Cohen’s death was confirmed on his Facebook page by Sony Music Canada.

The announcement comes only weeks after his last studio album, You Want It Darker, a collection which sparked renewed rumors about his health. On the title track, he intoned in a voice of pure doom: “I’m ready, my Lord.” As a signoff, it will come to stand alongside David Bowie’s Blackstar from earlier in 2016.

Cohen started as a writer, poet and novelist in the 1960s, winning attention with the novel Beautiful Losers. He then moved into stark lyrics which initially led to comparisons with fellow Canadian Joni Mitchell. His early songs included “Suzanne,” famously covered by Judy Collins, with its lyric “you’ve touched her perfect body with your mind.” More soon flowered on albums with wonderfully downbeat titles: Songs of Leonard Cohen, Songs from a Room, Songs of Love and Hate, Recent Songs and Ten New Songs among them.

“Bird on the Wire” was a highlight, a song now covered by hundreds of artists from Johnny Cash to Joe Cocker, with its opening “like a bird on the wire, like a drunk in a midnight choir, I have tried in my way to be free.”

“Hallelujah” sold more than five million copies, with cover versions by John Cale, Jeff Buckley, k.d. lang and others.