Ten years after losing his father, Adam Cohen spots him everywhere.
“I happen to have inherited his body type and his voice, and when I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror, I see him,” says the 54-year-old singer-songwriter.
Beyond that, the world brings its own reminders: songs playing in taxis and restaurants, buskers singing on street corners, videos of weddings and funerals set to his father’s music.
“I don’t know that there’s been a single day that I haven’t thought of him and that the world hasn’t provoked me to do it.”
Now, he’s seeking a more deliberate connection, gathering his own son and fellow artists for a concert marking a decade since his father’s death.
“Everybody Knows Leonard Cohen: The Official 10th Anniversary Concert Celebration” is a family-led tribute bringing the bard of Montreal’s music to Canadian stages this month before heading to Europe in early 2027.
Created and directed by Adam Cohen, the production combines performances with archival footage. Feist, Rufus Wainwright and Serena Ryder are among the guests announced for Toronto’s Meridian Hall on Nov. 7, exactly 10 years after Leonard Cohen’s death.
Over a career spanning five decades, Cohen was one of Canada’s most revered artists, bringing a poet’s sensibility and a distinctive baritone to enduring songs such as “Hallelujah” and “Suzanne.”
Adam Cohen and his 19-year-old son, Cassius, have been working through Leonard’s songs in the family home in Montreal, a bittersweet way of reconnecting with the late singer-songwriter.
“Just playing his songs and really studying them word for word, chord for chord is the closest thing to the grief that I remember of having lost him,” he says in an interview from the kitchen where they shared countless meals.
“It’s accompanied with a kind of deliciousness and deep appreciation for the man that you can only have when you’re practising someone’s song.”
The production also serves a more immediate parental concern: putting his own son to work.
After Cassius Cohen dropped out of college last summer and announced he wanted to be a musician, Adam hired him as his bass player for performances in Germany and Greece.
“If he’s not going to go to college, then he should be working with the same appetite and rigour that school was expecting of him, but in music,” he says.
Now, hearing his son perform his father’s songs brings back memories of three generations sitting at the dinner table.
“The whole thing is beautiful and touching and emotional.”
And while it could easily become sentimental, he says Cassius’s musicianship gives him plenty other reasons to be proud.
“He’s far more accomplished technically than I am.”
Adam Cohen knows a thing or two about seeking a father’s approval through music.
He recalls the bard saying he wanted his son to become something more important in society.
“He would often joke that he wanted me to be prime minister of Canada and he referred to the music business as a racket, a cesspool,” he says.
“There was a kind of disappointment that I’d followed in his footsteps.”
But being chosen to produce 2016’s “You Want It Darker,” Leonard Cohen’s final album released during his lifetime, offered Adam a chance to prove himself.
“To be in his midst in such intimate quarters for hours and hours on end, at the end of his life when I was making and producing his record, was a badge of honour for me because I got to show and deliver to him the lifetime of my experience,” he says.
Revisiting the catalogue now, Cohen says he’s struck by the painstaking choices behind it: every chord, adjective and cadence.
“The common expression is that they don’t make things the way they used to,” he says.
“His work lasts because it’s imbued with a kind of devotional labour. It aims for a kind of excellence that is a triumph over planned obsolescence.”
The tribute, which also hits Montreal this week, aims to summon Leonard Cohen’s presence, including the humour that accompanied his wisdom. Adam says it’s less about revealing an unknown side of his father than remembering the qualities audiences already cherish.
“We’ll do our best to capture the entirety of the man.”
One might imagine that aura of effortless cool occasionally gave way to a corny dad moment behind closed doors. But Adam has no such anecdotes.
“Not even when he was being extremely funny or light or jovial was there anything inconsistent,” he says.
“He did it in his inimitable style, and there was a throughline of elegance and humility and generosity and intelligence and presence. He was molecularly charged in a way that was very palpable to anyone who came in his midst.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 3, 2026.
Alex Nino Gheciu, The Canadian Press
