Artist · chart history · #79 in indie & aaa artist polls
Leonard Cohen
Solo artist Westmount Canada Canadian singer‐songwriter and poet
Leonard Cohen is an artist from Westmount. Leonard Cohen has 99 chart appearances on 46 radio countdowns from 13 stations on RockLists, spanning 1991–2026. The most successful song on radio countdowns is “Hallelujah”, which appears on 23 lists with a best position of #2. The station that charted Leonard Cohen most often is WYEP (Pittsburgh, PA), with 29 appearances. The artist’s biggest year on year-end countdowns was 2016.
Leonard Cohen was a poet and novelist long before he was a singer. Born in 1934 in Westmount, he spent the '50s and early '60s writing books and only turned to music in 1966. The next year's Songs of Leonard Cohen, with "Suzanne" and "So Long, Marianne", set the template: hushed, spare folk songs sung in a voice that sounded like it had seen everything and forgiven most of it. Songs of Love and Hate and "Famous Blue Raincoat" followed in 1971, and in 1977 he let Phil Spector drag him out of his minimalist shell on Death of a Ladies' Man.
Faith and mortality, desire and regret, betrayal and redemption: those were his subjects, and they only got heavier with time. Various Positions, in 1984, gave the world "Hallelujah" and "Dance Me to the End of Love". I'm Your Man, in 1988, dressed his songs in synthesizers and sly menace on "Everybody Knows" and "First We Take Manhattan", and The Future, in 1992, stared down the political and social rot of the day on "Closing Time" and "Anthem".
In 2005 he found out his manager had made off with most of his savings, so he headed back out on tour, from 2008 to 2013, then made a remarkable late run of records: Old Ideas in 2012, Popular Problems in 2014 and You Want It Darker, which came out 3 weeks before he died in 2016. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame had inducted him in 2008.
Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.
Songs by Leonard Cohen on radio countdowns
| # | Song | Strength | Lists | Best | #1s | Peak year |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Hallelujah | 23 | #2 | – | – | |
| 2 | You Want It Darker | 14 | #5 | – | 2016 | |
| 3 | Suzanne | 13 | #200 | – | – | |
| 4 | Everybody Knows | 14 | #107 | – | – | |
| 5 | Famous Blue Raincoat | 6 | #229 | – | – | |
| 6 | Tower of Song | 4 | #271 | – | – | |
| 7 | Bird on a Wire | 4 | #243 | – | – | |
| 8 | Almost Like the Blues | 3 | #79 | – | 2014 | |
| 9 | Who by Fire | 1 | #74 | – | – | |
| 10 | Closing Time | 3 | #719 | – | – | |
| 11 | So Long, Marianne | 1 | #580 | – | – | |
| 12 | Democracy | 2 | #547 | – | – | |
| 13 | Anthem | 1 | #716 | – | – | |
| 14 | First We Take Manhattan | 2 | #559 | – | – | |
| 15 | Sisters of Mercy | 1 | #1163 | – | – | |
| 16 | Dance Me To The End Of Love | 1 | #1191 | – | – | |
| 17 | I'm Your Man | 2 | #973 | – | – | |
| 18 | Joan of Arc | 1 | #1852 | – | – | |
| 19 | The Future | 1 | #1862 | – | – | |
| 20 | Chelsea Hotel #2 | 1 | #780 | – | – |
Albums with charting songs
Where each song was first released, from MusicBrainz.
Year-end chart timeline
Combined year-end countdown points per year. Taller bars mean more songs placing higher across more stations.
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