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When the mercurial Jensen, by now having achieved some literary success, left with an American painter, Cohen stepped into the breach, and he and Ihlen were soon living together. There, a later arrival from Montreal would espy them strolling the dockside with their newborn son, Axel Joachim, and quite reasonably think her “the most beautiful woman in the world.” They married against her parents’ wishes and, ahead of the counterculture curve, decamped to Hydra in 1958 when it was still barely known to outsiders. A bit confusingly, it had appeared not on Songs From a Room but on Cohen’s previous album, his recording debut, 1967’s Songs of Leonard Cohen.īorn in 1935 and raised middle-class in Oslo, the young Marianne found a focus for her inchoate thoughts of escape when she met and fell in love with aspiring writer Axel Jensen. It took a while to piece together in those pre-Internet times, but soon enough I learned that the woman in that photo was the very one addressed in one of the artist’s best-loved songs. Leonard Cohen, Marianne Ihlen and Ihlen’s young son Axel Joachim are seen at the right of a crowd at Grafos taverna in Hydra, circa 1963.

without thinking wistful thoughts of an island I had never seen. It’s a long way literally and figuratively from Alberta to Hydra, but for many years I could never pass by a certain stretch of Jasper Ave. Sisters of Mercy, as revealed in the liner notes of the Best Of collection, was written one night in a downtown hotel room with a view of moonlight over the North Saskatchewan River.

Improbably, Edmonton had its own Cohen connection.

That lure was no less strong if, like me, you first saw that photograph when you were living in a landlocked prairie city on the other side of the world and working in a suburban mall at a record store that would occasionally sell copies of Songs From a Room, which was by then 10 years old. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.