“Famous Blue Raincoat” by Leonard Cohen

"Famous Blue Raincoat" sits sixth on Songs of Love and Hate, Leonard Cohen's third album, from 1971, and it's written as a letter, much of it in lilting amphibrachs. The letter goes to a man caught in a love triangle with the narrator and a woman named Jane, rival and brother at once, and it's shot through with odd signposts: the old German love song "Lili Marlene," Clinton Street in Manhattan, where Cohen lived in the 1970s, and a question that a 1999 guide to his music reads as a nod to the Scientology state of Clear.

Bob Johnston produced it and Paul Buckmaster arranged it. The raincoat, Cohen later admitted in the notes to The Best of Leonard Cohen, was his own, a Burberry bought in London in 1959. Even so, he said in 1994 that he had never been satisfied with the song.

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