LEONARD COHEN | HALLS OF FAME

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LEONARD COHEN | HALLS OF FAME

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LEONARD COHEN | HALLS OF FAME
THE OFFICIAL HALLS OF FAME BIOGRAPHIES OF LEONARD COHEN
DEDICATED TO THE DOCUMENTATION OF THE HALLS OF FAME AWARDS AND OTHER HONORS LEONARD COHEN HAS RECEIVED THROUGHOUT HIS CAREER

http://leonardcohenhallsoffame.blogspot.com

THE 1991 CANADIAN MUSIC HALL OF FAME

Leonard Cohen is one of Canada's best-known singer/songwriters. His songs and poems have been embraced by millions the world over, and his writings have been studied and translated into many languages. Born in Montreal in 1934, he started out his musical career as a guitarist in a country band while studying literature at McGill University. By 1966, his literary reputation had grown with the publishing of three collections of poetry and two best-selling novels.

Judy Collins' recording of "Suzanne" resulted in Leonard Cohen himself being signed by legendary Columbia talent scout John Hammond and released his first album, Songs of Leonard Cohen, in 1967. Now on his tenth album and the latest recipient of the CBS International Crystal Globe Awards, he has sold more than five million albums outside of the United States. In Europe his popularity is such that he is honoured annually at the Leonard Cohen Festival in Krakow, Poland.

While performers like Suzanne Vega, Elvis Costello, and The Cure have cited his influence on their work, other artists like Neil Diamond, Diana Ross, Aaron Neville, Joan Baez and Joe Cocker have helped maintain Leonard Cohen's popularity with their own interpretations of his music. Long time associate Jennifer Warnes' critically acclaimed album of 1986, Famous Blue Raincoat, was devoted entirely to the songs of Leonard Cohen. In addition to his outstanding musical achievements, Leonard Cohen's work includes first prize at the Festival International de Television de Montreaux, Switzerland for the film I Am A Hotel which he scripted and scored.

With the induction into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame, Leonard Cohen joins previous Hall of Famers including The Guess Who, Oscar Peterson, Paul Anka, Joni Mitchell, Glenn Gould, Guy Lombardo, The Diamonds, Neil Young, Hank Snow, The Crew-Cuts, The Four Lads, Wilf Carter, Gordon Lightfoot, The Band, and Maureen Forrester. Leonard Cohen's induction into the Hall of Fame is in recognition of his contribution towards the greater international recognition of Canadian artists and music.

Leonard Cohen is many things to many people: poet, novelist, singer, songwriter, monk. But to all, is a legend. He was born in the English-speaking Montreal neighbourhood of Westmount on September 21, 1931. His earliest musical venture was a country and western square dance band, the Buckskin Boys, co-founded with a childhood friend while Leonard Cohen studied English at McGill University.

Leonard Cohen’s songwriting, however, would take a backseat to poetry (Flowers for Hitler, Let Us Compare Mythologies) and novels (The Favorite Game, Beautiful Losers) for several years. It was not until 1966 that he would make a concerted effort to sell his music, establishing himself in New York on the way to his proposed destination, Nashville. Via Bob Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman, Leonard Cohen sold the songs “Suzanne” and “Dress Rehearsal Rag” to folk singer Judy Collins. (They appeared on her 1967 album In My Life.)

His debut album, The Songs of Leonard Cohen, finally appeared in 1968, and contains his own version of “Suzanne.” Director Robert Altman used three tracks from the record in his 1971 film McCabe and Mrs. Miller.

The ‘70s would see Leonard Cohen establish a fertile working relationship with producer John Lissauer (1974’s New Skin for the Old Ceremony) and a more controversial one with Phil Spector (1977’s Death of a Ladies’ Man).

Leonard Cohen would finally come into his own commercially in the ‘80s with the Lissauer-produced Various Positions (1985) and its semi-hit “Dance Me to the End of Love,” which saw Leonard Cohen make his first video.

His reputation would be burnished by the success of Famous Blue Raincoat (1987), an album of Leonard Cohen covers by his backup singer Jennifer Warnes. It included the Leonard Cohen original “First We Take Manhattan,” featuring Stevie Ray Vaughan on guitar. Leonard Cohen would later include his own version on his own acclaimed 1988 album I’m Your Man.

Leonard Cohen’s renaissance continued in the ‘90s with 1992’s The Future getting a warm reception. Filmmaker Oliver Stone used three of its songs in 1994’s Natural Born Killers.

A period of seclusion followed as Leonard Cohen was ordained a Buddhist monk. He returned to public life with the release of 2001’s Ten New Songs and has continued to tour and record, most recently releasing Popular Problems in 2014.

The number of awards and honours Leonard Cohen has accrued over his career are too numerous to detail, but some of the most prominent include a Governor General’s Award (in 1968), his induction into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame (in 1991) and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (in 2008), five JUNO awards, a GRAMMY Lifetime Achievement Awards (in 2011), and being made an Officer of the Order of Canada (1991).

His artistic legacy, likewise, is ongoing and immeasurable. Kurt Cobain name-checked him in the lyrics of Nirvana’s song, “Pennyroyal Tea.” He has been the subject of three major tribute albums: the aforementioned Famous Blue Raincoat, 1991’s I’m Your Fan, and 1995’s Tower of Song. He has been name-checked as an influence by countless artists, including Nick Cave, R.E.M. and The Pixies, and the number of beautiful covers of his song “Hallelujah” – Jeff Buckley and k.d. lang first and foremost among them – is astonishing.

Career Highlights

1968: Won (but declined) the 1968 Governor General’s Award for Selected Poems 1956–1968

1991: Inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame

1991: Was made an Officer of the Order of Canada

2008: Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

2010: Has won five JUNO awards and a GRAMMY Lifetime Achievement Award

Media mogul Moses Znaimer inducts the legendary Leonard Cohen into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame at The 1991 JUNO Awards in Vancouver.

Here to present this year’s Hall of Fame award, president of Much Music, MusiquePlus, and Toronto’s City TV, Moses Znaimer.

I think that to create even a single song and float it in the air and have it play and play and play must be a wonderful thing, but to do that with an entire body of work that includes words as well as music, poems as well as melodies, and novels as well as records, and to do it over the space of twenty or thirty years, that proves that the work is true. I’ve known this about our nominee, that his work is true and that it’s destined to last. Ever since I met him thirty-five years ago in Montreal, where we were both students of Irving Layton. I was still in high school, but he was already out there establishing, burnishing, elevating his myth as a loner and a lover, and of course I identified like mad. Imagine an impossibly brash young man who prays for tunes and audiences and fame, and gets them, and along with them the countervailing burdens and broken hearts that lead him back to wisdom and compassion. So, very early on I became enormously proud that he came from my neighbourhood, my community, my city, and when he went on to conquer Europe, I was equally proud that we shared a country, and today, with millions of his albums quietly alive in millions of hearts and minds all over the world, we can all of us be glad that we share the same planet with Leonard Cohen. Ladies and Gentlemen, he’s my ideal, and your new member of the Juno Hall of Fame, Leonard Cohen.

The Leonard Cohen Acceptance Speech

Thank you. Thank you so much for standing up for me. I owe so much to so many that if I began to catalog the debts I’ve incurred on the way I would be in danger of exhausting us all with an endless filibuster of insolvency and gratitude. I did resist the tone that was entering the hall in which I was afraid of finding myself a guest of honor at a memorial service. I hope even though the devil laughs when we make plans, I hope that I will be able to sing another song or two before the curtain comes down. Some well-meaning, but mistaken individuals, came to me and said, well it’s about time they gave you that award. But I want to say that the graciousness, the hospitality and the timing of the academy are impeccable. If I had been given this attention when I was twenty-six, it would have turned my head. At thirty-six it would have confirmed my flight on a rather morbid spiritual path. At forty-six it would have rubbed my nose and my failing powers and prompted a plotting of a getaway and an alibi. But at fifty-six, hell I’m just hitting my stride and it doesn’t hurt at all.

I want to salute those who stood here before me, the residence of the hall of fame: Guy Lombardo, Oscar Peterson, Hank Snow, Wilf Carter, the Diamonds, The Crew-Cuts, the Four Lads, Glenn Gould, Neil Young, The Band, Paul Anka, Gordon Lightfoot, Joni Mitchell, Maureen Forrester. Two women of genius among all that exuberant masculine prominence causes me to reflect that it’s going to be hard to get a date in the hall of fame. But I know, like New York City, it’s only a place you visit. You don’t want to live there. Any soldier knows you don’t go to bed with your medals on. But most urgent on my list of appreciation are those of you who have welcomed my tunes into your lives, into your kitchens when you’re doing the dishes, in your bedrooms, in your courting and conceiving, into those nights of loss and bewilderment, and into those aimless places of the heart, which only a song seems to be able to enter. It is before this sudden and strange and mysterious intimacy that has developed between us that I bow my head with real gratitude. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Suzanne Vega performs "Who By Fire"
Aaron Neville performs "Bird On A Wire"
Jennifer Warnes performs "Joan Of Arc"


THE 1991 ORDER OF CANADA

Officer of the Order of Canada
Leonard Cohen, C.C., B.A., LL.D.
Appointment: April 19, 1991
Investiture: October 30, 1991

Poet, singer/songwriter and novelist, Leonard Cohen is one of the most popular and influential writers of his generation whose work has been critically acclaimed throughout the world and has made Canadian literature familiar to readers abroad. Images of beauty, despair, outrage and tenderness are found in his lyrical poetry and prose, whose themes of love, loss and loneliness touch a universal chord in us all.


THE 2003 ORDER OF CANADA

Companion of the Order of Canada
Leonard Cohen, C.C., B.A., LL.D.
Appointment: October 10, 2002
Investiture: October 24, 2003

Known for his striking imagery and evocative descriptions of the human condition, Leonard Cohen has the distinction of creating a body of work that has remained contemporary and significant through three decades of shifting musical and aesthetic tastes. His 1992 album, The Future, introduced his poetic style to a new generation of listeners. In 2001, Leonard Cohen released his twelfth album, Ten New Songs. It soared to the top of the charts, reaching gold and platinum sales in Canada and in several other countries. His continued popularity confirms his status as a Canadian icon and a venerated dean of the pop culture movement.

This is a promotion within the Order.


THE 2005 CANADIAN FOLK MUSIC WALK OF FAME

Leonard Cohen is living a resurgence of interest in his life and music at the moment, touring the world with a very successful series of concerts, some recorded for radio and TV, that showcase his innovative, honest and spiritual music. Since "Suzanne" became a folk music staple in the '60's, Leonard Cohen has reinvented the settings for his deep lyrical messages many times, ethno-folkie at one point, synth-driven at another. Always the melodies are memorable and the wedding of lyric and tune impeccable. Leonard Cohen is often sited as a major inspiration by artists as disparate as U2, Elton John and Kris Kristofferson.


THE 2006 CANADIAN SONGWRITERS HALL OF FAME

The Governor General of Canada Adrienne Clarkson inducts Leonard Cohen into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame

Before Leonard Cohen, there were songs, and after hearing Leonard Cohen, there are no songs quite like his. He has changed all of our lives with the complexity of his sadness, the breadth of his love. He gets inside your brain, your heart, your lungs. You remember him, you feel him, you breathe him. He is our connection to the meaning of ecstasy. Our access to another world we suspected existed, but which he puts into song. We love you Leonard, but in that love is some fear, fear that you are telling us the truth, and that the truth will make us know ourselves through unbearable beauty in painful remorse. In one of your first published poems, you wrote, "I heard of a man who says words so beautifully that if he only speaks their name women give themselves to him." We have heard those words and we have all given ourselves to him. It honours me deeply to present this award to Leonard Cohen, our Leonard Cohen.

Standing alone, the poetry of Leonard Cohen is perhaps the most precisely crafted observation of the human experience. Set to music, the songs of Leonard Cohen have become the standard to which songwriters aspire. Leonard Cohen was born in Montreal in 1935. His broad intellect was fostered by his maternal grandfather, a hebrew scholar who filled Leonard Cohen's young mind with the foundation of the Torah scripture (seeds for the themes that would reappear in his songwriting). By the time he attended university at McGill, he was winning awards for his writing, and his readings were becoming events. Leonard Cohen's brave, groundbreaking poetry was a voice to be reckoned with, but was misunderstood by the overly gentil society of the time. Leonard Cohen was undetered, and so Leonard Cohen the poet turned to song in search of an audience in tune with his work.

By 1967, his first record, Songs of Leonard Cohen was released. One song in particular hypnotized listeners with its mix of metaphor and mystique. When Judy Collins covered "Suzanne" the cult of Leonard Cohen was born. Her hit shot Leonard Cohen into the vein of popular culture where he has resided in measured isolation ever since. Over the years, Leonard Cohen's records have resided on the outskirts of the mainstream. His career does not read like a slick press release of hit singles or statistics. Yet, Leonard Cohen's songwriting has remained a constant, a guiding light from the tower of song. The effect of Leonard Cohen as a songwriter speaks for itself. More than 32 tribute albums to his work have been made, and over a thousand singles of his songs have been recorded worldwide, more than any other modern era songwriter. For anyone with a broken heart, or anyone with a heart for that matter, we have been able to turn to the combination of vintage wine and vintage Leonard Cohen to begin to heal. "The grocer of pain," as he called himself, has come to the rescue. For his wonderful words and his timeless body of work, we induct Leonard Cohen into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame.

The Leonard Cohen Acceptance Speech

Thank you friends. Thank you so much. The brevity and poverty of these remarks do not reflect the abundance of feeling in my heart for all of you and for the deep hospitality you have given to my work over the years. If I knew where the good songs came from I would go there more often. So it is that we shuffle behind our songs into the hall of fame, shuffle awkwardly, not quite believing that we wrote them, but happy that you do. You have been so good to me over the years. My heart is filled with gratitude. Georges Dor wrote that great song: "If you knew how life drags on at la Manic, you would write to me a lot more often at la Manicouagan." That is what we are all saying to one another. If you knew how life dragged on, you would write to us a lot more often. You would write each of us to one another. I'm so privileged and so proud and so honoured that you have accepted some of my letters. Thank you so much.

The Biography

Leonard Cohen (Montreal, Quebec, 21 September, 1934)
Year Inducted: 2006; Era Inducted To: Modern

With an extraordinary career spanning more than forty years, Canadian musical icon Leonard Cohen has earned the distinction as one of the most influential artists of his generation. A legendary songwriter, Leonard Cohen has brought honesty and artistry in a way few others have. His stark images of love, beauty and despair have touched fans and inspired writers and musicians the world over.

Throughout his storied lifetime, Leonard Cohen has succeeded as both poet and pop star. Inspired by his own history and romantic experiences, his intelligent musings and musical gifts have endured no matter where he resides - be it the urban chaos of Los Angeles and Montreal, the domestic comfort of a Greek island or monastic isolation of a Zen Buddhist Monastery.

His intense lyrics, spiritual observations and deft humour weave throughout his impressive body of work. Leonard Cohen's extraordinary writing and musical talents have gained him numerous accolades, among them: the Governor General's Award for poetry in 1969 which he declined, stating, "the poems themselves forbid it absolutely," followed by several Juno Awards, honorary degrees, and in 2003, the Companion of the Order of Canada, Canada's highest civil honor for achievement in the arts.

Leonard Norman Cohen was born in Montreal on September 21, 1934. He attended McGill University, where at 17, he formed a country western trio called the Buckskin Boys. While still an undergraduate, Leonard Cohen became part of Montreal's burgeoning Bohemian scene and published his first collection of poetry (Let Us Compare Mythologies) in 1956. The Spice Box of Earth (1961), his second collection of poems, catapulted Leonard Cohen to international recognition.

After a brief stint at Columbia University in New York, Leonard Cohen traveled throughout Europe and settled on the Greek island of Hydra where he wrote another collection of poetry (Flowers for Hitler, 1964) and two highly acclaimed novels (The Favourite Game, 1963 and Beautiful Losers, 1966). The books have been translated into many languages including Chinese and Japanese.

After seven years on Hydra, Leonard Cohen's restless spirit led him to the United States where he pursued his career as a songwriter. Championed by singer/songwriter Judy Collins, Leonard Cohen appeared at the Newport Folk Festival in 1967 where he caught the eye - and ear - of legendary Columbia A&R man John Hammond (who also recruited Billie Holiday, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen to the label) and by Christmas of that year, Columbia released his signature debut album, Songs of Leonard Cohen.

Songs like the enduringly popular Suzanne, and Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye, So Long, Marianne, and Sisters of Mercy propelled Leonard Cohen to the top of the pop music pantheon. The songs had such power that Robert Altman's 1971 film, McCabe and Mrs. Miller became, in effect, the first long form video for Leonard Cohen's soundtrack.

Songs From a Room (1969), his second album, and Songs of Love and Hate (1971) further reinforced Leonard Cohen's standing as a sentry of solitude. With Bird on the Wire, Story of Isaac, Joan of Arc, and Famous Blue Raincoat, he continued to stretch the borders of the lyrical landscape of the times.

Recent Songs (1979), co-produced with Henry Lewy (who had previously worked with Joni Mitchell), continued Leonard Cohen's dissection of the male female union, but also reflected his many explorations into the religious sphere. Various Positions (1984) marked the full flowering of these religious journeys. Songs like Hallelujah, The Law, Heart With No Companion, and If It Be Your Will, are contemporary psalms, born of an undoubtedly long and difficult spiritual odyssey, so difficult that its conclusion left Leonard Cohen - in his words " wiped out." I'm Your Man (1988) was the culmination of Leonard Cohen's professional and personal reintegration, a beautifully crafted work that speaks eloquently to his experience as a musical elder. Buoyed by now classic songs like First We Take Manhattan, Tower of Song, and Ain't No Cure For Love, the album went to #1 in several countries.

Despite many long passages of time between albums, Leonard Cohen's music has been kept on the airwaves through interpretations by artists as diverse as Neil Diamond, Nick Cave, Diana Ross, Joan Baez, Rita Coolidge, and Joe Cocker. Longtime musical colleague Jennifer Warnes released the critically acclaimed Famous Blue Raincoat in 1986, an entire album of Leonard Cohen's work.

In 1992, a number of contemporary recording artists collaborated on a tribute to Leonard Cohen. I'm Your Fan (1991) was the brainchild of Christian Fevret, editor of French rock magazine, Les Inrockuptibles. Originally intended for release on the magazine's small offshoot label Oscar, the project mushroomed into an 18 song cover collection released by Atlantic, featuring such prominent musicians as R.E.M., John Cale, Nick Cave, lan McCulloch, The Pixies, House of Love and Lloyd Cole. Tower of Song (1995) featured interpretations of Leonard Cohen songs by more mainstream artists such as Billy Joel, Sting, Elton John, Willie Nelson and Bono.

1992 saw the release of his eleventh album, The Future, an amazingly aural documentation befitting a cultural malaise. It was following the 1993 "Future" tour that Leonard Cohen retreated from public life and lived several years at the Zen Center on Mount Baldy in Southern California.

In January 1999, Leonard Cohen came down from the mountain armed with hundreds of new lyrics and poems. He settled in Los Angeles where he released two records, first another live album entitled Field Commander Cohen Tour of 1979 and in October, after nine years, the entrancing collection, Ten New Songs. After such a long silence, the power of this new studio album lay in its singleness, its unity of tone, songs flowing one into the other with a grave, contained intensity. In 2002, many of his best-known songs were digitally remastered and released on the double CD The Essential Leonard Cohen.

In 2004, Leonard Cohen returned with Dear Heather, produced with collaborators and singers, Sharon Robinson and Anjani Thomas. This musically diverse collection of songs seemed to celebrate the beauty of the world he had returned to with soaring lyrical styles and musical arrangements. Leonard Cohen's supporters and the sizeable online community of newsgroups and chat lines continually dissecting his creations anxiously await his next release. He is now working on new songs for his next album for a possible mid-2006 release. He is also working on new songs for Anjani Thomas' forthcoming album Blue Alert, to be released in Spring 2006.

A lyrical icon whose musical trials and travails have led him through an odyssey of hope, conflict and love, Leonard Cohen has taken us to that place by the harbor and our world has become much richer for the journey.

INDUCTED SONGS

Suzanne - Year Inducted: 2006; Era Inducted To: Modern; Written In: 1967; Lyrics & Music: Leonard Cohen. In 1966, Leonard Cohen penned Suzanne with the landscape of the Old Port in Montreal in mind. Leonard Cohen revealed, "the song was begun, and the chord pattern was developed, before a woman's name entered the song. And I knew it was a song about Montreal..." The beautiful poem and love song was originally inspired by the view of the Montreal harbour from the observation tower of the Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours chapel, known as the Sailors' Church. Remnants of the chapel are found in the lines, "And the sun pours down like honey/ On our lady of the harbour" which are in reference to the Our Lady of the Harbour statue that stands, with arms outstretched, towards the St. Lawrence river. It was after Leonard Cohen's chance meeting with Suzanne, the wife of sculptor Armand Vaillancourt, that life was breathed into the piece. She invited him to her home located near the river where the pair shared a cup of tea. "Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river," begins the beautiful and descriptive narrative of the woman who "feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China." Suzanne is poetry set to music. The beautiful and descriptive narrative was published in Selected Poems 1956-1968 (Toronto 1968) and later released on his debut LP, Songs of Leonard Cohen, in 1967. Judy Collins would be the first to record the song after having heard it sung to her over the telephone by Leonard Cohen, himself, and Noel Harrison would take the single to Number 56 on the pop charts. The song would go on to become one of Leonard Cohen's most covered singles with over 100 versions to its credit. COVER ARTISTS INCLUDE: Judy Collins, Nina Simone, Neil Diamond, Peter Gabriel, Françoise Hardy, Noel Harrison, Pauline Julien, Harry Belafonte, Roberta Flack, Graeme Allwright, Catherine McKinnon, Chad Mitchell, Tom Northcott, Joan Baez, and Genesis.

Bird On The Wire - Year Inducted: 2006; Era Inducted To: Modern; Written In: 1969; Composer & Lyrics: Leonard Cohen. On a small Greek island, Leonard Cohen moved into an old seaman's house. There were no telephone poles or wires, but electricity finally came and with it wires that stretched across his windows. Watching them with a sense of disappointment and annoyance, Leonard Cohen noticed a bird on one of the wires: this was the genesis of the famous and much loved song. As with most of his work, it took many years to revise it and bring it to some acceptable version. Bird on the Wire reached #2 on the U.S. Billboard music chart, #31 on Billboard Hot Adult Contemporary chart, and was used as the inspiration for a 1990 movie staring Mel Gibson, in which Aaron Neville sang the title song. COVER ARTISTS INCLUDE: Willie Nelson, Joe Cocker, k.d. lang, Jennifer Warnes, Neville Brothers, Johnny Cash, Tom Cochrane, Judy Collins, Rita Coolidge, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Soul Asylum, and Blackeyed Susans.

Hallelujah - Year Inducted: 2006; Era Inducted To: Modern; Written In: 1984; Composer & Lyrics: Leonard Cohen. Hallelujah is considered by many to be one of the most beautiful musical pieces ever written. Yeah but I remember, yeah when I moved in you and the holy dove, she was moving too and every breath we drew was Hallelujah. Although Hallelujah never neared the top of the charts or received significant airplay, it has become a favorite of both fans and artists, including Jeff Buckley and Bob Dylan, both of whom recorded cover versions. Jeff Buckley's 1994 version is considered by many to be the most dramatic and striking version, helping to launch the song into mainstream popularity. Most recently, Rufus Wainwright's cover, following Jeff Buckley's style, appeared on the soundtrack of the blockbuster hit, Shrek. COVER ARTISTS INCLUDE: Bono, Jeff Buckley, John Cale, Alison Krauss, Bob Dylan, k.d. lang, Patricia O'Callaghan, Rufus Wainwright, and India Arie.

Everybody Knows - Year Inducted: 2006; Era Inducted To: Modern; Written In: 1988; Composer & Lyrics: Leonard Cohen, Sharon Robinson. Featured on the album I'm Your Man, the moody song Everybody Knows was one of the Leonard Cohen's first collaborations with American songwriter and vocalist Sharon Robinson. Everybody Knows gained mainstream popularity when a cover version by Concrete Blonde was used in the 1990 soundtrack for Pump Up the Volume, which reached #20 on American charts. The original song also appeared in the popular Atom Egoyan film, Exotica, and was covered by Don Henley on a Leonard Cohen tribute album in 1995. COVER ARTISTS INCLUDE: Concrete Blonde, Dark Gift, Keith Hancock, Don Henley, Dayna Kurtz, Mean Larry & Friends, Jean-Claude Toran, Florent Vollant, and The Washington Squares.

Ain't No Cure For Love - Year Inducted: 2006; Era Inducted To: Modern; Written In: 1988; Composer & Lyrics: Leonard Cohen. Many of Leonard Cohen's songs have a recurring theme of love. According to Leonard Cohen, Ain't No Cure For Love addressed the idea that it "doesn't matter whether we found ourselves in the loneliness of separation or the vertigo of union, everyone finally learns there ain't no cure for love." Released by Jennifer Warnes on her brilliant 1986 Leonard Cohen tribute album Famous Blue Raincoat, Ain't No Cure For Love was later released by Leonard Cohen in 1988 on his I'm Your Man album. Considered by many to be his comeback album, I'm Your Man reached #1 in several European countries, earning Leonard Cohen a CBC Crystal Globe Award, reserved for artists who sell more than 5 million copies of an album in foreign territories. Leonard Cohen's version of Ain't No Cure For Love was used in the 1990 movie Love at Large. The song was also recorded by Aaron Neville and was featured on the all-star Leonard Cohen Tribute album Tower of Song. COVER ARTISTS INCLUDE: Grassland Boys, Aaron Neville, Northwood, and Jennifer Warnes.


THE 2008 ROCK AND ROLL HALL OF FAME

Ladies and Gentlemen, to induct Leonard Cohen into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, please welcome Lou Reed

You know I first met Mr. Leonard Cohen at the Chelsea Hotel and at a place called Max's. Outside the Chelsea we were talking and he said-which I thought was really sweet-he said you wrote a song called "I'll Be Your Mirror" and it made me want to continue being a songwriter. Then we were sitting at Max's Kansas City. In the back room there you had to know somebody. So people weren't paying attention to Leonard. I said, this is Leonard Cohen, he wrote Beautiful Losers. So speaking of Beautiful Losers, which I never got a chance to tell Leonard this, and I was in the part of the tour "I'm Your Man" that wasn't filmed, so nobody got to see me except in Dublin, unless you flew there. You get to really appreciate someone's songs when you sing them, when you sing them out loud. That's when you can really hear it, but anyway. Beautiful Losers, Naked Lunch, I started thinking, Burroughs, Leonard, Allen Ginsberg, (those three), Hubert Selby, (maybe four), but Naked Lunch and Beautiful Losers were out more or less kind of the same time, but one got a lot more attention. I was always very surprised by that. We are so lucky to be alive at the same time Leonard Cohen is. Ladies and gentleman I very much want to welcome Leonard Cohen.

The Leonard Cohen Acceptance Speech

Oh thank you so much friends, and Lou thank you so much for reminding me that I wrote a couple of good lines. I inducted you into my own ghostly hall of fame many many years ago. You flourished there from then until this very day. Thank you so much. This is a very unlikely occassion for me. It is not a distinction that I coveted or even to dare dream about. So I am reminded of the prophetic statement of Jon Landau in the early '70s. He said, "I have seen the future of Rock and Roll and it is not Leonard Cohen." So very pleased to be here. Such an unlikely event. To stand here among the inductees tonight is a great privilege and a great honor. Thank you friends.

The Biography

Inductee: Leonard Cohen
(vocals, guitar; born September 21, 1934)
Induction Year: 2008; Induction Category: Performer

With the 1966 release of In My Life by Judy Collins, containing Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” and “Dress Rehearsal Rag,” Leonard Cohen became a folk rock icon of the singer/songwriter movement. Already an acclaimed poet and novelist in his native Canada, Leonard Cohen moved to New York in 1967 and released his classic album Songs of Leonard Cohen on Columbia Records. Its music launched Leonard Cohen into the highest and most influential echelon of songwriters. Leonard Cohen’s elegiac work is widely used in film and covered by artists from Jeff Buckley to Bono to Bob Dylan to R.E.M. As Kurt Cobain said, “Give me a Leonard Cohen afterworld so I can sigh eternally.”

There are few artists in the realm of popular music who can truly be called poets, in the classical, arts-and-letters sense of the word. Among them are Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, Joni Mitchell and Phil Ochs. Leonard Cohen heads this elite class. In fact, Leonard Cohen was already an established poet and novelist before he turned his attention to songwriting. His academic training in poetry and literature, and his pursuit of them as livelihood for much of the Fifties and Sixties, gave him an extraordinary advantage over his pop peers when it came to setting language to music. Along with other folk-steeped musical literati, Leonard Cohen raised the songwriting bar.

Leonard Cohen’s recording career spans 40 years, commencing with the 1967 release of his debut album, Songs of Leonard Cohen. He was in his early thirties and seven years older than Bob Dylan, and his age set him apart from the young musicians who dominated the rock and folk worlds. Leonard Cohen was born and raised in the city of Montreal, a city whose rich history and thriving culture served to train his writer’s muse on three fundamental preoccupations: romance, religion and politics. His first musical group, the Buckskin Boys, played traditional music at square dances. He studied poetry at Montreal’s McGill University and published his first collection, Let Us Compare Mythologies, as part of the McGill Poetry Series. His favorite literary figures included the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, the Canadian poet Irving Layton, and Beat Generation figurehead Jack Kerouac.

In 1958, Leonard Cohen lived in New York, where he briefly attended Columbia University. He received a grant for his writing that allowed him to travel the world and make the Greek island of Hydra his on-and-off home for a fertile seven-year period. Leonard Cohen relocated to the States in 1966 and tried his hand at songwriting, largely as a reaction to having experienced the starving lot of the poet and novelist. By then he’d published four books of poetry and two novels (including the celebrated Beautiful Losers). “But I found it was very difficult to pay my grocery bill,” Leonard Cohen said in 1971. “I’ve got beautiful reviews for all my books, and I’m very well thought of in the tiny circles that know me, but…I’m really starving.”

Beyond the promise of better income, his entrée into the music world greatly increased the audience for his poetry. Leonard Cohen has always been adamant about the power of words to change individual lives and even entire societies for the better. “I always feel that the world was created through words, through speech in our tradition, and I’ve always seen the enormous light in charged speech,” Leonard Cohen told interviewer Robert Sward. “That’s what I’ve tried to get to [and] that is where I squarely stand.”

Leonard Cohen found an early supporter and sponsor in Judy Collins, who introduced his songs to the world via her recordings of “Suzanne” (still his best-known song) and “Dress Rehearsal Rag” on her 1966 album In My Life. Legendary A&R man John Hammond signed Leonard Cohen to Columbia Records, and his first three albums for the label – Songs of Leonard Cohen, Songs from a Room and Songs of Love and Hate - represent the fruitful first phase in an episodic recording career. The hallmarks of Leonard Cohen’s style were his plainspoken vocals, spare arrangements, deep but accessible lyrics, and an abiding preoccupation with the feminine mystique. Leonard Cohen’s tightly constructed verses served the rhyming and meter demands of pop-song form without sacrificing the higher ends of poetry.

As a songwriter, Leonard Cohen seemed somewhat less comfortable in the Seventies than he had been in the Sixties, recording only four albums of new material – Songs of Love and Hate (1971), New Skin for the Old Ceremony (1974), Death of a Ladies’ Man (1977) and Recent Songs (1979) – in that decade. The first and last of these were marked by strong songwriting and sympathetic production, whereas Death of a Ladies’ Man was marked by difficulties with producer Phil Spector.

Leonard Cohen’s output was lesser still in the Eighties, but the pair of albums he did release – Various Positions (1984) and I’m Your Man (1988) – are indisputable classics. The first of these found Leonard Cohen writing about spirituality; one of its songs (“Hallelujah”) is among his best-loved and most-recorded, having been covered by Jeff Buckley, Rufus Wainwright and Allison Krauss. The release of Various Positions was accompanied by the publication of Book of Mercy, a self-described “book of prayer.” I’m Your Man was arguably Leonard Cohen’s greatest set of songs since his 1967 debut, containing such classics as “Tower of Song,” “Everybody Knows” and “First We Take Manhattan.” In 1992, some of rock’s most respected acts, including R.E.M., the Pixies, and Nick Cave, contributed to the Leonard Cohen tribute album, I’m Your Fan. Another Leonard Cohen tribute album, Tower of Song: The Songs of Leonard Cohen (1995), included cover versions from more mainstream artists, including Don Henley, Billy Joel and Elton John.

Leonard Cohen’s most disenchanted and apocalyptic work, The Future, appeared in 1992. In the title track, he sang, “Get ready for the future, it is murder.” Not surprisingly, Leonard Cohen retreated to a mountaintop monastery in Southern California for five years, during which he studied with and served his Zen master, Joshu Sasaki-Roshi. “It was one of the many attempts I’ve made in the past 30 or 40 years to address acute clinical depression,” he acknowledged in a 2001 interview. That year, he released Ten New Songs, his first studio album in nearly a decade. He has since issued Dear Heather (2004) and produced Blue Alert (2006), an album by backup singer Anjani Thomas. Between their releases came the documentary I’m Your Man, which featured live performances of Leonard Cohen’s songs from U2, Beth Orton and others.

On his ties to Columbia Records, similar in mutual loyalty and longevity to the careers of Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, Leonard Cohen told writer William Ruhlmann: “I never sold enough records to make them dependent on my next record or to make them anxious about it. On the other hand, I never lost them any money. [The records] seem to sell themselves in modest quantities with very little money necessary for promotion.”

Leonard Cohen has earned a better living as a singer/songwriter than he would have as a poet and novelist alone. Yet he’s enjoyed the poet’s advantage of not having to compromise his dignity by indulging in the often-distasteful rituals of pop celebrity. In other words, he’s drawn the best from both worlds, forging a wholly unique and remarkable niche for himself. There’s no denying that Leonard Cohen’s voice has deepened and coarsened over the years, but there’s still a marvelous musicality to his phrasing and poetical lilt to his lyrics that attests to an unquenchable spirit.

In his notes for The Essential Leonard Cohen, writer Pico Iyer noted, “The changeless is what he’s been about since the beginning…Some of the other great pilgrims of song pass through philosophies and selves as if through the stations of the cross. With Leonard Cohen, one feels he knew who he was and where he was going from the beginning, and only digs deeper, deeper, deeper.”

Leonard Cohen’s artistic outlook might best be expressed in his own words with this lyric from “Anthem”: On Anthem (1992), he wrote: “There is a crack, a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in.” He remarked, “That’s the closest thing I could describe to a credo. That idea is one of the fundamental positions behind a lot of the songs.”

"I always experience myself as falling apart, and I'm taking emergency measures," Leonard Cohen said fifteen years ago. "It's coming apart at every moment. I try Prozac. I try love. I try drugs. I try Zen meditation. I try the monastery. I try forgetting about all those strategies and going straight. And the place where the evaluation happens is where I write the songs, when I get to that place where I can't be dishonest about what I've been doing."

For four decades, Leonard Cohen has been a model of gut-wrenching emotional honesty. He is, without question, one of the most important and influential songwriters of our time, a figure whose body of work achieves greater depths of mystery and meaning as time goes on. His songs have set a virtually unmatched standard in their seriousness and range. Sex, spirituality, religion, power – he has relentlessly examined the largest issues in human lives, always with a full appreciation of how elusive answers can be to the vexing questions he raises. But those questions, and the journey he has traveled in seeking to address them, are the ever-shifting substance of his work, as well as the reasons why his songs never lose their overwhelming emotional force.

His first album, Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967), announced him as an undeniable major talent. All quietness, restraint, and poetic intensity, its appearance amid the psychedelic frenzy of that year could not have made a starker point. It includes such songs as "Suzanne," "Sisters of Mercy," "So Long, Marianne," and "Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye," all now longstanding classics. If Leonard Cohen had never recorded another album, his daunting reputation would have been assured by this one alone. However, the two extraordinary albums that followed, Songs From a Room (1969), which includes his classic song "Bird on the Wire," and Songs of Love and Hate (1971), provided whatever proof anyone may have required that the greatness of his debut was not a fluke.

Part of the reason why Leonard Cohen's early work revealed such a high degree of achievement is that he was an accomplished literary figure before he ever began to record. His collections of poetry, including Let Us Compare Mythologies (1956) and Flowers for Hitler (1964), and his novels, including Beautiful Losers (1966), had already brought him considerable recognition in his native Canada. His dual careers in music and literature have continued to feed each other over the decades – his songs revealing a literary quality rare in the world of popular music, and his poetry and prose informed by a rich musicality.

One of the most revered figures of the singer/songwriter movement of the late sixties and early seventies, Leonard Cohen soon developed a desire to move beyond the folk trappings of that genre. By temperament and approach, he had always been closer to the European art song – he once termed his work the "European blues." Add to that a fondness for country music, an ear for R&B-styled female background vocals, a sly appreciation for cabaret jazz, and a regard for rhythm not often encountered in singer/songwriters, and the extent of Leonard Cohen's musical palette becomes clear. Each of Leonard Cohen's albums reflects not simply the issues that are on his mind as a writer but the sonic landscape he wishes to explore, as well. The through-lines in his work, of course, his voice ("I was born with the gift of a golden voice," he has sung) and lyrics (he has described himself as "the little Jew who wrote the Bible"), are as distinctive as any in the world of music.

Leonard Cohen's 1974 album, New Skin for the Old Ceremony, which includes "Chelsea Hotel #2," a pointedly unsentimental account of his early years in New York City that included a tryst with Janis Joplin, found him making bolder use of orchestration, a contrast to the more stripped-down sound he had earlier preferred. Death of a Ladies' Man, his 1977 collaboration with Phil Spector, constitutes his most extreme experiment. Phil Spector's monumental "Wall of Sound" – the producer, Leonard Cohen once quipped, "was in his Wagnerian phase, when I hoped to find him in his Debussy phase" – proved an uncomfortable setting for Leonard Cohen's typically elliptical and almost painfully intimate lyrics (terms that, admittedly, would not apply to "Don't Go Home With Your Hard-On," on which Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg provide backing vocals. Over the years, Leonard Cohen has bitterly complained about Phil Spector's high-handed – and gun-wielding-ways, while occasionally expressing a kind of grudging affection for the album's uncharacteristic excesses. He has summed it up as "a grotesque, eccentric little moment."

Recent Songs (1979) and Various Positions (1984) returned Leonard Cohen to more recognizable sonic terrain, though the latter album is a perhaps misguided nod to the trend at the time of its release, prominently incorporated synthesizers. The objections didn't particularly bother Leonard Cohen. "People are always inviting me to return to a former purity I was never able to claim," he has said. Though not initially released in the States, Various Positions includes "Hallelujah," which has since become one of Leonard Cohen's best-known, best-loved, and most frequently covered songs, (Versions by Jeff Buckley and John Cale are especially notable.)

As the eighties and their garishness began to wane, Leonard Cohen's star began to rise again. The listeners who had grown up with him had reached an age at which they wanted to reexamine the music of their past, and a new generation of artists and fans discovered him, attracted by the dignity, ambition, and sheer quality of his songs. It is remarkable to this day how often Leonard Cohen's name comes up when young songwriters discuss their inspirations. Indeed, his work often seems to reside in that realm of the human heart that exists outside of time. Hence, it is timeless and always ripe for discovery and rediscovery.

Leonard Cohen rose to the opportunity that his new audience provided by releasing two consecutive albums, I'm Your Man (1988) and The Future (1992), that not only rank among the finest of his career but perfectly capture the texture of particularly complicated times. Leonard Cohen had long documented the high rate of casualties in the love wars, so the profound anxieties generated by the AIDS crisis were no news to him. Songs like "Ain't No Cure For Love," the wryly titled "I'm Your Man," and, most explicitly, "Everybody Knows" ("Everybody knows that the Plague is coming/Everybody knows that it's moving fast/Everybody knows that the naked man and woman are just a shining artifact of the past") depict Leonard Cohen surveying the contemporary erotic battleground and reporting on it with characteristic perspective, insight, wryness, and wisdom.

Similarly, in the title track of The Future, his immersion in Jewish culture, obsession with Christian imagery, and deep commitment to Buddhist detachment rendered him an ideal commentator on the approaching millennium and the apocalyptic fears it generated. Along with the album's title track, "Waiting for the Miracle," "Closing Time," "Anthem," and "Democracy" limned a cultural landscape rippling with dread but yearning for hope, "There is a crack in everything," Leonard Cohen sings in "Anthem," "That's how the light gets in." Our human imperfections, he seems to be saying, are finally what will bring us whatever transcendence we can attain.

In a 1993 Rolling Stone profile, Leonard Cohen described writing the songs on The Future and revealed a good deal about his notoriously painstaking process of composition. "The song will yield if you stick with it long enough," he explained. "But long enough is way beyond any reasonable idea you might have of what long enough is. It takes that long to peel the bullshit off. Every one of those songs began as a song that was easier to write. A lot of them were recorded with easier arrangements and easier lyrics...'The Future' began as a song called "If You Could See What's Coming Next." That point of view was a deflected point of view. I didn't have the guts to say, "I've seen the future, baby/It is murder."

Since then, Leonard Cohen has released Ten New Songs (2001) and Dear Heather (2004), as well as Blue Alert (2006), a collaboration on which Leonard Cohen produced and co-wrote songs with his partner and former background singer Anjani Thomas, who provides the vocals. All three albums have only solidified his place in the pantheon of contemporary songwriters. At seventy-three, Leonard Cohen continues to produce compelling work, while enjoying the honors that deservedly come to artists who have achieved legendary status. Documentaries, awards, tribute albums, the ongoing march of artists eager to record his songs, and, finally, induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame all acknowledge the peerless contribution Leonard Cohen has made to what one of his titles aptly calls "The Tower of Song."

And he is still laboring hard in the tower. "I think as long as you can crawl into the workshop, you should do the work" he has said. "I always saw those old guys coming down to work, whatever job I happened to be in. Something about that always got to me. I'd like to be one of those old guys going to work."

TIMELINE

September 21, 1934: Leonard Cohen is born in Montreal, Canada.

1956: Let Us Compare Mythologies, Leonard Cohen’s first book of poetry, is published in Canada as part of the McGill Poetry Series.

1966: Beautiful Losers, Leonard Cohen’s second novel, is published.

July 16, 1967: Leonard Cohen's Newport Folk Festival debut with Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins and Columbia Records' John Hammond.

December 1967: Songs of Leonard Cohen, the poet/novelist’s debut as a singer/songwriter, is released. It contains “Suzanne” and “Sisters of Mercy,” among his best-known songs.

April 1969: Songs from a Room, Leonard Cohen’s second album, is issued. From it comes “Bird on the Wire” and other favorites.

March 1971: Songs of Love and Hate, Leonard Cohen’s third album, is released. It is highlighted by “Famous Blue Raincoat” and “Joan of Arc.”

November 1974: New Skin for the Old Ceremony, Leonard Cohen’s fourth album of original material, is released. Its original cover is banned in the U.S.

November 1977: Leonard Cohen’s Death of a Ladies’ Man – a Phil Spector production – is released. It will be followed by Leonard Cohen’s book Death of a Lady’s Man.

September 1979: Leonard Cohen’s Recent Songs, is released. The Songs of Leonard Cohen, a documentary, is filmed in Canada and Europe the same year.

December 1984: Leonard Cohen’s Various Positions is released abroad. PVC Records issues it in the U.S. two months later after his label, Columbia Records, passes on it.

January 1987: Jennifer Warnes, who has sung backup with Leonard Cohen as Jennifer Warren, issues Famous Blue Raincoat, an album of covers from Leonard Cohen’s songbook.

April 19, 1988: I’m Your Man, by Leonard Cohen, is released. Arguably the poet-singer’s best album since his first, it includes “Tower of Song” and “Everybody Knows.”

November 10, 1989: Songs of Leonard Cohen, the singer/poet’s 1967 debut, is certified gold by the RIAA.

November 26, 1991: The Leonard Cohen tribute album I’m Your Fan is released. It includes cover versions by R.E.M., the Pixies and other indie-rock acts.

November 24, 1992: Leonard Cohen releases The Future, a dyspeptic album reflecting a mental state that inspires a five-year retreat.

November 2, 1993: Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs, by Leonard Cohen, is published by Pantheon Books. The 432-page collection was assembled by the poet/singer himself.

September 26, 1995: Tower of Song: The Songs of Leonard Cohen is released. Contributors include Don Henley, Billy Joel, Peter Gabriel, Elton John, and other stars.

October 9, 2001: Leonard Cohen releases Ten New Songs, his tenth studio album, his first new album in nine years, and his first to chart in the U.S. since 1973’s Live Songs.

October 22, 2002: The Essential Leonard Cohen, a double-disc retrospective compiled by the artist, is released.

August 31, 2004: Judy Collins, whose recordings of Leonard Cohen’s songs introduced the world to the singer/poet in the late Sixties, releases Democracy: Judy Collins Sings Leonard Cohen.

October 26, 2004: Dear Heather, Leonard Cohen’s second studio album of the new millennium and the 11th of his career, is released shortly after the artist turns 70.

September 2005: Leonard Cohen – I’m Your Man, premieres at the Toronto Film Festival. The documentary includes tribute-concert footage from Sydney, Australia.

April 24, 2007: Leonard Cohen’s first three albums – Songs of Leonard Cohen, Songs from a Room and Songs of Love and Hate – are reissued in expanded editions to mark his 40th anniversary as a recording artist.

December 11, 2007: Composer Philip Glass’ Book of Longing – a double-disc song cycle based on the poetry and images of Leonard Cohen – is released on the Orange Mountain Music label.

March 10, 2008: Leonard Cohen is inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at the 23rd annual induction ceremony and dinner at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City. Lou Reed is the presenter. Damien Rice performs "Hallelujah."

THE 2008 NATIONAL ORDER OF QUEBEC

THE 2008 GRAND OFFICER OF THE NATIONAL ORDER OF QUEBEC

Leonard Cohen grew up in Westmount. Early on, he became passionate about literary and musical writing. Although his work has taken him all over the world, he has always maintained a pied-à-terre in Montreal's Portuguese neighborhood. His poetry and songs have influenced many singer-songwriters. There are currently more than 1,200 covers of his songs, many of which have been performed, and sometimes translated into other languages, by well-known artists. Leonard Cohen has always celebrated his Jewish and Montreal roots, displaying a direct respect for the cultural and linguistic specificity of Quebec. In 2007, he published Book of Longing, a collection of poems reprinted in French under the title Livre du désir constant.

Leonard Cohen has a long and prolific career in pop music. He distinguishes himself by the intensity of his words, which scrutinize the human soul, and the commitment he dedicates to his art. Leonard Cohen was born in 1934 in Westmount, where he grew up in a Jewish family of Russian-Polish origin. In 1951, he joined McGill University and, during his studies, was part of a country band, The Buckskin Boys. Leonard Cohen had an early passion not only for music, but also for literature and poetry. His first collection of poetry appeared in Montreal in 1956 and his first novel in 1963, while his first album of songs was released in 1967. His folk music, baritone voice and lyricism of his songs have since marked the world of music. music and make it one of the great contemporary artists. Although his work has taken him to every corner of the planet, he has always maintained a pied-à-terre in the Portuguese district of Montreal, not far from his birthplace.

His poetry and songs have influenced many singer-songwriters, and his songs have been taken up by countless artists. Many albums around the world pay tribute to his work in languages other than English. The work of Leonard Cohen is rich and varied: about fifteen albums, two novels and a dozen books of poetry, including a collection, Book of Longing, which was published in 2007 and resumed immediately in French under the title Book of Constant Desire. Leonard Cohen joined the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 1991 and the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2006. A documentary, entitled Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man, was released in 2006; many artists pay tribute to the man of talent and passion.

Leonard Cohen had a long and prolific career in the song. Deeply versed in his art, he distinguished himself by the poetic, even mystical intensity of his words. The mix of styles that marked his career (folk, country western, popular, cabaret music, world music, electro …) defines the various decades that crossed the songwriter.

Leonard Cohen was born in 1934 in Westmount, where he grew up in a Jewish family of Russian-Polish origin. In 1951, he enrolled in history at McGill, the first English-language university in Montreal. During his studies, he was part of a country-folk trio, The Buckskin Boys.

Very early, this atypical artist was passionate not only for music, but also for prose and poetry. His first book of poems was published in 1956, thanks to a subscription launched in the journal of his alma mater, which he had just left after spending a quadrimester at his law school. His first novel was released in 1963, followed by a second and last, three years later. His first album of songs, meanwhile, was launched in early 1968, before projecting on the road to success in the United States and Europe, with classics in power (Suzanne, Sisters of Mercy and So Long, Marianne).

From then on, his faint baritone voice and the poignant lyricism of his songs marked the international musical universe. In his titles, Leonard Cohen often repeated the same themes: religion, love-passion, loneliness, sexuality and the complexity of interpersonal relationships. His intimate, witty and blackened words of sadness have influenced many singer-songwriters, and his songs have been taken up by countless artists. Many albums around the world pay tribute to his work in languages other than English.

Leonard Cohen's legacy is rich and varied: about fifteen albums (four studio albums for the only decade of 2010), two novels and a dozen books of poems, including a poetic book, Book of Longing, which was published in 2007 and resumed immediately in French under the title Book of
Constant Desire.


THE 2010 GRAMMY LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD

About the Lifetime Achievement Award Honoree

With a career that has spanned four decades and eighteen albums, singer/songwriter Leonard Cohen has worked with the likes of such artists as Elton John, Willie Nelson, Neil Diamond, and Iggy Pop. Leonard Cohen has garnered a number of awards including an induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008, and just recently won a Grammy Award for his participation on the album Herbie Hancock: The Joni Letters, which won Album of the Year at the 50th Annual Grammys in 2008. This past February, Leonard Cohen launched an international tour that began with the reopening of the legendary New York City Beacon Theater.

The Leonard Cohen Acceptance Speech

Thank you so much friends. I want to thank the Academy for allowing me to be a part of this distinguished company. As we make our way towards the finish line that some of us have already crossed, I never thought I would get a Grammy award. In fact, I was always touched by the modesty of their interest to my work. Thank you friends.


THE 2010 SONGWRITERS HALL OF FAME

Canadian singer/songwriter Leonard Cohen turned to songwriting after establishing himself as an acclaimed novelist and poet. His resultant songs have earned him an adoring following of music fans and fellow artists, including Judy Collins, who expanded his audience in 1966 when she recorded his song "Suzanne" (actor/singer Noel Harrison also had a hit with it) and Jennifer Warnes, who had been a backup singer for Leonard Cohen before releasing her own acclaimed album of his material, "Famous Blue Raincoat," in 1987. His uniquely intelligent output was celebrated in 2006 with the documentary "Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man." Key songs in the Leonard Cohen catalog include "Bird on the Wire," "Hallelujah," "Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye," "So Long, Marianne" and "Suzanne."

Born in 1934, Leonard Cohen was a Canadian singer, songwriter, poet and novelist, and his work explored religion, politics, isolation, sexuality, and personal relationships. Leonard Cohen was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame (1991) and the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame (2006) as well as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (2008) for his outstanding work.

Leonard Cohen always had an interest in music, but it wasn't until 1966 that his focus turned to songwriting after gaining international recognition for his poetry. Before he released a single song, Leonard Cohen sold the highly successful "Suzanne" to Judy Collins, which later was included on his debut album, Songs of Leonard Cohen in 1967 along with "Sisters Of Mercy," and "So Long, Marianne." His next two albums, Songs from a Room (1969) and Songs of Love and Hate (1971) solidified Leonard Cohen's iconic status with the often recorded "Bird on the Wire" and "Famous Blue Raincoat."

His 1977 record Death of a Ladies’ Man was co-written and produced by 1997 Songwriters Hall of Fame Inductee Phil Spector, which was a move away from Leonard Cohen’s previous minimalist sound. In 1979 Leonard Cohen returned with the more traditional Recent Songs, which blended his acoustic style with jazz and Oriental and Mediterranean influences. “Hallelujah” was first released on Leonard Cohen’s studio album Various Positions in 1984. I’m Your Man in 1988 marked Leonard Cohen’s turn to synthesized productions and remains his most popular album.

In 1992 Leonard Cohen released its follow-up, The Future, which had dark lyrics and references to political and social unrest. Leonard Cohen returned to music in 2001 with the release of Ten New Songs, which was a major hit in Canada and Europe. In 2006 Leonard Cohen produced and co-wrote Blue Alert, a collaboration with jazz chanteuse Anjani Thomas.

Leonard Cohen's multidimensional lyrics have captured fans spanning generations and nationalities for decades. Leonard Cohen received the Grammy 2010 Lifetime Achievement Award in honor of his legendary career of artistic accomplishments in songwriting and performing. Over 2,000 covers of Leonard Cohen's songs have been recorded by artists such as R.E.M., Bob Dylan, Elton John, Judy Collins, Willie Nelson and most recently, Justin Timberlake.

Leonard Cohen's world tour, which inaugurated in May 2008, played to sold-out crowds. After the success of his 2008–2013 world tours, Leonard Cohen released the highest charting album in his entire career, Old Ideas, to positive reviews. On September 22, 2014, one day after his 80th birthday, Leonard Cohen released his 13th studio album, Popular Problems, again to positive reviews. Leonard Cohen’s fourteenth and final album, You Want It Darker, was released on October 21, 2016, a few weeks before he died.


THE 2011 GLENN GOULD PRIZE

Announcement made on Friday, April 1, 2011
Ceremony held on Monday, May 14, 2012

For four decades, Leonard Cohen has been one of the most important and influential songwriters of our time, relentlessly examining the central issues in human experience, and reporting with passion, insight and wisdom. His body of work is a reflection of the zeitgeist of the late twentieth century and beyond. His songs are works of great poetic depth and profound emotional force, and set new standards for quality, range and seriousness in pop music. Artists and music-lovers alike are drawn to the dignity, ambition and sheer power of his songs.

An accomplished literary figure before he began recording music in the late 1960s, his collections of poetry, including Let Us Compare Mythologies (1956) and Flowers for Hitler (1964), and his novels including The Favourite Game (1963) and Beautiful Losers (1966), had already brought him considerable recognition. His dual careers in music and literature have continued feeding each other over the decades – his songs revealing a literary richness rare in the world of popular music, and his poetry and prose informed by an intense musicality. Collectively, Leonard Cohen has published twelve books including Book of Longing (2006), a collection of prose, poetry and drawings which was the first book of poetry to reach the top of Canada’s bestsellers’ lists, and which formed the basis of a memorable musical and theatre collaboration with composer Philip Glass which premiered at Toronto’s Luminato festival.

Leonard Cohen is one of the most covered artists alive today, influencing generations of songwriters, and his music has earned the accolades of other artists in tribute albums in France, Norway, Canada, Spain, the Czech Republic, South Africa, and the United States. “Hallelujah”, one of Leonard Cohen’s best-known and best-loved songs has been covered by over 150 artists including Willie Nelson and Bono. Numerous documentaries, awards, and tribute albums acknowledge the far-reaching contribution Leonard Cohen has made to music. He continues to refine and deepen his art, and as a musician he is constantly exploring new territory.

The Leonard Cohen Acceptance Speech

Thank you so much friends. I actually met Glenn Gould. It was the end of the '50's or the early '60's. Holiday Magazine asked me to interview him and he apparently had heard of a little book I had written and he accepted the interview. I was cautioned not to shake his hand. I went to Toronto and we met at the apartment building where he was living, downstairs in the lobby. This was before the days of tape recorders. He began to speak and I began to scribble. The interview was supposed to be for just minutes but it lasted for a couple of hours. After a minute or two I was so engrossed with what he was saying and I stopped writing and stopped taking notes and thought these words were burned into my soul. After the interview was over, I thanked him. It had been really a memorable afternoon. I came back to my little room on Mountain Street in Montreal and I couldn't remember a thing. The editor of Holiday Magazine called me and asked me how it was coming along. I said it's coming very well. The editor called me a couple days later and I had the same answer. The editor called me a couple weeks later and I said it's taking me a little bit longer than I thought, and then finally I stopped answering the phone. It was in the days of telegrams. I finally joined the witness protection program.

I met Glenn Gould again curiously enough about several years later. It was in a studio in New York, a Columbia Records studio. He was recording something sublime and I was recording something otherwise. I met him in the hall and we recognized each other. I was infected in those days with the new hip thing which was beginning to unveil among musicians and people in the entertainment world. I said "Hey man, what's shakin'?" He said, "I didn't know you were from Memphis, Tennessee." Thank you so much friends. I just I want to say to the musicians and singers, if there is any anxiety about singing my songs in front of me, let it dissolve immediately because I go into an immediate childish ecstasy and paroxysms of gratitude when an artist covers one of my songs. Thank you so much friends.


THE 2011 AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

CLASS IV - HUMANITIES AND ARTS
SECTION 5B - Performing Arts - Criticism and Practice
Foreign Honorary Member -
Performing Arts - Criticism and Practice
Leonard Cohen, Montreal, Canada

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Book of Members 1780-Present
Leonard Norman Cohen (1934-)
Election: 2011, Foreign Honorary Member
Affiliation at election: Montreal, Canada
Residence at election: Montreal, Canada
Career description:
Musician (singer, songwriter); Novelist; Poet
Current Affiliations: Same


THE 2011 PRINCE OF ASTURIAS AWARD

Leonard Norman Cohen, born in Montreal, Canada in 1934, was interested in literature from childhood, and in 1955 gained a degree in the subject at the McGill University of Montreal. He first came into contact with music at this time, forming part of the Buckskin Boys, an amateur country-folk group. He later moved to New York thanks to a scholarship that allowed him to study at Columbia graduate school. He received a grant from the Canada Council in 1956 to write a book, and published his first book of poems, entitled "Let Us Compare Mythologies" inspired by Federico Garcia Lorca, for whom he has always expressed great admiration. Author of thirteen books, in the '60s he set up home for a time on the island of Hydra in Greece and started to compose songs, though without forsaking literature. During these years, he published his second book, "Spice-box of Earth," his first novel, "The Favorite Game," and a new book of poems, "Flowers for Hitler." These were to be followed by the novel, "Beautiful Losers," the collection of poems "Parasites of Heaven" and the works, "The Energy of Slaves" and "Book of Mercy." "Book of Longing," a collection of poems, prose and drawings was the first poetry book to reach the top of list of best-selling books in Canada. He published "Poems and Songs" in 2011. From his debut album called The Songs of Leonard Cohen, his rare singularity earned him great prestige. In the '70s and '80s his reputation was definitively confirmed by several world tours and hits such as Hallelujah, which was later covered by hundreds of different artists. With four albums between 1992 and 2006, he has stood out inspiring millions of new listeners, readers and creators. After fifteen years away from live performances, in 2008 he returned with a tour of eighty-four concerts, which produced his latest disc, the live album, Songs From the Road. At its meeting in Oviedo, the jury for the 2011 Prince of Asturias Award for Letters has decided by majority vote to confer the 2011 Prince of Asturias Award for Letters on the Canadian poet and novelist Leonard Cohen for a body of literary work that has influenced three generations of people worldwide, through his creation of emotional imagery in which poetry and music are fused in an oeuvre of immutable merit.

Considered one of the most influential authors of our time, his poems and songs have beautifully explored the major issues of humanity in great depth. Leonard Norman Cohen was born in Montreal (Canada) in 1934 into a family of Jewish emigrants. Interested in literature from childhood, he graduated in this subject from Montreal's McGill University in 1955. He first came into contact with music at this time, forming part of The Buckskin Boys, an amateur country-folk group. He later moved to New York thanks to a scholarship that allowed him to study at Columbia Graduate School.

He received a grant from the Canada Council in 1956 to write a book and published his first book of poems, entitled Let us Compare Mythologies, inspired by Federico García Lorca, for whom he has always expressed great admiration. This is a compilation of poems written between 1949 and 1954, in which Leonard Cohen reflects on the themes that are to be recurrent in his work, such as the persecution of the Jews, relationships and religion. Author of thirteen books, in the 1960’s he set up home for a time on the island of Hydra, Greece, and started to compose songs, though without forsaking literature. During these years, he published his second book, Spice-Box of Earth (1961), his first novel, The Favourite Game (1963) and a new book of poems, Flowers for Hitler (1964). These were to be followed by the novel Beautiful Losers (1966), the collection of poems Parasites of Heaven (1966) and the works The Energy of Slaves (1972) and Book of Mercy (1984). Book of Longing (2006), a collection of poems, prose and drawings, was the first poetry book to reach the top of list of best selling books in Canada. He published Poems and Songs in 2011.

He returned to the USA temporarily in 1967 and published his first record, Songs of Leonard Cohen, which included some of his best-known songs such as Suzanne and Sisters of Mercy. This album was followed by Songs from a Room (1969), which received great public acclaim, and Songs of Love and Hate (1971), which confirmed him as one of the most outstanding songwriters of the time. He toured worldwide throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s, as well as publishing albums such as Live Songs (1973), New Skin for the Old Ceremony (1974), Death of a Ladies’ Man (1977), Recent Songs (1979) and Various Positions (1984), whose song Hallelujah has cover versions by over 150 different artists. He subsequently published I’m Your Man (1988) and The Future (1992), in which he managed to convey the spirit of his time perfectly. Since then, he has recorded Ten New Songs (2001), Dear Heather (2004) and Blue Alert (2006). After celebrating his 40th anniversary as an artist, Leonard Cohen gave 84 concerts all over the world in 2008, attended by more than 700,000 people on a tour that meant his return to the stage after an absence of 15 years. He subsequently edited Songs from the Road, a live album recorded during the tour that includes his most emblematic songs. Admired by renowned artists, many have interpreted his songs and have recorded tribute albums like I’m Your Fan (1991), Tower of Song (1995) –in which singers such as Billy Joel, Sting, Elton John and Bono participate–, Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man (2006) and According to Leonard Cohen (2007).

He is an Officer and Companion of the Order of Canada, the country’s highest-ranking civilian order, and a Grand Officer of the National Order of Quebec. In 2008, he entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and was distinguished with the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010. He was awarded the Glenn Gould Prize in 2011.

The Leonard Cohen Acceptance Speech

Your majesty, your royal highnesses, excellencees, members of the jury, distinguished laureates, ladies and gentlemen, it is a great honour to stand here before you tonight. Perhaps, like the great maestro, Riccardo Muti, I’m not used to standing in front of an audience without an orchestra behind me, but I will do my best as a solo artist tonight.

I stayed up all night last night wondering what I might say to this assembly. After I had eaten all the chocolate bars and peanuts from the minibar, I scribbled a few words. I don’t think I have to refer to them. Obviously, I’m deeply touched to be recognized by the Foundation. But I have come here tonight to express another dimension of gratitude; I think I can do it in three or four minutes.

When I was packing in Los Angeles, I had a sense of unease because I’ve always felt some ambiguity about an award for poetry. Poetry comes from a place that no one commands, that no one conquers. So I feel somewhat like a charlatan to accept an award for an activity which I do not command. In other words, if I knew where the good songs came from I would go there more often.

I was compelled in the midst of that ordeal of packing to go and open my guitar. I have a Conde guitar, which was made in Spain in the great workshop at number 7 Gravina Street. I pick up an instrument I acquired over 40 years ago. I took it out of the case, I lifted it, and it seemed to be filled with helium it was so light. And I brought it to my face and I put my face close to the beautifully designed rosette, and I inhaled the fragrance of the living wood. We know that wood never dies. I inhaled the fragrance of the cedar as fresh as the first day that I acquired the guitar. And a voice seemed to say to me, “You are an old man and you have not said thank you, you have not brought your gratitude back to the soil from which this fragrance arose. And so I come here tonight to thank the soil and the soul of this land that has given me so much.

Because I know that just as an identity card is not a man, a credit rating is not a country.

Now, you know of my deep association and confraternity with the poet Federico Garcia Lorca. I could say that when I was a young man, an adolescent, and I hungered for a voice, I studied the English poets and I knew their work well, and I copied their styles, but I could not find a voice. It was only when I read, even in translation, the works of Lorca that I understood that there was a voice. It is not that I copied his voice; I would not dare. But he gave me permission to find a voice, to locate a voice, that is to locate a self, a self that that is not fixed, a self that struggles for its own existence.

As I grew older, I understood that instructions came with this voice. What were these instructions? The instructions were never to lament casually. And if one is to express the great inevitable defeat that awaits us all, it must be done within the strict confines of dignity and beauty.

And so I had a voice, but I did not have an instrument. I did not have a song.

And now I’m going to tell you very briefly a story of how I got my song.

Because – I was an indifferent guitar player. I banged the chords. I only knew a few of them. I sat around with my college friends, drinking and singing the folk songs and the popular songs of the day, but I never in a thousand years thought of myself as a musician or as a singer.

One day in the early sixties, I was visiting my mother’s house in Montreal. Her house was beside a park and in the park was a tennis court where many people come to watch the beautiful young tennis players enjoy their sport. I wandered back to this park which I’d known since my childhood, and there was a young man playing a guitar. He was playing a flamenco guitar, and he was surrounded by two or three girls and boys who were listening to him. I loved the way he played. There was something about the way he played that captured me. It was the way that I wanted to play and knew that I would never be able to play.

And, I sat there with the other listeners for a few moments and when there was a silence, an appropriate silence, I asked him if he would give me guitar lessons. He was a young man from Spain, and we could only communicate in my broken French and his broken French. He didn’t speak English. And he agreed to give me guitar lessons. I pointed to my mother’s house which you could see from the tennis court, and we made an appointment and settled a price.

He came to my mother’s house the next day and he said, “Let me hear you play something.” I tried to play something, and he said, “You don’t know how to play, do you?’

I said, “No, I don’t know how to play.” He said “First of all, let me tune your guitar. It’s all out of tune.” So he took the guitar, and he tuned it. He said, “It’s not a bad guitar.” It wasn’t the Conde, but it wasn’t a bad guitar. So, he handed it back to me. He said, “Now play.”

I couldn’t play any better.

He said “Let me show you some chords.” And he took the guitar, and he produced a sound from that guitar I had never heard. And he played a sequence of chords with a tremolo, and he said, “Now you do it.” I said, “It’s out of the question. I can’t possibly do it.” He said, “Let me put your fingers on the frets,” and he put my fingers on the frets. And he said, “Now, now play.”

It was a mess. He said, “I’ll come back tomorrow.”

He came back tomorrow, he put my hands on the guitar, he placed it on my lap in the way that was appropriate, and I began again with those six chords – a six chord progression. Many, many flamenco songs are based on them.

I was a little better that day. The third day – improved, somewhat improved. But I knew the chords now. And, I knew that although I couldn’t coordinate my fingers with my thumb to produce the correct tremolo pattern, I knew the chords; I knew them very, very well.

The next day, he didn’t come. He didn’t come. I had the number of his, of his boarding house in Montreal. I phoned to find out why he had missed the appointment, and they told me that he had taken his life. That he committed suicide.

I knew nothing about the man. I did not know what part of Spain he came from. I did not know why he came to Montreal. I did not know why he played there. I did not know why he he appeared there at that tennis court. I did not know why he took his life.

I was deeply saddened, of course. But now I disclose something that I’ve never spoken in public. It was those six chords, it was that guitar pattern that has been the basis of all my songs and all my music. So, now you will begin to understand the dimensions of the gratitude I have for this country.

Everything that you have found favourable in my work comes from this place. Everything , everything that you have found favourable in my songs and my poetry are inspired by this soil.

So, I thank you so much for the warm hospitality that you have shown my work because it is really yours, and you have allowed me to affix my signature to the bottom of the page.

Thank you so much ladies and gentlemen.


THE 2012 PEN NEW ENGLAND AWARD

Salman Rushdie presents the 2012 PEN New England Award for Song Lyrics of Literary Excellence to Leonard Cohen

Well this is a gig I wouldn't have missed for the world, I have to say. We were all having our picture taken backstage and I thought, this is the best photograph I have ever been in, and I've been in one or two. I really have to say I'm really grateful to PEN New England for the initiative of doing this, and to everybody who made it happen. When I was telling my friends that I was going to come and have the privilege of giving an award to Leonard Cohen, they began to insist that I did certain things. All of these friends were women. One of them said I should kiss him for her. Haven't done that yet, Leonard. Another of my friends said, "You know, I live on Clinton Street, and I'd really like him to come make music for me all through the evening, and I'll even wear a blue raincoat." This is a sign of how much regard and how deeply these songs have entered peoples lives. Yesterday, just as an experiment, I put on my twitter feed. I asked people what was their favorite Leonard Cohen line, and hundreds of people replied with an enormous diversity of lines from this extraordinary songbook. Several of them were among my favorites, but it was just both, the breadth of the response, how much different work was being responded to, how passionately it was being responded to, how much it meant to how many people. It was really very telling. I've been listening to Leonard Cohen's music ever since I was an undergraduate at Cambridge (the other Cambridge; the old one). It's really a thrilling opportunity to have a chance to tell him how much that music has meant to me for over four decades. I said to him before we came on that when we were kids he taught us something about how it might be to be grown up. How to have relationships that were in the real world, that were not kid stuff, but had the pain, the difficulty, the complexity, and the exaltation of real relationships to the real world of adult life.

Listening to his lyrics again before this evening, I was struck by something I had forgotten perhaps about how much religious imagery there is to be found in them. Jesus crops up in "Suzanne" and there are the "Sisters of Mercy" and of course there is the great Hallelujah. There has always been something anthemic, something hymn-like about Leonard Cohen's greatest songs, though when you start listening closely, you here his wit and his jaundice comedy and sometimes his disillusion undermining those hymnal qualities. Not many hymns would rhyme Hallelujah with what's it to ya. Not to mention all the other rhymes in that which are equally non-sacred. I think it's true that all great literature begins at the level of the line. If you can't write a good line, you can't write a good paragraph, you can't write a good page, you can't write a good book. At the level of the line for all these years, Leonard Cohen's work has been amazing us again and again. This is work of great beauty and depth, and to put it simply, if I could write like that, I would. I think of poets in the twentieth century who have had a real relationship with meter and rhyme, and who have loved the playfulness of those things, and I think of W.H. Auden and James Fenton, and I think that the kind of playfulness of those rhymes in Hallelujah, for example, is something that an Auden or a Fenton would respond to very immediately because it's the kind of language play that you find in their poetry, but there is only one man who writes like this, exploring melancholy and exhaultation, desire and loss, as nobody else can, and so it is with great respect and admiration I am able to present this award. Now it's my great pleasure to present the 2012 PEN Award for Song Lyrics of Literary Excellence to Mr. Leonard Cohen.

The Leonard Cohen Acceptance Speech

Thanks so much friends. Thank you for your gracious hospitality. Thank you PEN and the jury. I understand now on what basis these awards were given because the entire jury could be candidates for this award, but I understand they are awarding them on the basis of seniority. So there is Chuck Berry and then there is me, and I don't know who comes next, but it certainly is an inevitability. Thank you so much friends. Ever since I think the only exclamation in our literature that rivals Walt Whitman's declaration of his barbaric yawp is Chuck Berry's Roll Over, Beethoven. Those two expressions of American ingenuity are really what has defined our activity, and from Chuck Berry all the way down to us is a straight line from that Roll Over, Beethoven because if Beethoven hadn't rolled over, there wouldn't have been room for any of us. So friends, I am deeply grateful for this recognition, but I also want to say that in another sense, all of us are just footnotes to the work of Chuck Berry, and like a footnote, I want to keep it brief and light. So thanks a lot friends.


CANADA'S WALK OF FAME 2018

Leonard Cohen: INDUCTION YEAR 2018
PILLAR OF EXCELLENCE: Music
BORN: September 21, 1934
BIRTH PLACE: Montreal, Quebec
DATE OF PASSING: November 07, 2016

Leonard Cohen, a truly legendary poet, songwriter, performer and novelist, began his career as a poet and novelist during the 1950s and early 1960. In 1967, at the age of 33, he launched his music career with his first album, Songs of Leonard Cohen. He followed his debut with three more folk albums – Songs from a Room, Songs of Love and Hate and New Skin for the Old Ceremony. More albums followed and in 1984 he released perhaps his most famous song, “Hallelujah” on his studio album Various Positions. I’m Your Man in 1988 marked Leonard Cohen’s turn to synthesized productions and remains his most popular album. In 1992, Leonard Cohen released its follow-up, The Future, which had dark lyrics and references to political and social unrest.

Leonard Cohen returned to music in 2001 with the release of Ten New Songs, which was a major hit in Canada and Europe. His eleventh album, Dear Heather, followed in 2004. Following a successful string of tours between 2008 and 2013, Leonard Cohen released three albums in the final four years of his life: Old Ideas (2012), Popular Problems (2014) and You Want It Darker (2016), the last of which was released three weeks before his death.

Leonard Cohen was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame, the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He was a Companion of the Order of Canada, the nation’s highest civilian honour. In 2011, Leonard Cohen received one of the Prince of Asturias Awards for literature and the ninth Glenn Gould Prize.

Intersting Facts: Leonard Cohen’s first band, formed when he was 17, was called the Buckskin Boys. He published his first volume of poetry at 22, and won a $2,000 scholarship to travel around Europe when he was 25.
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LEONARD COHEN | HALLS OF FAME
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LEONARD COHEN | HALLS OF FAME
The Official Halls of Fame Biographies of Leonard Cohen
http://www.leonardcohenhallsoffame.blogspot.com

THE 1991 CANADIAN MUSIC HALL OF FAME
THE 1991 ORDER OF CANADA
THE 2003 ORDER OF CANADA
THE 2005 CANADIAN FOLK MUSIC WALK OF FAME
THE 2006 CANADIAN SONGWRITERS HALL OF FAME
THE 2008 ROCK AND ROLL HALL OF FAME
THE 2008 NATIONAL ORDER OF QUEBEC
THE 2010 GRAMMY LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
THE 2010 SONGWRITERS HALL OF FAME
THE 2011 AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS & SCIENCES
THE 2011 PRINCE OF ASTURIAS AWARD
THE 2011 GLENN GOULD PRIZE
THE 2012 PEN NEW ENGLAND AWARD
THE 2018 CANADA HONOURS/CANADA'S WALK OF FAME
THE 20?? HOLLYWOOD WALK OF FAME
THE 20?? KENNEDY CENTER HONORS
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Famous Names in Leonard Cohen's Halls of Fame Biographies and Induction Speeches

Canada's Walk Of Fame 2018
Glenn Gould, The Buckskin Boys, Lorca Cohen

The 2012 Pen New England Award
Walt Whitman, Chuck Berry, Beethoven, Salman Rushdie, W.H. Auden, James Fenton, Shawn Colvin

The 2011 Prince of Asturias Award
The Buckskin Boys, Federico García Lorca, Riccardo Muti, Adolf Hitler, Billy Joel, Sting, Elton John, Bono, Glenn Gould

The 2011 Glenn Gould Prize
Glenn Gould, Philip Glass, Willie Nelson, Bono

The 2010 Songwriters Hall Of Fame
Judy Collins, Suzanne Elrod, Marianne Ihlen, Jennifer Warnes, Phil Spector, Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Elton John, R.E.M., k.d. Lang, Noel Harrison, Justin Timberlake, Anjani Thomas

The 2010 Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award
Elton John, Willie Nelson, Neil Diamond, Iggy Pop, Herbie Hancock, Joni Mitchell

The 2008 National Order Of Quebec
The Buckskin Boys, Suzanne Elrod, Marianne Ihlen

The 2008 Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame
Judy Collins, John Hammond, Joni Mitchell, Jennifer Warnes, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Elton John, Billy Joel, R.E.M., Bono, U2, Don Henley, Peter Gabriel, Jeff Buckley, John Cale, Rufus Wainwright, Allison Krauss, Nick Cave, Anjani Thomas, Kurt Cobain, Lou Reed, Phil Ochs, Adolf Hitler, Suzanne Elrod, Marianne Ihlen, Janis Joplin, Allen Ginsberg, Hubert Selby, William Burroughs, Richard Wagner, Claude DeBussy, The Buckskin Boys, Federico Garcia Lorca, Irving Layton, Jack Kerouac, Robert Sward, Phil Spector, The Pixies, Joshu Sasaki-Roshi, Beth Orton, Jon Landau, William Ruhlmann, Pico Iyer, Philip Glass, Jim Devlin, L.S. Dorman, C.L. Rawlins, Ira Nadel, Anthony DeCurtis

The 2006 Canadian Songwriters Hall Of Fame
Judy Collins, John Hammond, Joni Mitchell, Jennifer Warnes, Joan Baez, Joe Cocker, Diana Ross, Neil Diamond, Aaron Neville, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Elton John, Billy Joel, R.E.M., Bono, Don Henley, Peter Gabriel, Jeff Buckley, John Cale, Rufus Wainwright, Allison Krauss, Nick Cave, Anjani Thomas, Adolf Hitler, Joan of Arc, Suzanne Elrod, Marianne Ihlen, Billie Holiday, Harry Belafonte, Roberta Flack, Nina Simone, Genesis, Robert Altman, Henry Lewy, Rita Coolidge, Christian Fevret, lan McCulloch, The Pixies, House of Love, Lloyd Cole, Sting, Willie Nelson, Sharon Robinson, The Buckskin Boys, Grassland Boys, Northwood, Mel Gibson, k.d. lang, Neville Brothers, Johnny Cash, Tom Cochrane, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Soul Asylum, Blackeyed Susans, Concrete Blonde, Atom Egoyan, Dark Gift, Keith Hancock, Danya Kurtz, Mean Larry & Friends, Jean-Claude Toran, Florent Vollant, The Washington Squares, Patricia O'Callaghan, India Arie, Armand Vaillancourt, Noel Harrison, Françoise Hardy, Pauline Julien, Graeme Allwright, Catherine McKinnon, Chad Mitchell, Tom Northcott, Georges Dor

The 2005 Canadian Folk Music Walk Of Fame
Suzanne Elrod, Kris Kristofferson, Elton John, U2

The 1991 Canadian Music Hall Of Fame
Judy Collins, John Hammond, Joni Mitchell, Jennifer Warnes, Joan Baez, Joe Cocker, Suzanne Elrod, Diana Ross, Neil Diamond, Aaron Neville, Suzanne Vega, Elvis Costello, The Cure, The Guess Who, Oscar Peterson, Paul Anka, Glenn Gould, Guy Lombardo, The Diamonds, Neil Young, Hank Snow, The Crew-Cuts, The Four Lads, Wilf Carter, The Band, Gordon Lightfoot, Maureen Forrester, Irving Layton

THE INDUCTEES

Canada's Walk Of Fame 2018
Leonard Cohen, Andy Kim, Andrea Martin, Jessie Reyez, Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg, Tessa Virtue & Scott Moir, Colonel Chris Hadfield, Dr. Joanne Liu, Jimmy Pattison

The 2012 PEN New England Award
Leonard Cohen, Chuck Berry

The 2011 Prince of Asturias Award
Leonard Cohen, Riccardo Muti, Haile Gebrselassie, Bill Drayton, Howard Gardner, Joseph Altman, Arturo Álvarez-Buylla, Giacomo Rizzolatti, The Royal Society, The Heroes of Fukushima

Sir Paul Nurse and Julie Maxton, President and Executive Director of The Royal Society collect the Prince of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities.

The Japanese delegation of "Fukushima heroes" who collect the Prince of Concordia Award 2011: Shinji Iwakuma, Masami Watanabe, Toyohiko Tomioka, Kenji Kato, Yoshitsugu Oigawa.

The 2011 American Academy of Arts & Sciences
Marsha Berger, Alex Eskin, Thomas Y. Hou, Kazuya Kato, Laurent Saloff-Coste, Shou-Wu Zhang, Thomas Banks, George William Crabtree, Sylvester James Gates, Jr., Michael Sol Gruner, Andrei Dimitriyevich, Gregory W. Moore, Ann E. Nelson, Hugh David Politzer, Shoucheng Zhang, Geoffrey W. Coates, Robert Howard Crabtree, Marcetta York Darensbourg, Martin P. Head-Gordon, Todd Joseph Martinez, Chad Mirkin, Ei-Ichi Negishi, Henry S. White, Jr., Hisashi Yamamoto, Joseph Klafter, R. Paul Butler, Chester Charles Langway, Jr., H. Jay Melosh, William Jason Morgan, Ellen Mosley-Thompson, Roberta L. Rudnick, Yuk Ling Yung, James C. Zachos, Frances Hamilton Arnold, Wanda M. Austin, Juan J. de Pablo, Glenn H. Fredrickson, Sharon C. Glotzer, Leah H. Jamieson, L. Gary Leal, Howard A. Stone, Edmund M. Clarke, Edward W. Felten, Eric Horvitz, Michael I. Jordan, Shree K. Nayar, Patricia Griffiths Selinger, Peter Williston Shor, Avi Wigderson, Raymond J. Deshaies, Robert E. Kingston, Kevan M. Shokat, Gisela T. Storz, Wesley Ian Sundquist, Jean Y.J. Wang, Marvin Pete Wickens, Shigeyuki Yokoyama, Victor Ambros, Scott E. Fraser, Maxwell E. Gottesman, Jeffrey H. Miller, Richard Isamu Morimoto, David Conrad Page, Rodney J. Rothstein, Martine F. Roussel, Eric Ursell Selker, Richard Warren Aldrich, David Paul Corey, John P. Donoghue, Russell Dawson Fernald, Okihide Hikosaka, Amita Sehgal, Brian A. Wandell, Anna Kay Behrensmeyer, Robert K. Colwell, Farish Alston Jenkins, Jr., Trevor Douglas Price, Peter B. Reich, David N. Reznick, Sybil Putnam Seitzinger, Svante Paabo, Clara Derber Bloomfield, George Q. Daley, Chi Van Dang, Vishva Dixit, Jonathan A. Epstein, Joseph Francis Fraumeni, Jr., Daniel Arie Haber, Katherine Ann High, Talmadge Everett King, Jr., Lewis Lee Lanier, David W. Russell, John Andrew Bargh, Melissa Foster Bowerman, Anthony S. Bryk, Michael K. Tanenhaus, Sandra Robin Waxman, Daniel Merton Wegner, Roland J.M. Benebou, Steven Neil Durlauf, David Laibson, John A. List, David G. Pearce, Monika Piazzesi, Larry Samuelson, Christopher R. Udry, Timothy J. Besley, Timothy J. Colton, Martha Finnemore, Jonathan N. Katz, Katherine S. Newman, Scott E. Page, Thomas Romer, Charles Haines Stewart III, Adam Roberts, Elizabeth J. Cabraser, Marcel Kahan, Geoffrey P. Miller, Roberta Cooper Ramo, Michael H. Schill, Louis Michael Seidman, Stephen Campbell Yeazell, Luc Anselin, Penelope Dorothy Eckert, Claude S. Fischer, Nancy Foner, Catherine S. Fowler, Jonathan Mark Kenoyer, Bruce David Smith, Lothar von Falkenhausen, Franklin I. Gamwell, Daniel E. Garber, James Higginbotham, E. Brooks Holifield, Frances Myrna Kamm, Beatrice Longuenesse, Margaret Mary Mitchell, Ann Taves, Angelika Neuwirth, James Clifford, Annette Gordon-Reed, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, William Roger Louis, Mark Mazower, Gabrielle M. Spiegel, Thomas J. Sugrue, Barbara Weinstein, Mary Beard, Stanley A. Corngold, Peter W. Culicover, Philip Fisher, Jeffrey Henderson, Jay Harold Jasanoff, James S. Shapiro, P. Adams Sitney, Herbert Tucker, John Guare, Oscar Hijuelos, Edward Hoagland, Bill McKibben, Michael Scammell, Yves Bonnefoy, Luisa Valenzuela, Mario Vargas Llosa, Thomas P. Campbell, Thomas W. Gaehtgens, Jenny Holzer, C. Brian Rose, Michael R. Van Valkenburgh, Eduardo E.M. Souto de Moura, Philip V. Bohlman, Dave Brubeck, Ken Burns, Daniel Day-Lewis, Bob Dylan, Sarah A. Fuller, Thomas Forrest Kelly, Paul Simon, Samuel A. Waterston, Robert Wilson, Leonard Cohen, Paul Griffiths, Helen Mirren, Jesse Huntley Ausubel, Edward P. Djerejian, Julio Frenk, W. Thomas Johnson, Alex S. Jones, Louis Menand, Robert D. Reischauer, Paul Gardner Allen, John E. Bryson, James Ireland Cash, Jr., Ernest H. Cockrell, Hugh Grant, Robert D. Haas, Robert F. Higgins, Robert Kraft, Morton L. Mandel, Miles D. White, David de Rothschild, Douglas Joseph Bennet, Jr., Francisco G. Cigarroa, Ray A. Hammond, Linda P.B. Katehi, Steven Knapp, William Barlow Neaves, Malcolm Austin Rogers, David J. Skorton, Debora L. Spar, Raghunath A. Mashelkar

The 2011 Glenn Gould Prize
Leonard Cohen

The 2010 Songwriters Hall of Fame Inductees:
Leonard Cohen, Laura Nyro, Bob Marley, Jackie DeShannon, Philip Bailey, Maurice White, Verdine White, Larry Dunn, Al McKay, David Foster, Johnny Mandel, Tom Adair, Matt Dennis, Sunny Skylar, Jesse Stone

The 2010 Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award:
Leonard Cohen, Bobby Darin, David "Honeyboy" Edwards, Michael Jackson, Loretta Lynn, André Previn, Clark Terry

The 2008 Order of Quebec:
Leonard Cohen, Alban D'Amours, Andre Bachand, Gerald A. Beaudoin, Michel G. Bergeron, Pierre Bruneau, Andre Caille, Robert Charlebois, Francine DeCary, Clement DuHaime, Louis Fortier, Pavel Hamet, Pierre Lassonde, Gilles Marcotte, Remi Marcoux, Anne Claire Poirier, Mohamad Sawan, Michele Stanton-Jean, Ashok K. Vijh, Silvia Araya, Antoine Ayoub, Georgette Beaudry, Francoise Bertrand, Gilles Bissonnette, Emile Bouchard, Raymond Brousseau, Louis Caron, Jacques Castonguay, Francois Chartier, Rene DeRouin, Jacques DuChesneau, Marisa Ferretti Barth, Sheila Fischman, Pierre Frechette, Edgar Fruitier, Sheila Goldbloom, Gisele Gravel, Henri Grondin, Gloria Jeliu, Aida Kamar, Nicole Mateesco Matte, Paul-Arthur McKenzie, Michel Pouliot, Normand Seguin, Peter Simons, E. Noel Spinelli, Richard Tremblay, Elena Venditelli Faita, Yanick Villedieu

The 2008 Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame Inductees:
Leonard Cohen, John Mellencamp, Madonna, The Dave Clark Five, The Ventures, Little Walter, Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff

The 2006 Canadian Songwriters Hall Of Fame Inductees:
Leonard Cohen, William Eckstein, Lionel Daunais, Carmen Lombardo, Gilles Vigneault

The 2005 Canadian Folk Music Walk Of Fame Inductees:
Leonard Cohen, Estelle Klein

The 2003 Order Of Canada:
Leonard Cohen, Stephen Lewis, Robert Mundell, Guy Saint-Pierre, Calvin David Abrahamson, Jack N. Agrios, George Frederick Curtis, Shirley Douglas, John Laurence Hamerton, Gerald K. Helleiner, Ted Hughes, Arthur Irving, Zacharias Kunuk, David S.R. Leighton, John Murrell, Gerald Pratley, Arthur R. Smith, Gordon G. Thiessen, Robert Volpé, T. M. (Mike) Apsey, Miller H. Ayre, William J. Barakett, David V. Bates, Prakash Bhartia, George Blondin, Walter Bushuk, Tagak Curley, Robert G. Elgie, Joanne Farley, Sharon Trostin Hampson, Charles V. Keating, Terry Kelly, Pierre Lassonde, Leonard G. Lee, Daurene E. Lewis, Lois Ada Lilienstein, Allan M. Lysack, Donald C. MacDonald, René Massé, M. Corinne Church Miller, Bram Morrison, Valentine O'Donovan, Elisapie Killiktee Ootova, Joseph Howard Sherman, Brijendra K. Sood, Robert Turner, William J. Warren, Harriet Winspear, Morden Yolles

The 1991 Order Of Canada:
Leonard Cohen, Mary C. Agnew, Anne Anderson, Tommy Banks, Douglas G. Bassett, Avie Bennett, Hector-Louis Bertrand, William J. Brady, Pierre Brouillette, Maureen Dunphy Brown, Manuel Buchwald, Rene Buisson, Duncan Chester Campbell, Jacques J. Castonguay, Douglas Bruce Clement, Allan F. Collins, Frances H. Dafoe, Tony Dagnone, John T. Dyment, Helmut M. Eppich, Joan Ford, L. Yves Fortier, Felix R. Blache Frasier, Rowland C. Frazee, Michel Gagne, Miroslawa Gawalewicz, Reuben A. Hornstein, Charles J.A. Hughes, Karen Kain, Max Keeping, Raymond Landry, Rene Latourelle, Trudi Le Caine, Jean Pierre Lefebvre, Michel Lemire, Richard G. Lipsey, Harold W. Lundrigan, John B. MacDonald, Thelma P. MacDonald, Eleanor A. Malkin, Goldwin Arthur Martin, William Rogers McIntyre, Arthur K. Miki, Roy Seymour Minter, Robert D. Murray, Arnold Naimark, Kelvin K. Ogilvie, Lilianne Perrault, Suzanne E. Pinel, Maurice Podbrey, Ken Read, Michelle Rossignol, Barbara Ann Scott-King, Leslie W. Shemilt, Raymond E. Sirois, Guy St-Germain, Andre Steinmann, H. Heward Stikeman, Mary Alice Stuart, Jack Sures, F. Elva Taylor, Lap-Chee Tsui, Lise Watier, P. David Webster, David C. Wilson, Arthur W.S. Wood, Jean Ross Woodsworth, Douglas Tyndall Wright, Hugh R. Wynne-Edwards

The 1991 Canadian Music Hall Of Fame Inductees:
Leonard Cohen, Mel Shaw


THE LOCATIONS

The Order of Canada is located in Ottawa, Ontario
The Order of Quebec is located in Quebec City, Quebec
Canada's Walk of Fame is located in Toronto, Ontario
The Juno/Canadian Music Hall of Fame is located in Vancouver, British Columbia
The Canadian Folk Music Walk of Fame is located in Ottawa, Ontario
The Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame is located in Toronto, Ontario
The Songwriters Hall of Fame is located in New York City, New York
The Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame is located in Cleveland, Ohio
The Hollywood Walk of Fame is located in Hollywood, California
The Kennedy Center Honors are located in Washington D.C.
The Grammys are in Los Angeles, California
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is in Cambridge, Massachusetts
The Glenn Gould Prize is in Toronto, Ontario
The Prince of Asturias Award is in Spain
The Pen New England is in Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts

LONGEST TO SHORTEST LEONARD COHEN HALL OF FAME BIOGRAPHY

01. THE 2008 ROCK AND ROLL HALL OF FAME BIOGRAPHY (3563 WORDS)
02. THE 2006 CANADIAN SONGWRITERS HALL OF FAME BIOGRAPHY (2094 WORDS)
03.
04.
05. THE 2011 PRINCE OF ASTURIAS AWARD FOR LETTERS BIOGRAPHY (592 WORDS)
06. THE 2008 NATIONAL ORDER OF QUEBEC BIOGRAPHY (420 WORDS)
07. THE 1991 JUNO/CANADIAN MUSIC HALL OF FAME BIOGRAPHY (329 WORDS)
08. THE 2011 GLENN GOULD PRIZE BIOGRAPHY (327 WORDS)
09. THE 2010 SONGWRITERS HALL OF FAME BIOGRAPHY (319 WORDS)
10. THE 2018 CANADA'S WALK OF FAME
11. THE 2003 ORDER OF CANADA BIOGRAPHY (128 WORDS)
12. THE 2010 GRAMMY LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD BIOGRAPHY (112 WORDS)
13. THE 2005 CANADIAN FOLK MUSIC WALK OF FAME BIOGRAPHY (103 WORDS)
14. THE 1991 ORDER OF CANADA BIOGRAPHY (85 WORDS)
15. THE 2011 AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS & SCIENCES BIOGRAPHY (73 WORDS)

MONTHS OF THE YEAR LEONARD COHEN WAS INDUCTED

1 TIME IN JANUARY
2 TIME IN FEBRUARY
2 TIMES IN MARCH
1 TIME IN APRIL
0 TIMES IN MAY
2 TIMES IN JUNE
0 TIMES IN JULY
0 TIMES IN AUGUST
1 TIME IN SEPTEMBER
4 TIMES IN OCTOBER
0 TIMES IN NOVEMBER
1 TIMES IN DECEMBER

DAYS OF THE WEEK LEONARD COHEN WAS INDUCTED

3 TIMES ON A SUNDAY
1 TIME ON A MONDAY
0 TIMES ON A TUESDAY
1 TIME ON A WEDNESDAY
2 TIMES ON A THURSDAY
3 TIME ON A FRIDAY
4 TIMES ON A SATURDAY

THE NUMBERS OF THE DAYS OF THE MONTHS LEONARD COHEN WAS INDUCTED ON

3 TIMES ON A 1
1 TIME ON A 3
1 TIME ON A 5
2 TIMES ON A 10
1 TIME ON A 17
1 TIME ON A 19
1 TIME ON A 21
1 TIME ON A 24
1 TIME ON A 26
2 TIMES ON A 30

THE YEARS LEONARD COHEN WAS INDUCTED

1 TIME IN 2018
1 TIME IN 2012
3 TIMES IN 2011
2 TIMES IN 2010
2 TIMES IN 2008
2 TIMES IN 1991
1 TIME IN 2006
1 TIME IN 2005
1 TIME IN 2003

LEONARD COHEN ALBUMS MENTIONED IN THE LEONARD COHEN HALLS OF FAME BIOGRAPHIES

01. SONGS OF LEONARD COHEN (12 TIMES)
02. SONGS FROM A ROOM (8 TIMES)
03. SONGS OF LOVE AND HATE (9 TIMES)
04. NEW SKIN FOR THE OLD CEREMONY (6 TIMES)
05. DEATH OF A LADIES' MAN (7 TIMES)
06. LIVE SONGS (1 TIME)
07. RECENT SONGS (6 TIMES)
08. VARIOUS POSITIONS (11 TIMES)
09. I'M YOUR MAN (13 TIMES)
10. THE FUTURE (10 TIMES)
11. TEN NEW SONGS (8 TIMES)
12. DEAR HEATHER (5 TIMES)
13. SONGS FROM THE ROAD (1 TIME)
14. OLD IDEAS (2 TIMES)
15. POPULAR PROBLEMS (2 TIMES)
16. YOU WANT IT DARKER (2 TIMES)

ALBUMS BY OTHER ARTISTS MENTIONED IN THE LEONARD COHEN HALLS OF FAME BIOGRAPHIES

01. IN MY LIFE BY JUDY COLLINS (4 TIMES)
02. FAMOUS BLUE RAINCOAT BY JENNIFER WARNES (6 TIMES)
03. I'M YOUR FAN BY VARIOUS ARTISTS (5 TIMES)
04. TOWER OF SONG: THE SONGS OF LEONARD COHEN BY VARIOUS ARTISTS (5 TIMES)
05. DEMOCRACY BY JUDY COLLINS (1 TIME)
06. LEONARD COHEN: I'M YOUR MAN SOUNDTRACK BY VARIOUS ARTISTS (4 TIMES)
07. THE BOOK OF LONGING BY PHILIP GLASS (7 TIMES)
08. BLUE ALERT BY ANJANI (5 TIMES)
09. THE JONI LETTERS BY HERBIE HANCOCK (1 TIME)

LEONARD COHEN BOOKS MENTIONED IN THE LEONARD COHEN HALLS OF FAME BIOGRAPHIES

01. THE FAVOURITE GAME (4 TIMES)
02. BEAUTIFUL LOSERS (9 TIMES)
03. LET US COMPARE MYTHOLOGIES (7 TIMES)
04. SPICE-BOX OF EARTH (1 TIME)
05. PARASITES OF HEAVEN (1 TIME)
06. THE ENERGY OF SLAVES (1 TIME)
07. FLOWERS FOR HITLER (5 TIMES)
08. THE SPICE BOX OF EARTH (1 TIME)
09. DEATH OF A LADY'S MAN (1 TIME)
10. BOOK OF MERCY (1 TIME)
11. STRANGER MUSIC (1 TIME)
12. THE BOOK OF LONGING (10 TIMES)

LEONARD COHEN SONGS MENTIONED IN THE LEONARD COHEN HALLS OF FAME BIOGRAPHIES

Suzanne (20 Times)
I'm Your Man (13 Times)
Hallelujah (13 Times)
Everybody Knows (9 Times)
The Future (10 Times)
Bird on the Wire (8 Times)
Famous Blue Raincoat (8 Times)
Tower of Song (6 Times)
Sisters of Mercy (6 Times)
Ain't No Cure For Love (5 Times)
So Long, Marianne (5 Times)
Anthem (4 Times)
Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye (3 Times)
Dear Heather (3 Times)
Dress Rehearsal Rag (3 Times)
Joan of Arc (3 Times)
First We Take Manhattan (3 Times)
Democracy (2 Times)
Chelsea Hotel #2
Don't Go Home With Your Hard-On
Who By Fire
Story of Isaac
Heart With No Companion
Field Commander Cohen
If It Be Your Will
The Law
Dance Me To The End Of Love
Waiting for the Miracle
Closing Time
Come Healing

NAMES THAT APPEAR IN THE LEONARD COHEN HALLS OF FAME BIOGRAPHIES

123 NAMES

01. LEONARD COHEN (232 TIMES)

02. SUZANNE ELROD (17 TIMES)

03. JUDY COLLINS (16 TIMES)

04. BOB DYLAN (10 TIMES)
04. JENNIFER WARNES (10 TIMES)

05. JEFF BUCKLEY (8 TIMES)
05. THE BUCKSKIN BOYS (8 TIMES)

06. ELTON JOHN (7 TIMES)

07. PHIL SPECTOR (6 TIMES)
07. WILLIE NELSON (6 TIMES)
07. R.E.M. (6 TIMES)

08. FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA (5 TIMES)
08. JONI MITCHELL (5 TIMES)
08. AARON NEVILLE (5 TIMES)
08. BONO (5 TIMES)
08. K.D. LANG (5 TIMES)
08. GLENN GOULD (5 TIMES)
08. ANJANI THOMAS (5 TIMES)
08. MARIANNE IHLEN (5 TIMES)

09. JOHN HAMMOND (4 TIMES)
09. NEIL DIAMOND (4 TIMES)
09. DON HENLEY (4 TIMES)
09. BILLY JOEL (4 TIMES)
09. RUFUS WAINWRIGHT (4 TIMES)
09. ADOLF HITLER (4 TIMES)
09. CHUCK BERRY (4 TIMES)
09. THE PIXIES (4 TIMES)
09. NICK CAVE (4 TIMES)

10. JOAN BAEZ (3 TIMES)
10. JOE COCKER (3 TIMES)
10. SHARON ROBINSON (3 TIMES)
10. NOEL HARRISON (3 TIMES)
10. JOHN CALE (3 TIMES)
10. BEETHOVEN (3 TIMES)

11. U2 (2 TIMES)
11. PETER GABRIEL (2 TIMES)
11. LOU REED (2 TIMES)
11. BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN (2 TIMES)
11. RITA COOLIDGE (2 TIMES)
11. DIANA ROSS (2 TIMES)
11. CONCRETE BLONDE (2 TIMES)
11. ALLISON KRAUSS (2 TIMES)
11. JOAN OF ARC (2 TIMES)
11. ALLEN GINSBERG (2 TIMES)
11. ADRIENNE CLARKSON (2 TIMES)
11. PHILIP GLASS (2 TIMES)
11. STING (2 TIMES)
11. W.H. AUDEN (2 TIMES)
11. JAMES FENTON (2 TIMES)
11. OSCAR PETERSON (2 TIMES)
11. GUY LOMBARDO (2 TIMES)
11. PAUL ANKA (2 TIMES)
11. NEIL YOUNG (2 TIMES)
11. HANK SNOW (2 TIMES)
11. WILF CARTER (2 TIMES)
11. GORDON LIGHTFOOT (2 TIMES)
11. MAUREEN FORRESTER (2 TIMES)
11. THE BAND (2 TIMES)
11. THE FOUR LADS (2 TIMES)
11. THE CREW-CUTS (2 TIMES)
11. THE DIAMONDS (2 TIMES)
11. ROBERT ALTMAN (2 TIMES)
11. JOHN LISSAUER (2 TIMES)
11. KURT COBAIN (2 TIMES)
11. MOSES ZNAIMER (2 TIMES)
11. IRVING LAYTON (2 TIMES)

ONLY ONE MENTION EACH:

Walt Whitman, Chuck Berry, Salman Rushdie, Shawn Colvin, Riccardo Muti, Justin Timberlake, Neil Portnow, Iggy Pop, Herbie Hancock, Nirvana, Phil Ochs, Jack Kerouac, Robert Sward, Joshu Sasaki-Roshi, Beth Orton, William Ruhlmann, Pico Iyer, Janis Joplin, Richard Wagner, Claude Debussy, Hubert Selby, William Burroughs, Jon Landau, Jim Devlin, L.S. Dorman, C.L. Rawlins, Ira Nadel, Anthony DeCurtis, Damien Rice, Georges Dor, Billie Holiday, Henry Lewy, Christian Fevret, lan McCulloch, House of Love, Lloyd Cole, Armand Vaillancourt, Nina Simone, Françoise Hardy, Pauline Julien, Harry Belafonte, Roberta Flack, Graeme Allwright, Catherine McKinnon, Chad Mitchell, Tom Northcott, Genesis, Mel Gibson, The Neville Brothers, Johnny Cash, Tom Cochrane, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Soul Asylum, Blackeyed Susans, Patricia O'Callaghan, India Arie, Atom Egoyan, Dark Gift, Keith Hancock, Dayna Kurtz, Mean Larry & Friends, Jean-Claude Toran, Florent Vollant, The Washington Squares, Grassland Boys, Northwood, Kris Kristofferson, Suzanne Vega, Elvis Costello, The Cure, The Guess Who, Ray Hnatyshyn, Albert Grossman, Oliver Stone, Stevie Ray Vaughan

PRESENTERS AND/OR PERFORMERS FOR LEONARD COHEN AT THE INDUCTION CEREMONIES

01. THE 1991 JUNO/CANADIAN MUSIC HALL OF FAME (MOSES ZNAIMER, SUZANNE VEGA, JENNIFER WARNES, AARON NEVILLE)
02. THE 1991 ORDER OF CANADA (RAY HNATYSHYN)
03. THE 2003 ORDER OF CANADA (ADRIENNE CLARKSON)
04. THE 2005 CANADIAN FOLK MUSIC WALK OF FAME
05. THE 2006 CANADIAN SONGWRITERS HALL OF FAME (ADRIENNE CLARKSON, K.D. LANG, WILLIE NELSON, RUFUS WAINWRIGHT)
06. THE 2008 ROCK AND ROLL HALL OF FAME (LOU REED AND DAMIEN RICE)
07. THE 2008 NATIONAL ORDER OF QUEBEC
08. THE 2010 GRAMMY LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD (NEIL PORTNOW)
09. THE 2010 SONGWRITERS HALL OF FAME (JUDY COLLINS AND K.D. LANG)
10. THE 2011 GLENN GOULD PRIZE
11. THE 2011 AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES
12. THE 2011 PRINCE OF ASTURIAS AWARD (PRINCE FELIPE)
13. THE 2012 PEN NEW ENGLAND AWARD (SALMAN RUSHDIE AND SHAWN COLVIN)
14. THE 2018 CANADA'S WALK OF FAME (LORCA COHEN)

DATES OF THE INDUCTION CEREMONIES:

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 1, 2018
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2012
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2011
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 1, 2011
FRIDAY, APRIL 1, 2011 - FRIDAY, APRIL 1, 2011 - THE ANNOUNCEMENT / MONDAY, MAY 14, 2012 - THE CEREMONY - GGP
THURSDAY, JUNE 17, 2010
SATURDAY, JANUARY 30, 2010
THURSDAY, JUNE 19, 2008
MONDAY, MARCH 10, 2008
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 5, 2006
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 2005
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 24, 2003
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 30, 1991
SUNDAY, MARCH 3, 1991


ARTISTS WHO WERE AWARDED THE GLENN GOULD PRIZE, INDUCTED INTO THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES, AND RECEIVED THE PRINCE OF ASTURIAS AWARD FOR LETTERS IN THE SAME YEAR:

01. 2011 - Leonard Cohen

ARTISTS WHO WERE AWARDED THE GLENN GOULD PRIZE AND INDUCTED INTO THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES IN THE SAME YEAR:

01. 2011 - Leonard Cohen

ARTISTS WHO WERE AWARDED THE GLENN GOULD PRIZE AND RECEIVED THE PRINCE OF ASTURIAS AWARD FOR LETTERS IN THE SAME YEAR:

01. 2011 - Leonard Cohen

ARTISTS WHO WERE INDUCTED INTO THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES AND RECEIVED THE PRINCE OF ASTURIAS AWARD FOR LETTERS IN THE SAME YEAR:

01. 2011 - Leonard Cohen

ARTISTS WHO WERE INDUCTED INTO THE SONGWRITERS HALL OF FAME AND RECEIVED THE GRAMMY LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD IN THE SAME YEAR:

01. 2010 - Leonard Cohen

ARTISTS WHO WERE INDUCTED INTO THE ROCK AND ROLL HALL OF FAME AND RECEIVED THE NATIONAL ORDER OF QUEBEC IN THE SAME YEAR:

01. 2008 - Leonard Cohen

ARTISTS WHO WERE INDUCTED INTO THE JUNO/CANADIAN MUSIC HALL OF FAME AND RECEIVED THE ORDER OF CANADA IN THE SAME YEAR:

01. 1991 - Leonard Cohen
Last edited by Roy on Tue Apr 23, 2019 4:09 pm, edited 134 times in total.
LEONARD COHEN | HALLS OF FAME
The Official Halls of Fame Biographies of Leonard Cohen
http://www.leonardcohenhallsoffame.blogspot.com
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Roy
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Re: LEONARD COHEN | HALLS OF FAME

Post by Roy »

:shock: I don't know what just happened today, but the number of visitors to the LEONARD COHEN | HALLS OF FAME website went from 4165 to 11,900. I got 6735 visitors between 5:00 PM and 7:00 PM! It took one year to get 4165. All I did was call SONY CANADA today to ask them if they could add the LEONARD COHEN | HALLS OF FAME website to the NEWS section of leonardcohen.com. They haven't yet. I also emailed Anjani on her official website to let her know the new web address. Then poof - 4165 to 11,900. :shock: Maybe this will help Leonard get the 4 remaining honors sometime soon: Canada's Walk of Fame, The Hollywood Walk of Fame, The Songwriters Hall of Fame (those 3 are done for the year; no Leonard Cohen) and the Kennedy Center Honors (2009 honorees will be announced in November; ceremony will be the first week of December in Washington D.C.).
Last edited by Roy on Thu Sep 10, 2009 7:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.
LEONARD COHEN | HALLS OF FAME
The Official Halls of Fame Biographies of Leonard Cohen
http://www.leonardcohenhallsoffame.blogspot.com
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sturgess66
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Re: LEONARD COHEN | HALLS OF FAME

Post by sturgess66 »

Roy - The Kennedy Center Honorees were announced today. Leonard is not among them - but they are: Dave Brubeck, Bruce Springsteen, Robert De Niro, Mel Brooks and opera singer Grace Bumbry. Anyway - the announcement today could explain the traffic to the site.

I had been planning on making a post about Leonard and the Kennedy Center Honors but was waiting to see who was being honored this year. Now I know. Now I will make that post.

This is not it. :lol: This is an article about this year's honorees.

From their site -

http://www.kennedy-center.org/programs/ ... /index.cfm
Mel Brooks, Dave Brubeck, Grace Bumbry, Robert De Niro, and Bruce Springsteen To Receive 32nd Annual Kennedy Center Honors

Washington, D.C.—The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts today announced the selection of the individuals who will receive the Kennedy Center Honors of 2009. Recipients to be honored at the 32nd annual national celebration of the arts are: writer, composer, actor, director, and producer Mel Brooks; pianist and composer Dave Brubeck; opera singer Grace Bumbry; actor, director, and producer Robert De Niro; and singer and songwriter Bruce Springsteen.

"This year, the Kennedy Center celebrates five extraordinary individuals whose unique and abundant artistry has contributed significantly to the cultural life of our nation and the world," said Kennedy Center Chairman Stephen A. Schwarzman. "With his hilarious movies and musicals, Mel Brooks has created comedic gems that will keep us laughing for years to come. Dave Brubeck's genius has dazzled us for six decades and has helped to define an American art form. Grace Bumbry helped to break the color barrier on her way to one of the most illustrious operatic careers in the 20th century. One of America's greatest cinematic actors, Robert De Niro has demonstrated a legendary commitment to his characters and has co-founded one of the world's major film festivals. With his gritty and honest songs that speak to the everyman, Bruce Springsteen has always had his finger on the pulse of America."

The annual Honors Gala has become the highlight of the Washington cultural year, and its broadcast on CBS is a high point of the television season. On Sunday, December 6, in a star-studded celebration on the Kennedy Center Opera House stage, produced by George Stevens Jr. and Michael Stevens, the 2009 Honorees will be saluted by great performers from New York, Hollywood, and the arts capitals of the world. Seated with the President of the United States and Mrs. Obama, the Honorees will accept the thanks of their peers and fans through performances and heartfelt tributes.

The President and Mrs. Obama will receive the Honorees and members of the Artists Committee who nominate them, along with the Kennedy Center Board of Trustees at the White House prior to the gala performance. The 2009 Kennedy Center Honors Gala concludes with a supper dance in the Grand Foyer.

The Kennedy Center Honors medallions will be presented on Saturday, December 5, the night before the gala, at a State Department dinner hosted by Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton.

The Honors Gala will be recorded for broadcast on the CBS Network for the 32nd consecutive year as a two-hour primetime special on Tuesday, December 29 at 9:00 p.m. (ET/PT).

George Stevens Jr., who created the Honors in 1978 with Nick Vanoff, will produce and co-write the show for the 32nd year. The Honors telecast has been honored with five Emmys for Outstanding Program and is nominated again this year. It has also been recognized with the Peabody Award for Outstanding Meritorious Service to Broadcasting and seven awards from the Writers Guild of America.

The Boeing Company is the exclusive underwriter of the 2009 Kennedy Center Honors Gala and weekend of events, which includes the honorees luncheon and post-gala supper dance in the Grand Foyer.

Delta Air Lines, the official airline of the Kennedy Center Honors television broadcast, will provide transportation for the performers and television crew that will be coming to Washington for the Honors Gala.

The Honors recipients recognized for their lifetime contributions to American culture through the performing arts—whether in dance, music, theater, opera, motion pictures, or television—are selected by the Center's Board of Trustees. The primary criterion in the selection process is excellence. The Honors are not designated by art form or category of artistic achievement; the selection process, over the years, has produced balance among the various arts and artistic disciplines.

Past Honors recipients, as well as members of the Kennedy Center's national artists committee, made recommendations of possible 2009 Honorees. Artists making recommendations included: Alan Alda, Jane Alexander, Dan Aykroyd, Harolyn Blackwell, Ethan Coen, Joel Coen, Barbara Cook, Laurence Fishburne, Thomas Hampson, Herbie Hancock, Evgeny Kissin, Patti LuPone, Yo-Yo Ma, Reba McEntire, Anna Netrebko, Mark O'Connor, Christopher Plummer, Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, Frederica von Stade, and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Previous Kennedy Center Honorees, including Edward Albee, Clint Eastwood, Suzanne Farrell, Aretha Franklin, Zubin Mehta, Sidney Poitier, Chita Rivera, and Barbra Streisand, also made nominations.
Kennedy Center President Michael M. Kaiser expressed the national cultural center's continued gratitude to the many individuals involved in the success of the Honors program. "In addition to recognizing some of the world's most treasured artists, the Kennedy Center Honors supports a wide variety of artistic programming, as well as the Center's educational and national outreach efforts."
And another article -

http://www.wtop.com/?nid=114&sid=1758488#

Springsteen, De Niro among Kennedy Center honorees
September 9, 2009 - 10:45am
By SARAH KARUSH
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) - Dave Brubeck just wishes his mom could see him now: On Dec. 6, the same day the jazz composer and pianist turns 89, he'll be among the leading artists feted at the 32nd Kennedy Center Honors Gala.

Dignitaries from President Barack Obama on down will celebrate Brubeck's career, along with those of Bruce Springsteen, Robert De Niro, Mel Brooks and opera singer Grace Bumbry, the Kennedy Center announced Wednesday.

Brubeck says it's a day that would have delighted his late mother, Elizabeth Ivey Brubeck, a classical pianist who was initially disappointed by her son's interest in jazz. He recalled that when he graduated high school in 1938, his mother wrote in her diary: "I think there is some hope for David after all."

"Both my older brothers were such terrific musicians _ classical musicians. And she wanted three sons that would follow in her footsteps ..., and I let her down," Brubeck said in a phone interview from Seattle, where he was touring this week. "She finally came around to what I was doing. She lived long enough to see good results, and she enjoyed going to the concerts."

Obama and the first lady will host the 2009 honorees at the White House before attending the gala with them at the Kennedy Center. Brubeck said he is looking forward to meeting the president, who wrote of going to a Brubeck concert as a child in his memoir "Dreams From My Father."

As usual, the gala will be recorded for broadcast as a two-hour prime-time special on CBS. This year's will air on Dec. 29 at 9 p.m.

The Kennedy Center Honors recognize performing artists for their contributions to American culture.

Brubeck is credited with helping take jazz into the mainstream, and his band popularized music that departed from the traditional 4/4 rhythm. "Time Out" _ the classic album by the Dave Brubeck Quartet featuring the hit "Take Five" in 5/4 time_ turned 50 this year. Brubeck has set to music the words of the Old Testament and of Martin Luther King Jr. and, most recently, the photographs of Ansel Adams.

As for the other honorees, Springsteen and De Niro belonged to the category of potential honorees that George Stevens Jr., the creator and producer of the honors show, calls "not if, but when." But both men are relatively young to be receiving the award, Stevens noted. De Niro turned 66 last month, and Springsteen will be 60 on Sept. 23.

"One of America's greatest cinematic actors, Robert De Niro has demonstrated a legendary commitment to his characters and has co-founded one of the world's major film festivals," Kennedy Center Chairman Stephen A. Schwarzman said in the announcement of the 2009 recipients. He was referring to the Tribeca Film Festival, which started in 2002.

"With his gritty and honest songs that speak to the everyman, Bruce Springsteen has always had his finger on the pulse of America," Schwarzman said.

Mel Brooks, 83, is a former standup comedian who made his mark on television with the classic 2000-year-old man routine with Carl Reiner. He soon moved to the big screen, where his hit comedies include "The Producers" and "Blazing Saddles."

For Grace Bumbry, a soprano and mezzo-soprano who became a trailblazer among black singers, being chosen for the award has a special significance. At the first Kennedy Center gala in 1978, Bumbry performed the aria "Vissi d'Arte" from Giacomo Puccini's opera "Tosca" in honor of her mentor, the renowned contralto Marian Anderson.

"It's full circle now," Bumbry, 72, said by telephone from Munich, where she was judging a vocal competition. "It's the most beautiful thing."

(Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)
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Re: LEONARD COHEN | HALLS OF FAME

Post by LisaLCFan »

I just nominated Leonard for Canada's Walk of Fame, for 2010!

By the way, people *do* have to be residents of Canada to vote (it specifies it on the form, so your "province" must be a Canadian province). Sorry to leave so many of you out! But hey, everyone who lives in Canada, please nominate Leonard!
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Re: LEONARD COHEN | HALLS OF FAME

Post by Roy »

Wow, I'm way behind on the Kennedy Center. When I spoke to Canada's Walk of Fame on the phone, they told me that anyone could vote, not just Canadians. Also, in their news section they stated the following:

Canada’s Walk of Fame Set to Reveal 2009 Inductees June 16th

(Toronto) May 4, 2009 – With thousands of nominations from all over the world, Canada’s Walk of Fame announced today that the final, confirmed list of this year’s inductees will be unveiled on Tuesday June 16th, 2009.

http://www.canadaswalkoffame.com/news/j ... -inductees

I guess this means anyone can vote, but only votes from Canadians will count! :?
LEONARD COHEN | HALLS OF FAME
The Official Halls of Fame Biographies of Leonard Cohen
http://www.leonardcohenhallsoffame.blogspot.com
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Re: LEONARD COHEN | HALLS OF FAME

Post by sturgess66 »

Here is the link where you can nominate Leonard for "Canada's Walk of Fame."

http://www.canadaswalkoffame.com/nomination
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Re: LEONARD COHEN | HALLS OF FAME

Post by Roy »

Last year and three weeks ago, I printed out the LEONARD COHEN | HALLS OF FAME biographies website on a color printer and mailed it to The Kennedy Center. 6 days ago, the 2009 Kennedy Center honorees were announced, Leonard Cohen was not among this years honorees, but the number of visitors to the HALLS OF FAME site went from 4165 to 11,900. 6735 visitors the same day that the 2009 Kennedy Center Honorees were announced, which I didn't know was going to happen. I had also called Sony Canada the same day to let them know about the site, and I emailed Anjani to let her know as well. I'm still trying to figure out who those 6735 visitors were. I'm guessing it was a mix of Sony employees, the voting body at the Kennedy Center and Anjani's friends. But still, 6735?! :shock: I hope this means Leonard Cohen will be an honoree at the 2010 Kennedy Center Honors. I would be very surprised if Leonard Cohen got the Kennedy Center Honor before being inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame and Canada's Walk of Fame, which you'd think were more likely chances.

LEONARD COHEN | HALLS OF FAME - # OF VISITORS NOW STANDS AT 12,062.
LEONARD COHEN | HALLS OF FAME
The Official Halls of Fame Biographies of Leonard Cohen
http://www.leonardcohenhallsoffame.blogspot.com
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Re: LEONARD COHEN | HALLS OF FAME

Post by Roy »

News

http://www.songhall.org/news/entry/912

Thursday, October 15, 2009

SongHall Announces Nominees For 2010
Get Out The Vote!

The nominees in both the non-performer and performer songwriter categories for induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame at our 41st Annual Awards Gala in 2010 have been announced today!

If you are an eligible voting member, watch for your paper ballot to come in the mail shortly. You will also be given the option to vote online, and you will receive instructions via e-mail and on your paper ballot. Those who joined as voting members after October 15th will be able to vote online, but will not receive a paper ballot. If you would like to join and become a voting member in order to participate now in the online voting, please download the membership application here, and mail it in before November 15th, 2009, or just use our online PayPal option in the “Join” section to become an instant member. If you are already an eligible voting member, please remember to cast your vote by the December 11th deadline.

Congratulations to all of our Nominees for 2010....we are looking forward to a very special 41st Annual Awards Show for the SongHall!

And The Nominees Are: 2010 Nominees
*Note that the five songs listed after the brief biographies of each nominee are merely a representative sample of their extensive catalogs.

Posted by April Anderson [SHOF] on 10/15 at 09:02 AM
General

News

http://www.songhall.org/vote

2010 SHOF Nominees

If you are not yet a member, there has never been a better time to join and have a voice and a vote! Become a member before November 12th, and you will be eligible to vote online. Use our new PayPal option to become an instant member, or renew your membership.

The nominees in both the non-performing and performing songwriter categories for induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2010 follow. Note that the five songs listed after the brief biographies of each nominee are merely a representative sample of their extensive catalogs. Eligible members, please make sure to vote by the December 11th deadline and congratulations to all the nominees!

5 INDUCTEES WILL BE CHOSEN - 3 NON-PERFORMERS AND 2 PERFORMERS

Non-Performing Songwriters

Tommy Boyce/Bobby Hart, Jackie DeShannon, Luther Dixon, David Foster, Mark James, Robert John "Mutt" Lange, Jerry Ragovoy/Bert Berns, Harvey Schmidt/Tom Jones, Johnny Mandel, Billy Sherrill, Joe South, Paul Vance/Lee Pockriss

Performer/Songwriters

Garth Brooks, Leonard Cohen, Elvis Costello, Dion DiMucci, David Gates, Tommy James, John Mellencamp, Lou Reed, Leon Russell, Cat Stevens, U2, Earth, Wind & Fire

News

http://www.songhall.org/vote/entry/902

Leonard Cohen

Canadian singer/songwriter Leonard Cohen turned to songwriting after establishing himself as an acclaimed novelist and poet. His resultant songs have earned him an adoring following of music fans and fellow artists including Judy Collins, who expanded his audience in 1966 when she recorded his song “Suzanne” (actor/singer Noel Harrison also had a hit with it) and Jennifer Warnes, who had been a backup singer for Cohen before releasing her own acclaimed album of his material, “Famous Blue Raincoat,” in 1987. His uniquely intelligent output was celebrated earlier this year with the documentary “Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man.” Key songs in the Cohen catalog include “Bird On The Wire,” “Hallelujah,” “Hey, That’s No Way To Say Goodbye,” “So Long, Marianne” and “Suzanne.”

Back to nominees list

Yes, Leonard Cohen is nominated for the 2010 Songwriters Hall of Fame. This is Leonard Cohen's second nomination since 2007. I urge all of you who have not applied for membership, to do so right away before it's too late, and vote! Your vote must be in by December 11th. The membership fee is a one-time payment of $1000.00 if you are not a member of the music industry.

Here is the membership application to fill out and MAIL IN:

http://www.songhall.org/forms/shof_membership.pdf

OR REGISTER, PAY AND VOTE ONLINE

http://www.songhall.org/join

If any of you will be voting, please let us know and please scan all sides of the ballot and post it to this thread.
LEONARD COHEN | HALLS OF FAME
The Official Halls of Fame Biographies of Leonard Cohen
http://www.leonardcohenhallsoffame.blogspot.com
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Re: LEONARD COHEN | HALLS OF FAME

Post by Roy »

Four Other References to Leonard Cohen at the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame:

John Simon Comes to the Rock Hall for “From Songwriters to Soundmen: The People Behind the Hits”
http://www.rockhall.com/pressroom/john-simon-release/

John Simon produced the music of Big Brother and the Holding Company, the Band; Simon and Garfunkel; Leonard Cohen; Blood, Sweat and Tears and many more.

After attending Princeton, John Simon joined Columbia Records as a producer-in-training. His first pop record was Red Rubber Ball by the Cyrkle. He went on to produce some of the biggest records of the 1960s: Cheap Thrills by Big Brother and the Holding Company; most of Bookends by Simon and Garfunkel; Leonard Cohen’s first album; the first album by Blood, Sweat and Tears and the first two albums by the Band.

STI Lesson 45 - Democracy…Not Yet!
http://www.rockhall.com/teacher/sti-lesson-45/

Day Two: CD player/CD and class quantity of lyrics of-Leonard Cohen’s “Democracy” / poster paper or oak tag

Distribute lyrics and play Leonard Cohen’s “Democracy” to the class. Students will analyze the lyrics and answer on paper and/or brainstorm:

What is the main idea or message of the song?
List the issues of contemporary society that are highlighted by the song writer/performer?
Explain the chorus lyrics and use of metaphor.
How does “Democracy” compare or contrast with “My Country Tis Of Thee”?
Discuss how the two songs of the same subject can differ in their lyric content so much.

“Democracy” recorded by Leonard Cohen (Capitol,1992); written by Leonard Cohen; Sony/ATV Songs LLC.

Steve Douglas - Inducted 2003
http://www.rockhall.com/inductee/steve-douglas/

In the 1970s, Douglas would play on Spector-produced projects by Cher, Leonard Cohen and the Ramones.

Jackson Browne - Inducted 2004
http://www.rockhall.com/inductee/jackson-browne/

In 1967 he ventured to New York, brushing against Andy Warhol’s scene and befriending Leonard Cohen and Lou Reed.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________

There are currently four references to Leonard Cohen at The Kennedy Center

MIRAH & SPECTRATONE INTERNATIONAL
http://www.kennedy-center.org/programs/ ... MRHSPCTRTN

The album ‘To All We Stretch the Open Arm’ was conceived as an anti-war statement and included renditions of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Story of Isaac’ and Kurt Weill’s ‘What Keeps Mankind Alive.’ Mirah’s third solo album ‘C’mon Miracle’ (2004) combined the ever-present youthful splendor of her earlier works with a more mature stylistic component which led many critics to hail it as her best work to date. A sonic expedition, Joyride: Remixes was released in 2006 and features dance remixes of tracks from Mirah’s three solo efforts by the likes of The Blow, Guy Sigsworth, and Anna Oxygen.

Colm Wilkinson
http://www.kennedy-center.org/calendar/ ... rce_type=A

He will perform a selection of his favorite songs from the world of theatre and popular music, including Bring Him Home, Music of the Night, Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah and his own composition I Cannot Stay from his latest CD Some of My Best Friends Are Songs.

k.d. lang
http://www.kennedy-center.org/calendar/ ... rce_type=A

Watershed serves as a highly personal companion to her 2004 Nonesuch debut, Hymns of the 49th Parallel, a collection of brilliantly realized interpretations of material from fellow Canadian songwriters like Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and Jane Siberry.

BROOKS WILLIAMS
http://www.kennedy-center.org/explorer/ ... rce_type=B

Singer/songwriter Brooks Williams began violin lessons at age three, but moved on to the guitar when he was ten so that he could try on songs from musicians as diverse as Leonard Cohen and Jimi Hendrix. Today his guitar reinvents works by the likes of Joseph Spence, Caetano Veloso, Pat Metheny, Buddy Miller, T-Bone Burnett, Miriam Makeba, Paul Buchanan of the Blue Nile, Sam Phillips, and J.S. Bach.
LEONARD COHEN | HALLS OF FAME
The Official Halls of Fame Biographies of Leonard Cohen
http://www.leonardcohenhallsoffame.blogspot.com
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Re: LEONARD COHEN | HALLS OF FAME

Post by Roy »

THE HOLLYWOOD WALK OF FAME - NEW WEBSITE - NEW INFORMATION

http://www.hollywoodchamber.net/walk-of-fame-welcome
http://www.hollywoodchamber.net/

DOWNLOAD YOUR WALK OF FAME NOMINATION APPLICATION

http://www.hollywoodchamber.net/downloa ... onForm.pdf

http://www.hollywoodchamber.net/nomination

Walk of Fame Nomination Procedures
COMMITTEE NOW ACCEPTING WALK OF FAME NOMINATIONS FOR YEAR 2010

All Nomination Forms must be submitted by
Monday, May 31, 2010 to be considered in June Selection Meeting for 2010

Download your Walk of Fame Nomination Application.

Nominations for the Hollywood Walk of Fame are now being accepted by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce. Deadline for submission is Monday, May 31, 2010 at 12 noon. All nominations will be considered in the annual Walk of Fame Committee meeting to be held in June. The committee will make selections for the year 2010.

Nomination applications can be obtained by downloading the link below or by sending a self-addressed, stamped envelope to:

Walk of Fame Committee
c/o Hollywood Chamber of Commerce
7018 Hollywood Boulevard, 2nd Floor
Hollywood, CA 90028

The Walk of Fame includes five categories:

Motion Pictures
Television
Radio
Recording
Live Theatre/Performance.
All Nominations must include the following documents with the application:

Photo of the nominee
Brief bio of nominee – no more than 5 pages
Nominee’s qualifications
List of contributions to the community and civic-oriented participation
Letter of agreement from the nominee or his/her management
The committee will select approximately 12-15 names for insertion into the Walk. Nomination of an individual or group must be approved by the Walk of Fame Committee, sometimes requiring several annual nominations before a nominee is selected to receive a star. The ten to fifteen most qualified artists nominated are eligible for a star to be installed in the Walk during the subsequent year. Those not selected for the current year are requested to resubmit for the following nomination period.

The criteria for receiving a star consists of the following: professional achievement, longevity of five years or more, contributions to the community and the guarantee that the celebrity will attend the dedication ceremony if selected.

Posthumous awards require a five-year waiting period.

After the Walk of Fame Committee has made its selections, the Chamber’s Board of Directors also vote to approve the star and then for a final vote, the names are submitted to the City of Los Angeles’ Board of Public Works Department.

All honorees must be approved by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, the decisions of which are final and entirely within the Chamber’s Discretion. Nomination and selection procedures, forms, and qualifications are guidelines only, entirely within the Chamber’s discretion, and are subject to change at any time, without notice.

Special Rules for Performing Duos and Groups:

The current owner(s) of a performing duo or group name must consent in writing to the nomination before it will be considered. The names of all group members, past and present, must be included on the nomination form. The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce reserves the right to condition award and installation of any star honoring a duo or group on its discretionary satisfaction with the sponsor’s arrangements regarding honorees and the installation ceremony.

All Nomination Forms must be submitted by Monday, May 31, 2010 to be considered in June 2010 Selection Meeting

After reading FAQ, if you still have any questions, please email Ana Martinez.
Or you can call 323-469-8311 and ask for Ana Martinez.

Hollywood citizens and tourists alike look forward to each dedication ceremony with eager anticipation.

FOLLOW THIS SAMPLE FOR WALK OF FAME NOMINATION FORM

KEVIN COSTNER

Often portrayed as America’s sexiest actor, Kevin Costner’s talent is what has truly guided him through his immensely successful career. An actor, producer and director, Costner gave bus tours of the stars homes in Hollywood before landing his first role in THE BIG CHILL although his scenes eventually made their way to the cutting room floor. He has gone on to appear in over thirty films spanning the last two decades. His most credited film, DANCES WITH WOLVES, won him numerous awards, including the Oscar® for Best Director and Best Picture in 1991. Charity: Haven House-a home for victims of domestic violence.

Dances with Wolves (1990)
1991 Won Academy Award—Best Director
1991 Won Academy Award—Best Picture
1991 Nominated Academy Award—Best Actor in a Leading Role
1992 Nominated BAFTA Film Award—Best Actor, Best Direction, Best Film
1991 Won Silver Berlin Bear—Outstanding Single Achievement
1991 Nominated Golden Berlin Bear
1991 Won DGA Award—Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures
1991 Won Golden Globe—Best Director – Motion Picture
1991 Nominated Golden Globe—Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture – Drama
1990 Won National Board Review—Best Director
1991 Won Motion Picture Producer of the Year Award
1991 Won Bronze Wrangler-Western Heritage Award—Theatrical Motion Picture
JFK (1991)
1992 Nominated Golden Globe—Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture – Drama
Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991)
1992 Nominated MTV Movie Awards—Best Male Performance
1992 Nominated MTV Movie Awards—Best On-Screen Duo
1992 Nominated MTV Movie Awards—Most Desirable Male
The Bodyguard (1992)
1993 Nominated MTV Movie Awards—Best Male Performer
1993 Nominated MTV Movie Awards—Best On-Screen Duo
1993 Nominated MTV Movie Awards—Most Desirable Male
Tin Cup (1996)
1997 Nominated Golden Globe—Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture – Comedy/Musical
Message in a Bottle (1999)
2000 Nominated Blockbuster Entertainment Award—Favorite Actor – Drama/Romance
Misc.

1988 Won Golden Apple—Male Star of the Year
1990 Won Hasty Pudding Theatricals—Man of the Year
1992 Won People’s Choice Award—Favorite Dramatic Motion Picture Actor
1993 Won People’s Choice Award—Favorite Dramatic Motion Picture Actor

INCLUDE A PROFESSIONAL PHOTO OF YOUR NOMINEE
Last edited by Roy on Wed Nov 17, 2010 1:35 am, edited 2 times in total.
LEONARD COHEN | HALLS OF FAME
The Official Halls of Fame Biographies of Leonard Cohen
http://www.leonardcohenhallsoffame.blogspot.com
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Re: LEONARD COHEN | HALLS OF FAME

Post by Roy »

LEONARD COHEN | HALLS OF FAME
The Official Halls of Fame Biographies of Leonard Cohen
http://www.leonardcohenhallsoffame.com
Last edited by Roy on Wed Jun 29, 2011 3:45 am, edited 4 times in total.
LEONARD COHEN | HALLS OF FAME
The Official Halls of Fame Biographies of Leonard Cohen
http://www.leonardcohenhallsoffame.blogspot.com
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Re: LEONARD COHEN | HALLS OF FAME

Post by Roy »

It's that time of the year again! Nominate Leonard Cohen for Canada's Walk of Fame if you haven't already.

http://www.canadaswalkoffame.com/nomination
LEONARD COHEN | HALLS OF FAME
The Official Halls of Fame Biographies of Leonard Cohen
http://www.leonardcohenhallsoffame.blogspot.com
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Re: LEONARD COHEN | HALLS OF FAME

Post by B4real »

Thanks Roy,

for the reminder. I have just officially voted and here's hoping Leonard wins 8)
It doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to B4real ~ me
Attitude is a self-fulfilling prophecy ~ me ...... The magic of art is the truth of its lies ~ me ...... Only left-handers are in their right mind!
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