The Mount Baldy Monastery

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.