Death of a Ladies' Man

People hate this record, and Cohen himself more or less disowned it – not a single track from it appears on The Essential Leonard Cohen, one of his best career retrospectives. But for me, the extravagance of Phil Spector’s production is a welcome sonic shift, if only because it is truly an eccentric outlier from the rest of the Cohen catalog. The album’s opening bell is like the flick of a wand that transports you from guy-with-guitar world to full-on lounge Cohen, Copacabana Cohen. And the writing isn’t bad either – “True Love Leaves No Traces” is a beautiful poem that was clearly precious to Cohen (versions of it appear in his first poetry collection (Let Us Compare Mythologies, 1956), as the epigraph to his first novel (The Favourite Game, 1963), and in 2006’s Book of Longing). It’s also a showcase for his underrated and legendarily dry sense of humor; “Paper-Thin Hotel” and “Memories” are hilarious. No one would argue that this is his finest or most-focused work, but it doesn’t deserve to be disowned to quite the extent that it has been.