Legendary singer Leonard Cohen dies aged 82: ‘We have lost one of music’s most revered visionaries’

Leonard Cohen, who has died at age 82, wandered the world reaching into his own melancholy and emerged as a sublime, spiritual voice for his generation.

“It is with profound sorrow we report that legendary poet, songwriter and artist, Leonard Cohen has passed away,” a statement on his Facebook page said. “We have lost one of music’s most revered and prolific visionaries.”

Best known to his wide base of admirers as a singer and songwriter, Cohen entered the music industry relatively late and was first a poet, a solitary vocation that suited the personality of the shy and frequently depressed boy from Montreal.

But Cohen, who struggled with stage fright even at the height of his career, went on to record some of the 20th century’s most critically acclaimed, if not always commercially lucrative, songs including So Long, Marianne and Suzanne – named after two of the many women who became his muses – and the religiously intoned, frequently covered Hallelujah.

Born into a prosperous Jewish family that had founded synagogues in Canada, Cohen would be hailed as one of the all-time literary greats in his native country but spent his adult life constantly on the move both geographically and spiritually.

He started his music career in 1960s New York, where he would mingled with avant-garde artists such as painter Andy Warhol and late Velvet Underground frontman Lou Reed who, on inducting the Canadian into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008, said: “We’re so lucky to be alive at the same time as Leonard Cohen.”