“So Long, Marianne” by Leonard Cohen

"So Long, Marianne" sits on Songs of Leonard Cohen, the Canadian poet's 1967 debut album, produced by John Simon, and it's a farewell written for a real woman: Marianne Ihlen, whom he'd met in 1960 on Hydra, the Greek island where the Norwegian writer Axel Jensen, her husband, had just walked out, leaving her with a baby boy of six months. Cohen took her home to Oslo, later moved mother and child into his life in Montreal, and the pair spent the decade moving between New York, Montreal and Hydra.

He began writing it on Aylmer Street in Montreal and only wrapped it up about a year later, at New York's Chelsea Hotel. In a note for his 1976 Greatest Hits, he admitted he hadn't known he was saying goodbye, though it seems he was, and called her a Muse.

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