“Suzanne” was first written as a poem. It was the song that launched his career. Cohen met Suzanne Verdal in Montreal. She was seventeen—bohemian, a dancer. Her own career never blossomed: “And she shows you where to look amid the garbage and the flowers. There are heroes in the seaweed. There are children in the morning.” Cohen played this song for Israeli troops in 1973.
Cohen wrote “Bird on the Wire” while living on the Greek island of Hydra. When the island first received electricity, the wires strung up: “I would stare out the window at these telephone wires and think, how civilization had caught up with me and I wasn’t going to be able to escape after all.” His girlfriend at the time, Marianne Ihlen, handed Cohen a guitar. The birds, she said, looked like musical notes. Ihlen said, on meeting Cohen, “when my eyes met his, I felt it through my body.” About her, he wrote the songs “Hey That’s No Way to Say Goodbye” and “So Long Marianne.” This is one of the songs he played for Israeli troops in 1973.
Cohen wrote “Lover Lover Lover” while in Israel during the 1973 war. In an orange notebook, he wrote: “I went down to the desert / to help my brothers fight / I knew that they weren’t wrong / I knew that they weren’t right / but bones must stand up straight and walk / and blood must move around / and men go making ugly lines / across the holy ground.” He played the song for the first time, there, for Israeli soldiers. Later on, he took out these lines. He would backpedal, and say at a concert a few years later that he wrote the song for “the Egyptians and the Israelis.”
-Morgan English