Sylvie Simmons is an award-winning writer and one of the foremost music journalists working today. Born in London, she moved to Los Angeles in the late seventies and started writing about rock music for magazines such as Sounds, Creem, Kerrang! and Q. She is the author of acclaimed fiction and nonfiction books, including the biography Serge Gainsbourg: A Fistful of Gitanes and the short-story collection Too Weird for Ziggy. She has lived at various times in England, the United States, and France, and she currently lives in San Francisco, where she writes for MOJO magazine and plays the ukulele.
I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen
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- ISBN-13: 9780061995002
- Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
- Publication date: 08/27/2013
- Pages: 592
- Sales rank: 265,077
- Product dimensions: 5.30(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.50(d)
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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 Man is 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.
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Rolling Stone
This is the bio Cohen has long deserved, and it makes every prior Cohen book practically unnecessary.MOJO Magazine
Leonard fought darkness through his work and... the light ultimately prevailed when he triumphantly toured the world for three years beginning in 2008... ‘You could hear the hairs stand up on people’s arms,’ writes Simmons of the hushed reverence of his audience. This book demands a similar reaction.A.M. Homes
A thoughtful celebration of the artist’s life...Simmons has deftly narrated Cohen’s evolution... In the end, this biography has the oddest effect: as soon as you finish reading it you feel an overwhelming impulse to go back and begin again, revisiting the story with what you’ve learned along the way.Booklist (starred review)
Compelling biography. . . A must for anyone interested in one of the most influential songwriters of our time.Los Angeles Times
A new gold standard of Cohen bios.The Onion A.V. Club
The book is a seductive tribute to a master seducer.Shelf Awareness
This is a revelatory biography that investigates not just an artist’s life, but the life of his art.New York Jewish Week
In I’m Your Man, we see not only the life of one man who was transformed by words, but how we ourselves may be transformed by them.Jewish Journal Los Angeles
Simmons’ rich, compelling and provocative book... is a star-studded but also frank account of how the music industry really works and, at the same time, a discerning portrait of one especially important musician.Paste Magazine
Simmons is a wonderful writer... the book informs like carefully researched non-fiction, but engages like enchanting fiction... Like listening to one of Cohen’s songs, this complex, beautiful biography requires you to think about it. This book will stay with you. It will change the way you hear Leonard Cohen.BookPage
In this elegantly crafted biography, Simmons captures the artist who, in spite of all his highs and lows, is still sharp at the edges, a wise old monk, a trouper offering up himself and his songs.Dallas Morning News
Exquisitely researched and elegantly written.San Jose Mercury News
The success of Simmons’ book is the way it deftly integrates each facet in a unified portrait.The Oregonian (Portland)
A deep, enlightening book. . . Simmons, a music journalist and short-story writer, knows how to research and write and keep a critical distance from Cohen, who opens up some but uses his usual weapons, politeness and self-deprecation, to maintain an air of mystery.The Tuscon Citizen
Cohen is a complex man and Sylvie Simmons has captured every essence of it in her remarkable book. This is a deeply insightful portrait that is guaranteed to haunt the reader much like his “Suzanne” and “Bird on the Wire.Janet Maslin
I’m Your Man is the major, soul-searching biography that Leonard Cohen deserves... a mesmerizing labor of love.The New York Times Book Review
There is a familiarity to much of Simmons's material, the sense of being on the inside, as though the reader were sitting at the table during the conversations Simmons reports, and the overall experience is of a thoughtful celebration of the artist's life…Simmons has deftly narrated Cohen's evolution, bringing the past into the present and reminding us of the breadth of the journey…In her interview excerpts, Simmons captures the elliptical nature of Cohen's speech, the wry turns of phrase that are almost like stand-up comedy…And in the end, this biography has the oddest effect: as soon as you finish reading it you feel an overwhelming impulse to go back and begin again, revisiting the story with what you've learned along the way.—A. M. Homes
Publishers Weekly
In this vibrant and enthusiastic chronicle of Leonard Cohen's life, music critic Simmons (Neil Young: Reflections in Broken Glass) draws extensively on interviews with Cohen's friends and associates, as well as on his private archives, his unpublished writings, and his published stories and poetry. The author narrates Cohen's life from his childhood and youth in Montreal—where he started writing poetry and stories when he was 15—through his aborted college career to his move to Manhattan in pursuit of music; his rise to fame with such songs as "Suzanne," "Bird on a Wire," and "Hallelujah" (one of pop music's most recorded songs); his often difficult relationships with women; and his search for tranquility and order in his embrace of Buddhism. Carefully weaving the threads of all of his songs and albums through the patterns of his life, Simmons craftily explores the themes that regularly mark Cohen's work: desire, regret, suffering, love, hope, and hamming it up. Cohen emerges from this definitive biography as a sensitive and intensely serious artist whose reverence for the word and deep love and respect for his audiences continues "to dissolve all the boundaries between word and song, between the song and the truth, and the truth and himself, his heart and its aching." (Oct.)Booklist
"Compelling biography. . . A must for anyone interested in one of the most influential songwriters of our time."Library Journal
To craft this portrait of the man who gave us such immortal songs as "Suzanne," prolific music journalist Simmons conducted more than 100 interviews with Cohen's friends and fellow musicians. Audience potential: Cohen has just wrapped up a sold-out three-year world tour after a 15-year hiatus.