The Warnes cover - beautiful

History

Although one of Cohen's best-known songs, it is also one with which he remained dissatisfied. In an interview with Details magazine in 1993 he said:

"I never felt I really sealed that song; I never felt the carpentry was finished. That song and 'Bird on the Wire' were two songs I never successfully finished, but they were good enough to be used. Also, with the poverty of songs I have for each record, I can't afford to discard one as good as that. It's one of the better tunes I've written, but lyrically it's too mysterious, too unclear."

The song describes a love triangle and shares a common plot with his novel, Beautiful Losers. Like many of Cohen's songs it is based on a true story, but on BBC Radio in 1994 he claimed to have forgotten who was involved and how:

"The trouble with that song is that I've forgotten the actual triangle. Whether it was my own … of course. I always felt that there was an invisible male seducing the woman I was with, now whether this one was incarnate or merely imaginary I don't remember, I've always had the sense that either I've been that figure in relation to another couple or there'd been a figure like that in relation to my marriage. I don't quite remember but I did have this feeling that there was always a third party, sometimes me, sometimes another man, sometimes another woman."

However, in the liner notes to 1975's The Best of Leonard Cohen, which includes the song, he alludes that the famous blue raincoat to which he refers actually belonged to him, and not someone else:

"I had a good raincoat then, a Burberry I got in London in 1959. Elizabeth thought I looked like a spider in it. That was probably why she wouldn't go to Greece with me. It hung more heroically when I took out the lining, and achieved glory when the frayed sleeves were repaired with a little leather. Things were clear. I knew how to dress in those days. It was stolen from Marianne's loft in New York sometime during the early seventies. I wasn't wearing it very much toward the end."

Ron Cornelius played guitar on Songs of Love and Hate and was Cohen's band leader for several years. He told Songfacts: "We played that song a lot before it ever went to tape. We knew it was going to be big. We could see what the crowd did - you play the Royal Albert Hall, the crowd goes crazy, and you're really saying something there. If I had to pick a favorite from the album, it would probably be 'Famous Blue Raincoat.'"