AKIPRESS.COM - Leonard Cohen, the baritone-voiced Canadian singer-songwriter who seamlessly blended spirituality and sexuality in songs like “Hallelujah”, ”Suzanne” and “Bird on a Wire”, has died at age 82, reported In-Cyprus.

“My father passed away peacefully at his home in Los Angeles,” the singer's son Adam Cohen said in a statement. “He was writing up until his last moments with his unique brand of humor.”

Cohen, also renowned as a poet, novelist and aspiring Zen monk, blended folk music with a darker, sexual edge that won him fans around the world and among fellow musicians like Bob Dylan and R.E.M.

He remained wildly popular into his 80s, when his deep voice plunged to seriously gravelly depths. He toured as recently as earlier this year and released a new album, “You Want it Darker”, just last month. Adam Cohen said his father died with the knowledge that he’d made one of his greatest records.

Cohen, who once said he got into music because he couldn’t make a living as a poet, rose to prominence during the folk music revival of the 1960s. During those years, he traveled the folk circuit with younger artists like Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez and others.

The Montreal-born Cohen never seemed quite as comfortable on stage, however, and he chalked it up in part to being the old man among the group. “I was at least 10 years older than the rest of them,” he told Magazine, a supplement to the Spanish newspaper El Mundo, in 2001.

It was Dylan who first recognized the potential of 1984’s “Hallelujah”, performing it twice in concert during the mid-1980s, once in Cohen’s native Canada.

It had gone unnoticed when it came out on an independent-label album that had been rejected by Cohen’s label. He had filled a notebook with some 80 verses before recording the song, which he said despite its religious references to David, Bathseba and Samson was an attempt to give a nonreligious context to hallelujah, an expression of praise.

Cohen recorded four verses, but he sent several more to John Cale, a founding Velvet Underground member who recorded “Hallelujah” for a 1991 tribute album.

It’s the Cale version that has become the standard and was used by its most celebrated singer, the late Jeff Buckley, whose 1994 recording really began the launch of the song as cultural phenomenon.

Cohen never married but he had two children, Adam and Lorca, with artist Suzanne Elrod.

He never won a Grammy, but he won countless other awards, including being named a companion of the Order of Canada in 1991, his native country’s highest civilian honor.