Greatest Hits

Leonard Cohen arrived in popular music as a published poet and novelist already in his thirties, and his first four albums - Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967), Songs from a Room (1969), Songs of Love and Hate (1971) and New Skin for the Old Ceremony (1974) - established him as one of the era's most distinctive songwriters, trading the folk revival's optimism for a spare, literary melancholy. This compilation draws its twelve tracks from across that run, pairing early signature pieces such as “Suzanne” and “So Long, Marianne” - songs rooted in his Montreal and Greek-island years - with the harder-edged “Bird on the Wire” and “The Partisan” from the Nashville sessions, and later, more confessional material like “Famous Blue Raincoat” and “Chelsea Hotel No. 2”. Cohen's own liner notes on the back cover, offering brief, often wry accounts of each song's origins, underline how closely his writing stayed tied to lived experience - hotel rooms, broken love affairs, friendships and political upheaval. Critically, Cohen's early work was divisive on release - too literary for some rock audiences - but it steadily built the devoted following that made him one of the most covered and revered songwriters of his generation, and these songs in particular became foundational to his reputation, cited for decades afterward as the core of his achievement in the 1960s and 70s.