Suzanne

Written by Leonard Cohen, 1966.

No lyric sheet on this page — Cohen’s words began as a poem, “Suzanne Takes You Down,” in his 1966 collection, “Parasites of Heaven,” and are still under his publisher’s control. However, the video has subtitles you can check on to follow.

“Suzanne” began life not as a song but as a poem, “Suzanne Takes You Down,” published in Leonard Cohen’s 1966 collection Parasites of Heaven. At the time Cohen was a respected Montreal poet and novelist in his early thirties, discovering that poetry paid almost nothing. It was Judy Collins who read the poem, encouraged him to set it to music, and recorded it in 1966 — months before Cohen released his own version — effectively launching one of the great songwriting careers of the twentieth century. Cohen recorded it as the opening track of his 1967 debut, Songs of Leonard Cohen.

The Suzanne of the song was real: Suzanne Verdal, a dancer and the wife of an artist friend, who lived in an apartment by the harbor in Old Montreal. Nearly every detail is literal — the tea and oranges (Constant Comment tea, in fact), the river, the boats going by, the walks past the sailors’ church of Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours. Cohen was always clear that the relationship was entirely platonic; the longing in the song was imagination, not history. Verdal later said he was quietly “drinking me in” during those visits without her ever realizing it.

Two bittersweet postscripts. Cohen lost the publishing rights to the song in a bad New York contract early on, and shrugged it off with characteristic grace, saying it was probably appropriate that he didn’t own it — after all, he’d heard strangers singing it on a ship in the Caspian Sea. And Suzanne Verdal, whose kitchen table became one of the most famous rooms in folk music, never earned a penny from it; when the CBC tracked her down in later years, she was living in a homemade camper in California. The song, meanwhile, has been recorded by Nina Simone, Joan Baez, Neil Diamond, and dozens more, and sits at #284 on Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.