leonardcohenforum.com

I have found some lyrics books on Goodreads, such as «The Lyrics Of Leonard Cohen» which contains «over 100 song lyrics by the legendary songwriter», and «Leonard Cohen: Poems and Songs» which contains «a cross-section covering his career, including such legendary songs as 'Suzanne', 'Sisters of Mercy', 'Bird on the Wire', 'Famous Blue Raincoat' and 'I'm Your Man'».

What I am looking for is a single book with a complete collection of his lyrics, just like Bob Dylan has released.

You'll not find a book with all the song lyrics.
By my reckoning, Leonard has written 89 songs himself; 44 credited with other (mostly living!) writers - e.g. Anjani, Felicity Buirski, Jeff Fisher, Patrick Leonard, Sharon Robinson, Phil Spector; also the songs with words by Lorca, F.R.Scott and Lord Byron.
And then there's several 'cover' songs: e.g. Un Canadien Errant, Choices, Be For Real, The Partisan, Always, Passing Through.
I suppose because of various national & international copyright laws/restrictions etc. it's maybe not actually legally possible to assemble them ALL into one volume.

P.S. there's also a bunch of songs written by, but not recorded by, Leonard.

It´s not a book, but on http://www.leonardcohenfiles.com in the section "Song Index" you find the lyrics at least of all songs from official albums (marked "L").

Jim Devlin ~ You give such great responses! And, harald, yours are always so helpful!


~ Lizzie

In addition to Harald's answer: all the songs from studio albums on one page: http://www.alwaysontherun.net/leonard.htm

Way to go, Goldin

Thankyou goldin - that is a superb link.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Lyrics-Leon ... em_1p_0_ti

Must be getting close to ' complete' albeit only to 2009 - anyway a nice book to have.

Be careful with this book!! It's littered with spelling mistakes, wrong dates, words missing; I counted 25 errors in the main text, and 7 more in the Index. For example, line 4 of the introduction: "Cohen's mesmerising debut LP The Songs of Leonard Cohen ..."; and page 34 referring to the song 'Closing Time' ... "was included on Recent Songs (1979)...", and on p.155 Recent Songs is dated 1984.
Yes, good source for the official lyrics, but not for the accuracy of song-details.

Schwarz wrote:What I am looking for is a single book with a complete collection of his lyrics, just like Bob Dylan has released.

There won't be such thing for many many years. Cohen just loves to slightly change the key parts of his lyrics. Like, I'm your man is a song about a hooker and her pimp, their on/off relationship and their special needs, right? But then in some concert Cohen changes "work streets alone" to "work the loom alone", and it is whole new song. Euphemism or prostitution gets replaced by euphemism of divine intervention - you supposed to need some kind of divine intervention to work loom alone.