Discounting my vague awareness of “Suzanne” during my college days, I started listening to Leonard Cohen’s music in 2002 and began writing about him and Anjani in July 2006. His songs, I have discovered, are atypical of pop music in general in that learning about their origins, contexts, or any of a dozen other literary or musicological elements is an effort abundantly rewarded by increased appreciation and enjoyment of the music. Further, there is much about Cohen that is intrinsically interesting.
I am not the first to reach such conclusions. A dedicated group of Cohen fans has accumulated an impressive amount of data about the life and work of Leonard Cohen, and have made it available on the internet. While there are a number of Cohen-dedicated sites, clearly the most impressive and influential is leonardcohenfiles.com, for which Jarkko Arjatsalo serves as webmaster. It is no small factor that leonardcohenfiles.com has earned the trust and appreciation of Cohen himself, who has released significant raw materials (e.g., notebook pages Cohen used in the creation of a finished song), answered innumerable queries, and revealed future plans in order to enhance the site.
Research and fact-checking in the course of writing about Leonard Cohen brought me, time and again, to these sites. I recently became convinced that I could accomplish this research more efficaciously with a search engine customized to search only those web sites I’ve found most useful and accurate. Happily, Google has made tools to accomplish this task accessible to wannabe geeks like me.
The site before you is, developmentally, barely Beta, but it does demonstrate potential. The most efficacious means of improving the process is for users to participate. For example, suggest web sites to be added to the search list, slam a currently searched web site with a recommendation to drop it, let me know if there is a problem with the site, send me a link to that essay on Leonard Cohen’s favorite jokes, …
Email me at: drhguy@1heckofaguy.com
I hope you find the site helpful.
