I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen

About this book

Leonard Cohen, one of the most important and influential artists of our era, is a man of powerful emotion and intelligence whose work has explored the essential issues of human life--sex, religion, power, love. Cohen is also a man of complexities and seeming contradictions: a devout Jew, who is also a sophisticate and a ladies' man, as well as an ordained Buddhist monk whose name, Jikan--"ordinary silence"--is quite the appellation for a writer and singer whose life has been anything but ordinary. I'm Your Manis the definitive account of that extraordinary life. Starting in Montreal, Cohen's birthplace, acclaimed music journalist Sylvie Simmons follows his trail, via London and the Greek island of Hydra, to New York in the sixties, where Cohen launched his career in music. From there she traces the arc of his prodigious achievements to his remarkable retreat in the mid-nineties and his reemergence for a sold-out world tour almost fifteen years later. Whether navigating Cohen's journeys through the backstreets of Mumbai or his countless hotel rooms along the way, Simmons explores with equal focus every complex, contradictory strand of Cohen's life and presents a deeply insightful portrait of the vision, spirit, depth, and talent of an artist and a man who continues to move people like no one else.