Help

Wayne · Post by **Wayne** » Wed Dec 22, 2004 1:48 am

I'm taking a course on Canadian musicians, and I have to write a 2000 word essay on a Hall of Fame artist.

I saw a clip of Cohen performing in Montreal and decided to choose him.

I had no idea that he's done so much!

I think I want to focus on his music and poetry.

Can anyone recommend any biographies, films or anything that might help me get into the world of Cohen

Thanks

Pete · Post by **Pete** » Wed Dec 22, 2004 1:59 am

Hi Wayne
I think everything you need will be mentioned or linked in this website which itself is absolutely staggering

http://www.leonardcohenfiles.com

I can recommend the biography by Ira B. Nadel called Various Positions
A book about his music to be recommended is 'Leonard Cohen - In Every Style of Passion' by Jim Devlin

I'm sure you'll get some other recommendations from here though.
Good luck

Pete

Wayne · Post by **Wayne** » Wed Dec 22, 2004 5:17 pm

thanks Pete

I'll check those books out

linda_lakeside · Post by **linda_lakeside** » Wed Dec 22, 2004 6:05 pm

Hi Wayne,

You did indeed come to the right site. If you find Tom Sakic, he has a LC site in Croatia, the link to his site is under his name - he is also doing similar studies. He has postings all over this Forum. You might also be interested to know that Leonard has a new book of poems coming out sometime in 2005. There is much info in this Forum and in this site that will be of benefit to you. Good luck!

Tom: I hope you don't mind me dropping your name!

tomsakic · Post by **tomsakic** » Thu Dec 23, 2004 11:21 am

Well, it's hard to help in this case, because with Cohen's work, you don't know where to start.
If you are totally new to Leonard Cohen and only need to write 2000 words essay for the course, maybe it would be best to take just one aspect of his work - but the best way out from this s**t you put yourself in when you decided to write about the man which work you didn't know (it's hard job, believe me

) is maybe to write general perspective work about his whole career, with help of Ira Nadel's Various Positions and maybe Jim Devlin's In Every Style Of Passion and Leonard Cohen In His Own Words* books. (But you will update all three with http://www.10newsongs.com and http://www.dearheather.com. Particularly the first one: there are many 2001 interviews and articles.) If you go to deep in the matters, you will be swallowed!

Pete gave you the best start at The Leonard Cohen Files site. From there you can find all links to articles, interviews, other sites, etc. Anyway, maybe you will miss some, so these are good readings:

http://www.webheights.net/speakingcohen/archives.htm (Speaking Cohen is online archive of Cohen related articles)

http://www.lucking.net/canlinks/cl_crit ... .htm#cohen

http://www.ckk.chalmers.se/guitar/LC3.html

http://perso.wanadoo.fr/pilgraeme/ Here Cohen explains most of his songs.

*some quot. from In His Own Words you can read here.