Leonard Cohen appeared on seven of his album covers before 1988, always looking cooler and wiser than his listeners: he was the saturnine poet, the seductive man of the world. On the cover of I’m Your Man he looks better than ever, with his sunglasses and impeccable pinstripe suit—except that he’s eating a banana, the slapstick fruit. James Dean would not have looked cool eating a banana. Gandhi would not have looked wise. Cohen’s publicist Sharon Weisz snapped the picture at the video shoot for Jennifer Warnes’ version of “First We Take Manhattan” and thought nothing of it, but Cohen thought it summed up everything the album was saying about himself and the human condition: Just when you think you’ve got it all worked out, life hands you a banana.
Cohen was 53 when he released the album that reinvented him musically, vocally, linguistically, temperamentally and philosophically. It quickly became his most successful record since his 1967 debut and many people’s favorite. In Sylvie Simmons’ Cohen biography, also called I’m Your Man, Black Francis says: “Everything that’s sexy about him was extra sexy, anything funny about him extra funny, anything heavy was extra heavy.” Triple-espresso Cohen. Six of these eight songs were career highlights that featured on “The Essential Leonard Cohen” and his 2008 comeback tour. Over the years, they have been consistently covered and quoted and folded into popular culture. Not a bad strike rate for an album that, according to Cohen, “broke down three or four times in the making of it.”
Cohen was on his knees when he made I’m Your Man. His 1984 album Various Positions had revitalized his songwriting with his embrace of cheap synthesizers and contained “Hallelujah,” destined to become a modern standard, but it had been rejected by Columbia Records in the U.S. He was running out of money. Songwriting, never easy, had become “hard labor”—he had been struggling with “Anthem” and “Waiting for the Miracle” for years and wouldn’t nail them until his 1992 album The Future. Above (or below) all, he was poleaxed by depression, unable at one stage to get out of bed or answer the phone. He considered retiring and withdrawing to a monastery but he didn’t feel he had the spiritual mettle. He felt that the personality he had sustained for so many years—as an artist, lover, friend—was disintegrating. “My own situation was so disagreeable that most forms of failure hardly touched me,” he said. “That allowed me to take a lot of chances.”