World mourns the death of Leonard Cohen – as it happened

Last year, Guardian music colleagues compiled a list of Cohen’s 10 best songs.

At number one? Suzanne.

Check your own list against the Guardian’s here:

11 Nov 201621.50 EST

Lanre Bakare

As well as musing on mortality, Cohen recently weighed in on Bob Dylan’s surprise Nobel prize win, the art of songwriting and the constant presence of religious themes in his work.

Speaking at a Q&A and playback session for his latest and now final album in Los Angeles, Cohen said that giving the award to Dylan “is like pinning a medal on Mount Everest for being the highest mountain”:

I think that Bob Dylan knows this more than all of us: you don’t write the songs anyhow.

So if you’re lucky, you can keep the vehicle healthy and responsive over the years. If you’re lucky, your own intentions have very little to do with this. You can keep the body as well-oiled and receptive as possible, but whether you’re actually going to be able to go for the long haul is really not your own choice.

He also spoke about religion’s impact on his work. Cohen was an ordained Zen Buddhist who was given the Dharma name of Jikan – which means “silence” – after taking up the religion and kicking his habit of drinking four bottles of wine a day.

I’ve never thought of myself as a religious person. I don’t have any spiritual strategy. I kind of limp along like so many of us do in these realms. Occasionally I’ve felt the grace of another presence in my life. But I can’t develop any kind of spiritual structure on that.

This biblical landscape is very familiar to me, and it’s natural that I use those landmarks as references. Once they were universal references, and everybody understood and knew them. That’s no longer the case today, but it is still my landscape.

I try to make those references. I try to make sure they’re not too obscure. But outside of that, I can’t – I dare not – claim anything in the spiritual realm for my own.

11 Nov 201621.42 EST

Steph Harmon

You Want It Darker was co-produced by Leonard Cohen’s son, Adam. Speaking recently with CBC radio host Tom Power, Adam talked about working with his father on the album many believed would be his last.

This old man, who was truly in pain and discomfort, would at some intervals get out of his medical chair and dance in front of his speakers.

And sometimes, we would put on a song and listen to it on repeat just like teenagers with the help of medical marijuana.

I think in states of pain and discomfort, what do you seek with more energy and more clarity than joy and jubilance?

Adam described his father as “the last of his kind”:

Unlike so many from that golden era, from which he comes, he’s not a nostalgia act.

This guy is speaking from his particular vantage point, he’s speaking about things that are meaningful to him at his particular rung in life — he will be leaving a giant void when he leaves us.

11 Nov 201621.32 EST

So long, Marianne

Lanre Bakare

Cohen’s comments after the death of his most famous muse Marianne Ihlen, who died in August, now strike a particularly prophetic tone.

Jan Christian Mollestad, a documentary maker, read a letter Cohen wrote to her before she died:

Well Marianne, it’s come to this time when we are really so old and our bodies are falling apart and I think I will follow you very soon.

Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine.

Ihlen, whom Cohen wrote about in So Long, Marianne and Bird on a Wire, died in Norway on 29 July, aged 81.

You Want It Darker, the album released only weeks ago, won rave reviews, including from the Observer, which gave it five stars. Reviewer Kitty Empire said it was:

an album of killer couplets, even the bleakest delivered with a half-smile. Finality is a theme.

The Guardian’s Alexis Petridis also gave it five stars:

Throughout, he sounds wise and honest, and – despite the occasional lyrical protestations of weariness – full of life. Last week in LA, Cohen talked about making two more albums, about following the musical path sketched out on the album’s finale, String Reprise/Treaty.

It’s hard not to hope it works out that way – the man behind You Want It Darker does not seem like someone running short on inspiration – but if circumstances dictate otherwise, there are worse ways to bow out than this.

In an interview last month, Cohen said he was “ready to die”.

He told the New Yorker:

I am ready to die. I hope it’s not too uncomfortable. That’s about it for me.

In the same interview, he said he had a vault of unpublished poems and unfinished lyrics to finish and record or publish:

The big change is the proximity to death. I am a tidy kind of guy. I like to tie up the strings if I can. If I can’t, that’s OK.

But my natural thrust is to finish things that I’ve begun.

Leonard Cohen has died at the age of 82.

A post to his official Facebook page today announced the musician’s passing.

It is with profound sorrow we report that legendary poet, songwriter and artist, Leonard Cohen has passed away. We have lost one of music’s most revered and prolific visionaries.

A memorial will take place in Los Angeles at a later date. The family requests privacy during their time of grief.

We will have tributes and reaction to his death as they come in.