Originally published in Hot Press in 2016:

Released in April 1969, Songs From A Room was critically acclaimed and enjoyed considerable success in the UK, where it narrowly missed out on topping the charts. Leonard Cohen undertook his first tour in 1970, hitting the road in Canada and the US and appearing at the UK’s Isle of Wight festival, where he single-handedly stopped a riot after appealing to the agitated crowd for calm.

It set him up nicely for his third album, 1971’s Songs Of Love And Hate, which contained several more classic tracks and catapulted him to the front rank of contemporary singer-songwriters. Reuniting with Bob Johnston in Nashville, Cohen began laying down tracks that were rife with existential gloom, sealing his reputation as the archetypal bedsit poet (the New York Times wrote that on the alienation scale, he ranked “somewhere between Schopenhauer and Bob Dylan.”).

The album marked the first appearance of Cohen’s famous baritone, with the ominous atmosphere being further emphasised by the foreboding strings and stark imagery of the opening track, ‘Avalanche’: “I stepped into an avalanche/ It covered up my soul.”

The album’s centrepiece was the unforgettable ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’, which took the form of a letter written by a man who’d lost his wife to another lover. Once again, Cohen’s literary flair surfaced in a lyric that was novelistic in detail: “New York is cold but I like where I’m living/ There’s music on Clinton Street all through the evening”.

Rounding out a classic album was the epic ‘Joan Of Arc’, which boasted exquisite harmonies and even a singalong friendly “La-la-la” section. Subsequently described by one reviewer as “one of the scariest albums of the last forty years,” Songs Of Love And Hate nonetheless enjoyed considerable success, particularly in Europe, where it sealed Cohen’s reputation as one of the pre-eminent solo artists of his generation.

Listen to Songs of Love and Hate below:

Read Paul Nolan's full tribute to Leonard Cohen here.