My mother owned this on cassette—probably still does—and it was a staple of car rides throughout my childhood. Because of that, until I really started exploring music in my late teens, I naively assumed Leonard Cohen was an ‘80s artist. The deep, deadpan voice, the sleek synths, the pulsing drum machines—wasn’t this just what he did? I was, of course, completely oblivious to his stark and poetic folk albums from the ‘60s and ‘70s, but maybe that says something. For many, I'm Your Man wasn’t just a reinvention but rather an entry point or a reminder. Cohen’s shift to this sleek, synthetic sound was a calculated move. By the mid-‘80s, his commercial standing had waned, but the 1987 tribute album Famous Blue Raincoat (featuring covers by Jennifer Warnes) had renewed interest in his work. Seeing an opportunity, Cohen fully embraced contemporary production, using drum machines, glossy keyboards, and a more theatrical vocal delivery to reinvent himself for a new audience. And it worked. The album opens with First We Take Manhattan, a politically tinged track that blends apocalyptic paranoia with a strangely danceable groove. Its pulsating synths and foreboding guitar licks feel like the perfect backdrop for Cohen’s cryptic warnings. Then there’s Everybody Knows, possibly the album’s definitive statement. The song’s skeletal beat, brooding bass, and eerily chipper backing vocals make it sound like a prophecy delivered with a smirk. That blend of cynicism and humour runs through much of the album, particularly in I’m Your Man, a playful yet devastating ode to devotion where Cohen practically leans into the microphone with a knowing wink. Take This Waltz (adapted from a Federico García Lorca poem) and Tower of Song provide a reflective counterweight—one romantic and wistful, the other self-deprecating and profound. Lyrically, Cohen was at his most sardonic and prophetic. Everybody Knows is practically a manifesto of disillusionment: “Everybody knows that the dice are loaded / Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed.” The song’s fatalistic humour made it a cult favourite, frequently used in film and television. Even Tower of Song, with its seemingly lighthearted refrain about being "born with the gift of a golden voice," reads like a career-spanning reflection, equal parts self-deprecating joke and poetic resignation. Not everything quite sticks. Jazz Police is the album’s oddest detour, a frenetic, borderline-satirical piece that plays like an inside joke that doesn’t quite land. I Can’t Forget, meanwhile, feels like Cohen-by-numbers—solid but lacking the weight of the album’s best moments. The production, too, leans heavily into late-’80s aesthetics, and while that mostly works in Cohen’s favour, certain tracks (Ain’t No Cure for Love) carry a sheen that hasn’t aged as well. Some saw Cohen’s pivot to synth-driven pop as opportunistic or at odds with his poetic roots but time has been kind to it. The album has since been recognized as a landmark moment in his career that allowed him to step into a new artistic phase with renewed energy. It also became one of his most covered and sampled works, with Everybody Knows and First We Take Manhattan frequently reinterpreted by other artists. In hindsight, I'm Your Man was the bridge to the Cohen we now recognize as one of music’s great elder statesmen. Without it, there might not have been The Future (1992), which expanded on its dark, apocalyptic themes, or even You Want It Darker (2016), which distilled his late-career wisdom into a haunting farewell. This was a career resurgence that set the stage for the next three decades. I'm Your Man is Leonard Cohen at his sharpest, funniest, and most effortlessly cool. A masterclass in reinvention, it took the sound of the late ‘80s and made it Cohen’s own.