I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen

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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I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen

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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I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen

I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen

by Sylvie Simmons
I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen

I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen

by Sylvie Simmons

Paperback

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Overview

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.


Product Details

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)

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

Prologue 1

One Born in a Suit 3

Two House of Women 16

Three Twenty Thousand Verses 32

Four I Had Begun to Shout 51

Five A Man Who Speaks with a Tongue of Gold 72

Six Enough of Fallen Heroes 91

Seven Please Find me, I Am Almost 30 110

Eight A Long Time Shaving 135

Nine How to Court a Lady 155

Ten The Dust of a Long Sleepless Night 179

Eleven The Tao of Cowboy 198

Twelve O Make me a Mask 222

Thirteen The Veins Stand out Like Highways 245

Fourteen A Shield Against the Enemy 267

Fifteen I Love you, Leonard 294

Sixteen A Sacred Kind of Conversation 314

Seventeen The Hallelujah of the Orgasm 334

Eighteen The Places Where I Used to Play 355

Nineteen Jeremiah in Tin Pan Alley 375

Twenty From this Broken Hill 398

Twenty-one Love and Theft 427

Twenty-two Taxes, Children, Lost Pussy 448

Twenty-three The Future of Rock 'n' Roll 472

Twenty-four Here I Stand, I'm your Man 488

Twenty-five A Manual for Living with Defeat 509

Epilogue 526

Author's Note 529

Notes 535

Index 561

What People are Saying About This

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.”

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