ONE DAY, around the middle of the 1980s, Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan met in a Paris café. Both men's careers were at a low ebb but were soon to have critical rehabilitations. Dylan's latest material had been widely panned, but in 1989 he would release his best album since Desire, Oh Mercy. Cohen had recently put out Various Positions, dropping his voice several semitones and swapping his Spanish guitar for a portable Casio keyboard, but it wouldn't be until 1988 that these changes would reach their full creative possibilities on I’m Your Man.

The conversation inevitably turned to songwriting, each curious about the other’s creative process. How long had it taken Cohen to write ‘Hallelujah’, the opening track on Various Positions, Dylan wondered. ‘About 2 years,’ Cohen answered. How long had it taken Dylan to write ‘I and I’, a song from his 1983 album Infidels? ‘About 15 minutes,’ Dylan said.

There has always been something slow and methodical about Cohen’s songwriting, a singular care taken over the relationship between melody, meter and rhythm; we sense Cohen has weighed each word in his hands, feeling its particular texture, before putting it down on the page. His songs have all the fine draftsmanship and dark mystery of renaissance paintings, something visible everywhere in his discography, from ‘Hallelujah’ to the deep cuts on this playlist. So turn off the electric lights, light a candle and explore the lesser known work of the man Dylan called the ‘Kafka of the blues’.