Acclaimed poet, artist, and songwriter Leonard Norman Cohen (1934–2016) was born on this day in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He began his lifelong soul searching as a writer at age nine when he buried a note to his dead father—a child’s whispered prayer folded into earth.

“I’ve been digging in the garden for years, looking for it,” Cohen once said. “Maybe that’s all I’m doing, looking for the note.”

He dedicated his first book of poems, Let Us Compare Mythologies (1956), to his father, reflecting that grief’s scar is “always left on one of the survivors—a scar that does not heal quickly.”

This ability to search into the soul and speak raw truth set him apart as an artist—whether as a Greenwich Village bohemian, melancholy writer, or deadpan baritone “suspended between song and speech.”

His deep baritone—low, gravelly, and tender—could hush a room with its honesty. There was something about Cohen that felt both ancient and intimate, as if he were singing only to you.

“There is a confusion between depression and seriousness,” he explained. “I happen to like the mode of seriousness. It’s peaceful and relaxing to me… I always hear an invisible guitar behind my novels and poetry.”

That invisible guitar became real with his first album, Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967). His pieces—“muffled prayers,” as he called them—were covered by hundreds of artists, from Judy Collins to Neil Diamond to Jeff Buckley.

In 1994, seeking silence, Cohen became Jikan (“silent one”) and spent five years in a Zen monastery in the San Gabriel Mountains. “There’s a similarity in the quality of the daily life” on the road and in the monastery, he said. “There’s just a sense of purpose.”

By 2008, as he entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, his faith had grown quiet and sure: “The older I get, the surer I am that I’m not running the show.”

In his final days, Cohen recorded You Want It Darker, a musical deathbed confession. With that same low, gravelly tenderness, he whispered to the world, “Hineni, I’m ready, my Lord.” It was a last prayer from a poet who always found light, even in the dark.