Leonard Cohen Timeline

This Friday, Canadian musician and writer Leonard Cohen would have turned 84 years. Rising to fame with songs like “Suzanne”, “I’m Your Man” and, perhaps his best known one, “Hallelujah” (which has been covered more than 300 times by various singers), the iconic deep-voiced artist proved to be more focused on authenticity rather than achieving musical precision. Long before he made his debut in the music industry, he channeled his creativity into writing poetry and fiction, publishing a long list of volumes throughout his life and receiving one of the Prince of Asturias Awards for literature in 2011.

To bring an homage to the multifaceted artist who was invested as a Companion of the Order of Canada, the country’s highest civilian honor, we have created the Leonard Cohen Timeline – a brief visual chronology of his most prominent literary and musical works, along with a few interesting life events.

Having the reputation of being a latent creative mind and admitting that he would take even years to complete a song, Mr. Cohen showed a care for his form of expression that few artists can match. This explains the long gaps of time between the release dates of his albums. One of Cohen’s longest hiatuses, from which the public thought he wouldn’t return, occurred in 1994 when he retreated to a Zen monastery near Los Angeles, where he spent 5 years. However, contrary to the general impression, he did resume his career, yielding 5 more albums as a result, the last being You Want It Darker. Being released three weeks before his death on the 7th of November, 2016, it completed an impressive recorded output that promises to appeal to the public for a long time to come.

The Leonard Cohen chronology was designed with Office Timeline, an intuitive plugin for PowerPoint that enables the fast creation of timelines and Gantt charts. You can copy and share the image for free, and further edit it with the help of the Plus version of the tool.

Download the Leonard Cohen Timeline for PowerPoint here.