Leonard Cohen was right about "Suzanne". It is not a song. It has a clear theme but no development or refrain. The subject "takes you down", far below the stave, leaving no room for high notes. It maintains so even a tone, you could (some do) call it a drone.

Or, more accurately, a prayer. 

In 1985, Cohen astonished a Polish audience by declaring that "when I was a child I went to synagogue every Saturday morning" and quoted accurately from one of the prayers. He has told biographers that he "liked the music in the synagogue". That statement is vindicated by some of his best-known songs. 

In his family's Polish-Ashkenazic ritual, much of the music in the service verges on the monotonous, fostering a communion of equality between worshippers with fine voices and those who sing flat. "Suzanne" fits aptly into that bracket. Apply the tune to the Sabbath-morning prayer "El Adon" (God, master of all deeds) and the cadence is tailor-made. It is not so much song as supplication. "Suzanne" has no beginning, no end. As in "It Seems So Long Ago, Nancy", the song places us in the present continuous, in a situation that may end badly or well or not at all. It is unresolved. Only God can decide.

The liturgical allusions of some Cohen songs stand in vivid contra-distinction to the poet-performer with whom Cohen is most compared. Bob Dylan, however, is numb to the numinous. Dylan is first political, then personal. Cohen is first personal, then mystical. On the same subject, they stand back to back. Compare Dylan's "It Ain't Me, Babe" to Cohen's break-up song "So Long Marianne". With Dylan the breach is harsh and irrevocable: "Go away from my window." With Cohen, the door is always open to possibility and renewal: "It's time that we began . . ."

Cohen had two golden decades on stage and on record before he ran into a brick wall. In 1984, as he reached 50, CBS Records refused — to his uncomprehending dismay — to release a hard-worked new album, Various Positions. In a reversal of Judy Collins's liberating endorsement, the CBS boss Walter Yetnikoff announced, "Leonard, we know you're great, but we don't know if you're any good." His verdict echoed a wider critical confusion about Cohen's status and the music industry kicked him into limbo.

Cohen issued Various Positions on a fringe label, where it sold in dribs and drabs. Reputationally, he was on the skids, reduced to appearing in the TV cop series Miami Vice. Dylan admired one of his new songs and ground it out on tour, but "Hallelujah" went virtually unacknowledged until first John Cale, then Jeff Buckley, interpreted the song on record, secularising the message, taking it far from Cohen's Biblical-erotic fantasy to a steelier, mass-marketed utility. Buckley's early death endowed "Hallelujah" with tragic grandeur. DreamWorks soundtracked it on Shrek. It was warbled on television talent shows. In one generation, "Hallelujah" went from oblivion to the most covered lyric of modern times, yet Cohen's purpose went undetected.