The room › Artists › Leonard Cohen
Where to start with Leonard Cohen
Start with Ain't No Cure for Love — I'm Your Man, 1988. That is the track sitting closest to the centre of all 12 Leonard Cohen tracks in Zubissou Sounds — a listening room of 14,971 tracks placed one at a time by hand, not an algorithm.
This page is not a discography and not a ranking. It describes exactly one thing: the 12 Leonard Cohen tracks that one person put in one room, and where they sit relative to each other. The starting point above is chosen by a rule you can check — of the 12 tracks, it is the one nearest the average position on the four knobs the room runs on, and where two sit equally close the one on a named record wins. Nothing here calls any record better than any other.
The collection leans hard on one record: 8 of the 12 tracks come from I'm Your Man alone.
The years need a caveat: 8 of 12 dated tracks land in the 1980s and come from 1 record, while the rest come from elsewhere — the mark of a reissue carrying its own date rather than the music's. Read the year column below as the date on the copy in this room, not the date the music arrived in the world.
The density knob swings 50 points across these tracks, the widest of the four — it is the axis this artist actually travels along in this room.
Three ways in
The one track, if you only play one
Ain't No Cure for Love — I'm Your Man, 1988. Of the 11 Leonard Cohen tracks here that have actually been listened to, this one sits closest to the average of them across the four knobs the room runs on. The other 1 arrived carrying the default for their genre, and averaging a placeholder in would move the centre towards nothing. It is the least surprising thing among the tracks that were read, which is what an entry point should be.
If you want the sparse end
You Know Who I Am — Songs From A Room, 1969. The lowest density reading of any Leonard Cohen track in the room (15 out of 100). This is as far towards sparse as the collection goes.
If you want the wall end
I Left A Woman Waiting — Death of a Ladies Man, 1977. The highest density reading here, at 65 out of 100 — a 50-point swing across the collection towards wall.
Where Leonard Cohen sits in the room
Zubissou Sounds does not have playlists or genres you click. It has knobs. Every track carries a position on each one, set by hand when the track was added, and you find music by setting the room to a state rather than by searching for a name. These are Leonard Cohen's average coordinates and the range they cover.
| Knob | Average | Range | Low → high |
|---|---|---|---|
| mood | 42 | 18–48 | melancholy → euphoric |
| energy | 40 | 12–45 | ambient → driving |
| density | 47 | 15–65 | sparse → wall |
| head · body | 42 | 10–48 | cerebral → groove |
All four run 0–100. They are placed by a person, not derived from audio analysis or from any streaming service's feature data.
What is here, record by record
| Album | Year | Tracks |
|---|---|---|
| I'm Your Man | 1988 | 8 |
| Songs of Love and Hate | 1971 | 2 |
| Songs From A Room | 1969 | 1 |
| Death of a Ladies Man | 1977 | 1 |
Every Leonard Cohen track in the room
| Track | Album | Year |
|---|---|---|
| You Know Who I Am | Songs From A Room | 1969 |
| Joan of Arc | Songs of Love and Hate | 1971 |
| Sing Another Song, Boys | Songs of Love and Hate | 1971 |
| I Left A Woman Waiting | Death of a Ladies Man | 1977 |
| Ain't No Cure for Love | I'm Your Man | 1988 |
| Everybody Knows | I'm Your Man | 1988 |
| First We Take Manhattan | I'm Your Man | 1988 |
| I Can't Forget | I'm Your Man | 1988 |
| I'm Your Man | I'm Your Man | 1988 |
| Jazz Police | I'm Your Man | 1988 |
| Take This Waltz - Paris Version | I'm Your Man | 1988 |
| Tower of Song | I'm Your Man | 1988 |
Near neighbours in this room
These are the artists whose average knob position sits nearest to Leonard Cohen's in this room. It is a coordinate match, not a claim that they sound alike.
- Where to start with Tortoise — krautrock, 13 tracks
- Where to start with Shakatak — smooth jazz, 10 tracks
- Where to start with Fleetwood Mac — classic rock, 11 tracks
What the open databases say
MusicBrainz lists Leonard Cohen as a solo artist, from Westmount, Canada and born in 1934. Its contributors tag the artist folk, contemporary folk, singer-songwriter, blues rock and rock. These are the open database's facts, not mine — you can check them against the MusicBrainz entry.
Questions
How many Leonard Cohen tracks are in Zubissou Sounds?
There are 12, across 4 albums. 12 of them carry a date, running from 1969 to 1988. That is the whole of what this room holds — it is one person's collection, not a discography.
Is this a best-of, or a ranking?
No. Nothing here is ranked and no track is called better than another. The starting point is picked by arithmetic — the track closest to the centre of all the others on four measured axes — and the rule is printed above so you can disagree with it.
Where do the knob numbers come from?
They are set by hand, one track at a time, by the person who added the track. They are not audio analysis and not a Spotify feature. Mood, energy, density and the head/body balance each run 0 to 100. 11 of these 12 tracks have been read that way. The other 1 arrived with the default for their genre and nobody has listened to them yet, so they are left out of the centre, the ends and the spread quoted above.
Can I listen to these here?
Not yet from this page. Zubissou Sounds is in private beta — the room itself plays through Spotify, and 12 of these 12 tracks are matched to a Spotify ID and ready to play the moment you are in. The waitlist form is at the bottom of this page.