# The Mount Baldy Monastery *A Biography of Leonard Cohen* — Legendary Biographies No. 225 - **Subject:** Leonard Norman Cohen - **Written by:** Bryson Lyle - **Shelf:** Music / Folk & Songwriting - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 222 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-150-5) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Desmond Vale (ISBN 979-8-90623-620-3) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/225-the-mount-baldy-monastery.html ## About this book Leonard Cohen is filed under songwriter, and the Mount Baldy years are usually told as the interruption, a career put down in the San Gabriel Mountains and picked up again later. Bryson Lyle's biography takes both of those apart. Cohen had published three books before he made a record: Let Us Compare Mythologies in 1956, at twenty-two, The Spice-Box of Earth in 1961, and the novel Beautiful Losers in 1966. He recorded Songs of Leonard Cohen at Judy Collins's encouragement in December 1967. And the monastery was not a detour. This book argues the ordination had been the foundation of the work all along. The songs are the part everyone can recite. Suzanne, Bird on the Wire, Sisters of Mercy, Famous Blue Raincoat, Chelsea Hotel, Hallelujah, the last of them covered more than three hundred times by 2024. The life underneath ran through Westmount, the predominantly anglophone-Jewish neighbourhood of Montreal, where he was the elder of two children of a clothing manufacturer who died when Leonard was nine. Then McGill and Columbia. The Hydra years of the 1960s with Marianne Ihlen. The relationships with Suzanne Elrod, Rebecca De Mornay and Anjani Thomas. From 1996 to 2001 he lived at the Mount Baldy Zen Center in southern California's San Gabriel Mountains, ordained as a Rinzai Zen Buddhist monk under his teacher Joshu Sasaki Roshi. In 2005 the Kelley Lynch financial betrayal took $7 million and drove the seventy-three-year-old back on the road; the world tour that followed ran from 2008 to 2013 and produced the recordings. You Want It Darker, his fourteenth studio album, arrived in 2016. Three weeks after its release he died at his Los Angeles home, on November 7, 2016, at eighty-two. Thanks for the Dance was published posthumously in 2019. Poetry, fiction, song, and by his eightieth year the most-covered modern songwriter in the English language. ## Contents 1. 599 Belmont Avenue 2. Layton, Dudek, the Six Chords 3. Columbia to the Ferry 4. Marianne at the Grocery 5. The White House Above the Harbour 6. Beautiful Losers, the End of Prose 7. The Chelsea, the First Album, Janis 8. Songs from a Room, Isle of Wight 9. Sinai, the Spector Pistol, Masha 10. Various Positions, the Album Yetnikoff Refused 11. I'm Your Man, the Banana, the Future 12. Jikan: Five Years on the Mountain 13. Anjani, Dear Heather, the New Rooms 14. The Theft, the Two Hundred and Forty-Seven Shows 15. Old Ideas, Popular Problems 16. Hineni: 27 July to 7 November 2016 17. Tower of Song: The Posthumous Decade 18. The Bow-Tie Buried Again 19. Hallelujah ## Questions **Who is The Mount Baldy Monastery about?** Leonard Norman Cohen. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Mount Baldy Monastery — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 3,799 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 68,500 words, 19 chapters, 222 pages in the paperback. ## The writer Raised in a family of session musicians, Bryson Lyle spent his youth in recording studios and backstage wings. This upbringing shaped his focus on the labor and lives behind America's roots music, from country and gospel to Southern rock. He has written extensively on regional music histories and creative hubs. His biographical works include The Compton Tycoon, The Saskatoon Origins, The Mount Baldy Monastery, The 1650 Broadway Office, and A Man He Never Shot. He lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where he restores vintage acoustic guitars and collects mid-century gospel vinyl.