"Famous Blue Raincoat" by Leonard Cohen, 1971

(This time, I had no idea of the year.)

I am not a Leonard Cohen fan, and this time I'm being very upfront not about my distaste for his music, which is not the case, but about my lack of education in the man's work.

This song came to me through Twitter only a couple of years ago, when I asked for help coming up with songs to add to a playlist meant to put me in mind of winter for a work-for-hire book I was writing that I wanted to have a bleak and wintery feel. (The playlist worked well. It's a very bleak book.) At the time, I knew only "Everybody Knows" and "Hallelujah," songs I'd known at least peripherally since college and that never really interested me much. If I'm honest, I don't think "Famous Blue Raincoat" would have interested me much in my younger days either. I'm sure young Leonard Cohen fans exist, but I needed a few more years of life experience to get it.