Songs of Love and Hate

Songs of Love and Hate was Leonard Cohen's third studio album, recorded in Nashville and London sessions produced by Bob Johnston and released in March 1971, arriving just as the plaintive melancholy of his first two records hardened into something starker and more desolate. The songs trace a bleak arc from the ecstatic dread of the opening “Avalanche” through the bitter domestic reckoning of “Last Year's Man” and “Dress Rehearsal Rag” to the elegiac “Famous Blue Raincoat,” a letter-form ballad of betrayal and reconciliation that became one of the most covered and analysed songs of Cohen's career. “Joan of Arc,” closing the record, recasts romantic surrender as martyrdom, a recurring motif in Cohen's writing of religious and erotic imagery fused together. Coming after the commercially mixed reception of Songs from a Room, the album deepened Cohen's reputation as a poet-songwriter of uncommon literary weight rather than a pop figure, and it has since been recognised as one of the most unflinching records of the singer-songwriter era. Critics at the time were divided by its austerity, but the album's reputation has only grown, with “Famous Blue Raincoat” and “Avalanche” now considered essential entries in Cohen's songbook. It remains a touchstone for the confessional, darkly romantic strain of folk songwriting that Cohen helped define.