New Leonard Cohen Biography Coming in December

You know you’ve made it big when there are two official biographies written about you. So congrats, Leonard Cohen, welcome to the big boy’s club. The second Cohen biography, called Hallelujah: A New Biography and to be released on Dec. 1, will chronicle both Cohen’s origins as a singer-songwriter and his recent resurgence as a sort-of indie godfather.

Author Tim Footman also penned Welcome to the Machine: OK Computer and the Death of the Classic Album, so we can hope that Hallelujah won’t be just another fawning piece of rock journalism fandom. The last Cohen biography hit shelves back in 1998, and while it may seem that he’s been up to relatively little since then, his name and reputation has only grown; just last year, two different covers of Cohen’s “Hallelujah” fought for the top spot in the UK’s Christmas Singles charts, not to mention the song’s giant boost when it appeared in Shrek, as sung by Rufus Wainwright.

What the book won’t cover, though, is this morsel: Cohen is allegedly recording an album of all new material due out in 2010. Someone call a writer! That third biography can’t be far behind.

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