If you are a regular in our STR section, you will know that Focus On is never about simply lining up the greatest hits. Our music team likes to dig a little deeper — and Leonard Cohen is no exception. So no Hallelujah, So Long, Marianne, Famous Blue Raincoat or I am Your Man this time.

Instead, the playlist travels across more than half a century, from Suzanne in 1967 to the posthumously released The Night of Santiago and The Hills in 2019. And the chronology is deliberately upside down: we meet 77-year-old Cohen first with Going Home — a song that already feels like a reflection on the road travelled and the idea of leaving — then gradually move backwards, ending with Suzanne, almost where his recording career began.

Different decades, same obsessions: love and religion, loss and mortality, the personal and the enormous. Even when Cohen writes about very real events — 9/11 in On That Day or post-Katrina New Orleans in Samson in New Orleans — they become something much bigger.

It is a playlist for falling for Cohen all over again: the voice, the poetry, the dry darkness and that rare ability to sing about the heaviest things without ever making them feel unbearably heavy.