The World of Leonard Cohen

Rock Star author Shumway, an English professor at Carnegie Mellon, collects illuminating essays exploring the life, work, and legacy of singer-songwriter, poet, and novelist Leonard Cohen (1934–2015). Ira B. Nadel’s “The Life of a Troubadour” vividly traces Cohen’s life from his upper-class Canadian Jewish roots to his early affinity for poetry and music (at 15 he heard a young Spanish musician playing guitar in a park and “knew at once he had discovered a secret”), and the depression and restlessness that followed him throughout his career. Another of the book’s strongest pieces is “Assembling Albums in the Tower of Song” from Rolling Stone writer Anthony DeCurtis, whose familiarity with Cohen—he interviewed Cohen and wrote liner notes for some of his albums—adds a deep familiarity to his discussion of the artist’s creative process. Elsewhere, Alan Light spotlights the centrality of melody in Cohen’s music and notes that even though most attention is paid to Cohen’s songwriting, “usually, the tunes were completed before the lyrics.” While some pieces retread the same ground—much is said about the song “Hallelujah,” and about Cohen’s romantic relationships—they more often enrich one another, especially in elucidating Cohen’s painstaking and sometimes-tortured creative process (in the concluding essay, Robert de Young notes that Cohen rejected more than 80 verses for “Hallelujah”). The result is a multifaceted portrait of an artist whose creativity transcended genre and form. (Jan.)