“I sang it to her over the phone”: How Judy Collins encouraged Leonard Cohen to write a classic
When it comes to Leonard Cohen, there are several alternate timelines the singer could have travelled down. He could have easily never been a singer at all. He could have stayed in Montreal and been an English professor. He could’ve stayed in Greece and been solely a novelist. He could’ve stayed up Mount Baldy and lived out his days as a monk. He could have actually completed another journey he was taking and been the master of a whole other genre. But fate stepped in.
The story goes like this. Leonard Cohen was living on Hydra, a chapter of his life that fans know well as a truly formative era. He was deeply in love with a woman named Marianne, surrounded by artists, and, in that setting, he was truly embodying his calling as a writer. He wrote poems and novels and was enjoying some success, but, as always seems to be the way with great artists, Cohen declared, “I couldn’t pay my rent”.
However, while today that would prompt them to get a side hustle, maybe take up some shifts at a bar or cafe, or even some corporate job on the side, Cohen had the benefit of working during the 1960s when there genuinely was financial viability in art. All it would take was one big break, so he went off to get it where he thought the money was.
“In hindsight it seems like a mad decision that I was going to rectify my economic situation by becoming a singer,” he joked years down the line, but explained, “I had been very interested in country music for a long time and I’d been writing songs for a long time I thought I’d go down to Nashville and cut a country-western record and that would take care of everything.”
So here’s the other alternative timeline: Leonard Cohen, the country star, writing hits for the cowboy singers. But this is the moment when the universe stepped in, and during the journey from Greece to Nashville, he got delayed as he suddenly re-encountered the world outside of his small island.
“I’d been in Greece for about six years and wasn’t really aware of what was going on. I was totally unaware of the so-called folk song renaissance,” he explained, “I didn’t know who Dylan was or Joan Baez or Judy Collins and on the way down to Nashville, I got ambushed in New York by this whole phenomenon.”
The last name in that list is the essential one. Perhaps more so than Hydra or New York, his connection with Judy Collins is arguably the most important moment in the start of Leonard Cohen’s career. Beyond his books and his own recordings, which wouldn’t come for a while longer, it was Collins who launched him after a chance meeting and a simple comment of encouragement. At this point, he wasn’t a musician, really, or he wouldn’t call himself that. But the latter managed to convince him to sing her some of his songs once he landed in the middle of the Greenwich Village folk scene, wondering if maybe there was a place for him there.
“I sang a few songs that she didn’t like particularly, but she liked something about them, and she said, you know, if you write anything else, call me,” Cohen recalled. It took him a while; he stayed in New York for a bit, then travelled to Montreal, abandoning his Nashville plans, and somewhere along the way, he wrote a song. Given his reputation as a perfectionist who would often take literally years to finish a song, there must have been something instant about this one track as he finished it, adapting the lyrics from an older poem of his. He immediately called up Collins, knowing that maybe she would see it too. “When I finished ‘Suzanne’, I telephoned her from Montreal and I sang it to her over the phone,” he said.
That was the moment that changed everything. In 1966, Judy Collins released her version of the song, and people paid attention. They wanted to know more about the writer, so by the time Cohen got the courage to release his own take in 1968, prompted by Collins pushing him to sing more, he already had an audience waiting, and it was an audience that would stick around for more.
