Heartbreak, hope and human imperfection: Leonard Cohen’s greatest songs – ranked!

A decade after his final album, and his death, we rate the best of the Canadian singer-songwriter who brought a deep, spiritual wisdom to love and grief

20. First We Take Manhattan (1988)

The synth-heavy production on 1988’s I’m Your Man has always been divisive – even Leonard Cohen’s longtime collaborator Anjani Thomas subsequently expressed misgivings – but on its opening track, it really works. The Pet Shop Boys-ish arrangement chafes against Cohen’s growling vocal, amplifying First We Take Manhattan’s shiver-inducing sense of brooding menace.

19. Going Home (2011)

Seven years – and a personal financial crisis – after 2004’s half-hearted Dear Heather, Cohen returned to the studio with his powers freshly marshalled. As if to underline the point, Old Ideas opened with the sharply witty Going Home, on which Cohen’s muse addresses the listener directly, disparaging the artist himself as “a lazy bastard in a suit”.

18. Memories (1977)

Cohen famously called his 1977 LP Death of a Ladies’ Man “a catastrophe”, which perhaps reflected more on its drug- and booze-soaked recording with dangerously erratic producer Phil Spector than the finished album. It’s an outlier in Cohen’s catalogue, but one with much to commend it. Certainly, he maintained an understandable fondness for the rock’n’roll-influenced Memories, often performing it live.

17. Almost Like the Blues (2014)

Cohen’s renaissance continued apace on Popular Problems. Released the day before his 80th birthday, it sounded suspiciously like a masterpiece. Almost Like the Blues found him reflecting sorrowfully on man’s inhumanity to man – not merely torture, killing and war, but “all my bad reviews” – and staring down his own mortality, replete with a jab at Richard Dawkins.