Comment by indigodaddy
Comment by indigodaddy 8 hours ago
His later tour stuff is great as another commented mentioned, but I'd say maybe give 'I'm Your Man' a whirl (it has Everybody Knows and Take This Waltz). If you don't like it then you probably won't like LC in general (although you maybe could still like Hallelujah as that one has sort of taken over the mainstream consciousness. Definitely a great song, and I'm in the minority probably being that I dislike most of the Hallelujah "covers", preferring the LC original).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27m_Your_Man_(Leonard_Cohen_...
Songs from a Room from 1990 is also pretty great, with one of the most beautiful songs I've ever heard, The Partisan.
His early stuff is a little different, mostly due to his voice being different tonally and being much younger (just his later stuff with the gruff voice comes off kind of different, but stylistically his music has stayed pretty consistent-- he has explored and incorporated world music throughout his career for instance), but you can't go wrong with his first album from 1967, with classics like Suzanne and So Long, Marianne.
Suzanne is quintessential young Cohen: written as poetry before he became a singer, put to simple but enjoyable music, personal but relatable in its theme and quite evocative of the 60s.
I think the best way to understand Cohen is that he is a legitimate poetry writer who realised early on that his voice and good look could earn him more money as a singer. He is in a lot of way a better Dylan except giving him the Nobel would have been less insulting to Roth.