Icon: Leonard Cohen

For those looking to dip a toe in Cohen’s waters, there’s no better place to start than at the beginning. Containing some of Cohen’s most enduring songs — “Suzanne,” “Sisters of Mercy” and “So Long Marianne” among them — Songs introduces his pet themes of lust, spirituality and the place where they overlap. “The Stranger Song,” used to immortal effect in Robert Altman’s hazy post-Western McCabe and Mrs. Miller, comes closest to Cohen’s original vision of the album, just his weary voice and a flurry of Spanish guitar echoing through space, a marked contrast to the sometimes overbearing orchestration of later years.

I’m Your Man is Cohen’s shortest album, and some of it’s ’80s production flourishes haven’t dated well. (Just listening to the Miami Vice-ish opening bars of “First We Take Manhattan.”) But it’s hard to quarrel with the songs themselves: the acid, ominous “Everybody Knows,” the lilting “Take This Waltz.” It’s also the album on which Cohen discovers his sense of humor. On “Tower of Song,” he pokes fun at the image of the tortured singer toiling away in his garrett, following a one-sided conversation with the ghost of Hank Williams with a crude one-finger piano solo. His writing is looser as well, the rhythms more free-swinging. Where many songwriters’ careers effectively wind down in middle age, Cohen sounds as if he’s just warming up.

The highlight of Cohen’s latter-day output, The Future casts a cold eye on humanity’s imperfections. As on Death of a Ladies’ Man, the album’s relatively upbeat musical backing belies its pessimistic outlook; Cohen is a prophet tap-dancing on the edge of the abyss. The title track looks hungrily towards the apocalypse, while “Waiting for the Miracle” gives up on anything but divine intervention. In the midst of the chaos and impending doom comes “Anthem,” which finds spiritual enlightenment in imperfection. “There is a crack in everything,” Cohen sings above a gospel choir. “That’s how the light gets in.” The Future is one of Cohen’s most polished albums, but there are just enough cracks in its glossy surfaces.

Given Cohen’s obvious (sometimes too much so) appreciation of the feminine, it’s not surprising that women have played a substantial role in creating his music as well as inspiring it. On Various Postions, he shares the microphone with Jennifer Warnes, who would later repay the favor by recording an album of Cohen’s songs entitled Famous Blue Raincoat. “Dance Me to the End of Love” is one of Cohen’s purest and most untroubled love songs, and “If It Be You Will” finds Cohen expressing vulnerability in the face of the ultimate authority. The album’s highlight, of course, is “Hallelujah,” the most covered number in Cohen’s songbook. Even if you wind up preferring Jeff Buckley’s version — or John Cale’s, or Rufus Wainwright’s — Cohen’s has a desperation none of the others can match.

"I'm back on Boogie Street," declares Leonard Cohen on two different songs in this collection, titled with characteristic understatement Ten New Songs. (Previous album titles have included Songs of Leonard Cohen, Songs from a Room, and Recent Songs.) More poet than musician, Cohen has, since his early albums, tended to rely on collaborations with musicians to put together his music: John Lissauer on 1974's New Skin for the Old Ceremony, Henry Lewy on 1979's Recent Songs, and, notoriously, Phil Spector on 1977's Death of a Ladies' Man. On Ten New Songs, his partner is former backup singer Sharon Robinson, who co-wrote "Everybody Knows" on 1988's I'm Your Man and earns co-writing credit on all the material here. She has also conjured the musical backgrounds ("All tracks arranged, programmed, and performed by Sharon Robinson," reads the credit), and she harmonizes with Cohen throughout. But all collaborators (even Spector) are in the service of Cohen's poetic vision, which remains the dominant element on this elegiac set. After a restatement of purpose on "In My Secret Life," he turns in a moody set of reflections on decline, even alluding to fellow poet Robert Frost's famous "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" in "A Thousand Kisses Deep": "And maybe I had miles to drive/And promises to keep/You ditch it all to stay alive/A thousand kisses deep." The songs are full of leave-taking, with titles like "Alexandra Leaving" and "You Have Loved Enough" accurately describing the tone, concluding with the prayer-like valedictory "The Land of Plenty," which gently remonstrates with the consumer society the poet has always engaged and rejected: "May the lights in the land of plenty/Shine on the truth some day." Even in the quietude of Cohen's catalog, the result seems like a coda.