Songs of Leonard Cohen, was released in late 1967, when he was already 33.
By the time he began making music, he had already spent years writing, reading, and thinking about the things that would later define his songs.
Perhaps that is what made his music feel so different to me.
His songs were filled with longing, desire, loneliness, faith, regret, and mortality. He seemed less interested in sounding fashionable than in saying something that might remain after the moment had passed.
Then there was "Hallelujah."
He spent years writing and rewriting the song, accumulating dozens of draft verses.
When Various Positions was released in 1984, Columbia Records declined to release it in the United States. The song found a much larger audience later, particularly through versions by John Cale and Jeff Buckley.
Today, “Hallelujah” is everywhere. But his original is far more complicated than the familiar chorus suggests.
His hallelujah contains desire and failure, doubt and devotion.
Throughout his work, the sacred and the sensual exist side by side. Biblical imagery appears beside erotic desire. Love songs turn into reflections on God. Intimacy leads unexpectedly to thoughts of death.
As he wrote in "Anthem," “There is a crack, a crack in everything / That's how the light gets in.”
He did not try to resolve these contradictions. He allowed them to remain.
His Jewish heritage shaped much of his writing, and his songs and poems frequently drew on biblical stories, figures and imagery. At the same time, his years studying Zen Buddhism added another dimension to his spiritual life. In 1996, he was ordained as a Zen monk at the Mount Baldy Zen Center in California under the name Jikan, meaning "silence."
Yet the poet remained the poet.
That became clearer to me during the pandemic. Reading his poems, I began noticing the things I had heard in his songs but never fully understood: the biblical references, the humour, the eroticism, the philosophical questions, and the sudden changes in tone.
What struck me most was the way he could bring so many different things into the same poem: love, desire, relationships, disappointment, faith, politics and philosophy.
In “The Bus," for example, a lonely passenger imagines escaping the city with the driver, ending up in “some tiny American fishing village / in unknown Florida." It begins almost playfully, but beneath the fantasy is loneliness, restlessness, and a desire to escape the world around him. Even the bus becomes something more than a bus: “metallic, painted, solitary," carrying the loneliness of the person inside it.
Elsewhere, he could achieve almost the opposite effect through extreme simplicity. His “Summer Haiku” consists of only a few words:
“Silence
and a deeper silence
when the crickets
hesitate."
There is almost nothing there, yet the poem leaves behind a whole atmosphere. This was part of what fascinated me about his poetry.
One moment he could sound like a wandering lover with a guitar, the next like a Jewish mystic or a Buddhist seeker, and then like a playful man making a joke. Somehow, emotion and intellect existed in the same space.
His language was equally distinctive. He could be sharp and direct, but he also played with words, leaving room for more than one meaning.
A line could seem simple at first and then reveal something else when read again. His poems could be deeply personal while carrying a remarkable understanding of life and its contradictions.
The poems stayed with me so deeply that I eventually began translating some of them into Bangla.
So far, I have translated more than 60 of them. The experience has brought me even closer to his work, leading me to spend more time with the words, images and silences that make his poetry so distinctly his own.
Sometimes he does not sound like someone presenting finished answers. He sounds like someone trying to understand life while writing about it.
That may be why his work continues to feel so human.
Cohen's final years added another remarkable chapter.
After discovering that his longtime manager had misappropriated much of his savings, he returned to touring in his seventies. Between 2008 and 2013, he performed around the world, often giving generous concerts that lasted for hours.
He did not try to hide his age. He seemed to make it part of the performance.
His final album, You Want It Darker, was released in October 2016.
It sounded like a man looking directly at mortality. Less than three weeks later, on 7 November, Leonard Cohen died at the age of 82 at his home in Los Angeles, California.
Nearly a decade later, his voice still finds new listeners.
For me, however, his legacy is not only in the songs. It is in the discovery that came afterwards.
I still return to his songs. But I also return to the books.
Because the older I get, the more convinced I become that the voice was only the beginning.
Behind it was the poet.
Ashfaq Saklain Gourab is a writer and communications professional interested in literature, film, and critical theory.