But Cohen, who had been in a country band (the Buckskin Boys) briefly as a teenager, eventually returned to his love of songwriting. His breakthrough was when Judy Collins recorded "Suzanne" in a hit 1966 album and the tune became a fixture in her live show.
Although Cohen had planned only to be a songwriter, John Hammond, the Columbia Records executive who also signed Bob Dylan, was so impressed by Cohen's own versions of his songs that he signed Cohen to a record contract. The debut reached only No. 83 on the U.S. charts, but the critical acclaim was enormous. His literary bent and insightful reflections placed him alongside Dylan and Joni Mitchell as the inspirations for much of the 1970s singer-songwriter movement in America.
The music: Cohen's graceful, confessional songs have been described by Rolling Stone as "elegant, bittersweet mood music for the dark nights of the soul," and there is a relentlessly stark and revealing quality to such tunes as "Sisters of Mercy." Sample lines: "You who must leave everything / That you cannot control / It begins with your family / But soon it comes round to your soul."
"It was all I could write about," Cohen told me in 1995 when I asked him about the dark isolation in his music. "You have to dig down for that true voice, which you've heard in others -- a Billie Holiday or a Hank Williams -- and you try to find it in your music. It's a way of proving you deserve to be here. . . . You deserve to get a girl or deserve to walk out on the street.
"I know this is a very poverty-stricken view of things, but that's the way I was. I never had the luxury of standing in front of a buffet table saying, 'I'll write this kind of song today and that kind tomorrow.' It was like: 'Can I scrape some words together and write anything? Can I dig deep enough inside to say something that matters?' "
For further study: It was hard for years to imagine Cohen ever matching the intimacy and depth of his early rush of songs, but he has come up with so many other gems in his long career. To hear the original versions, the best CD package is "The Essential Leonard Cohen," a two-disc set from Columbia that contains 31 songs, including "Hallelujah" and "Everybody Knows."
If you already have several Cohen albums, the recent "Live in London," a two-disc set, updates his tunes marvelously.
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Backtracking is a monthly look at CDs and other pop music releases of historical importance.
