Suzanne

The harmony of 'Suzanne' is deceptively simple yet profoundly effective. By restricting the palette to four diatonic chords (I, ii, iii, IV) and avoiding the dominant entirely, Cohen creates a harmonic world without tension-resolution — a perpetual floating quality. The stepwise ascending and descending motion mirrors the flowing river and the spiritual drifting described in the lyrics. This dominant-avoidance technique became a hallmark of Cohen's harmonic language and influenced generations of folk and indie songwriters.

Leonard Cohen wrote 'Suzanne' first as a poem in 1966, published in his poetry collection 'Parasites of Heaven.' The poem emerged from Cohen's visits to the Montreal waterfront, where Suzanne Verdal — then wife of Québécois sculptor Armand Vaillancourt — would invite him to her apartment near the harbour, serving him Constant Comment tea (the 'tea and oranges that come all the way from China' in the lyrics). The three verses weave together the figure of Suzanne, the spiritual image of Jesus walking on the water, and a return to Suzanne, creating a triptych of earthly and divine devotion.

"Suzanne" is the song that launched Leonard Cohen's music career, originally written as a poem inspired by Suzanne Verdal and the Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours Chapel in Montreal. Its fingerpicked nylon-string guitar and Cohen's incantatory baritone created a template for literary folk music, covered by hundreds of artists and universally regarded as one of the finest songs of the 20th century.