Suzanne Verdal in 1966 or Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne”
"Suzanne Takes You Down to Her Place Near the River
You can hear the boats go by, you can spend the night beside her
And you know that she’s half-crazy but that’s why you want to be there
And she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China'
— Leonard Cohen, “Suzanne”-
Possibly one of Cohen’s most famous songs from his rich canon was inspired not by a romantic relationship but his infatuation with platonic friend Suzanne Verdal. Given to Judy Collins as one of the first songs he ever wrote, the song became a hit under her guidance but it was rooted in Cohen’s love life.
In truth, the song was, in fact, an amalgamation of his journey so far. In ‘Suzanne’ Cohen provided an infinitely detailed piece of work, capturing the encounters he had with Suzanne Verdal, the girlfriend of Canadian artist Armand Vaillancourt. “He got such a kick out of seeing me emerge as a young schoolgirl, I suppose, and a young artist, into becoming Armand’s lover and then-wife,” recalled Verdal, in a 1998 interview. “So he was more or less chronicling the times and seemingly got a kick out of it.”
“He was ‘drinking me in’ more than I even recognised if you know what I mean,” Verdal said when noting the song’s intensity. “I took all that moment for granted. I just would speak and I would move and I would encourage and he would just kind of like sit back and grin while soaking it all up, and I wouldn’t always get feedback, but I felt his presence really being with me.”
“The song ‘Suzanne’ is journalism,” Cohen says in the book Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen: Interviews and Encounters. “It’s completely accurate.”
Asked to confirm the line about tea and oranges, Cohen smirked: “Well, the tea actually had little pieces of orange peel in it. But ‘tea and oranges’ sounds better, doesn’t it? She lived near the water in Montreal. And she did used to ‘take you down to her place near the river’. You could ‘hear the boats go by’ and you could ‘spend the night beside her.’ All those things…and I touched her perfect body with my mind. Mostly because she was married to a friend of mine and I couldn’t touch her with anything else!”
Regardless of the contentious issues of adultery within the track, it’s hard to ignore this as one of Cohen’s finest works.