I’m Your Man by Leonard Cohen

I'm Your Man, Leonard Cohen's eighth studio album, arrived on Columbia on February 2, 1988, and it finds the poet who began with spare, minimalist folk dressed in the cool pulse of synthesizers. Four years on from Various Positions, the record that gave the world "Hallelujah", Cohen went all the way modern, with Michel Robidoux credited as producer, and the result is synth-pop as only that low, weathered voice could deliver it.

The drum machines tick and the keyboards glint, but the preoccupations are the ones that ran through his whole career: desire and loss, faith and betrayal. "Everybody Knows" and "First We Take Manhattan" carry a wry, chilly menace over their glossy surfaces. The gamble paid off. It became his most successful studio album in America up to then, went to number one in several European countries, and turned a cult hero into a best-selling artist.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.