‘Listen to the Hummingbird’: Decoding Leonard Cohen’s final song

Posted On June 13, 2025June 13, 2025

In 2016, in the middle of a press conference, Leonard Cohen paused and said, unprompted, “You guys wanna hear something I wrote last night?” Into the crappy mic, with crackles and noises common of cheap tech, he started reading a poem: ‘Listen to the Hummingbird’. 

That was the end of October, and on November 7th, Cohen died. It was really a shock to no one. For months prior, years even, the writer and singer had become incredibly candid about death. The album he was promoting at that conference, You Want It Darker, deals with it head-on with insight but also humour. In a final interview with The New Yorker, he talked outright about preparing for death, stating plainly, “I am ready to die”.

But his relationship to his demise was more complex than that, all because of his work. The poem Cohen read right before his death was part of it. He was still, as he had been his entire life, in the process of working. It was his ethos: “If it is your destiny to be this labourer called a writer, you know that you’ve got to go to work every day,” he said earlier in his life, truly seeing the calling of art as a vocation and so, even when he was coming to his final months and days, he didn’t stop. He told The New Yorker, “You’re dying but you don’t have to co-operate so enthusiastically with the process”.

Instead, he was focused on a new album, which would become Thanks for the Dance. He knew he would never see the end of it, stating, “I don’t think I’ll be able to finish those songs. Maybe I’ll get a second wind, I don’t know”. But either way, he was incredibly proud of what was coming out, stating, “There are songs halfway through that are not bad” while choosing to recite lines from that same poem again: “Listen to the hummingbird, whose wings you cannot see. Listen to the hummingbird, don’t listen to me”.

Cohen was right; he didn’t finish those songs. Instead, they were tasked to his son, Adam Cohen, who had been working on the project alongside him, allowing them rich time together at the end. Having watched his father work tirelessly his entire life, the experience of being entrusted with finishing these songs was an honour for Adam as well as a way of processing things, and when it was done, ‘Listen to the Hummingbird’ was the final track. 

Cohen clearly held dear this song. He read the lines several times, often pointing towards it in interviews as if it held some kind of clue for the end or a final message. Perhaps it does, as the track is an utterly egoless one. “Don’t listen to me”, he repeats over and over, instead imploring the world to listen to birds, butterflies, and God. Capturing so much of his messaging throughout his career, his interactions with Buddhism, his ideas that the writer is merely a worker and the singer merely a mouthpiece, his humble devotion to craft over stardom, this final song seems to summarise it all succinctly. 

But it’s more than just a poem set to music. The second the album was handed over to Adam, it became more than just another record but also a personal project or a place to channel his love and grief. ‘Listen to the Hummingbird’ holds that outright as one of the most unfinished tracks at the time of Cohen’s death, with the poet not even knowing if he definitely wanted it on the tracklist. But as Adam reflected on the piece, he knew it needed to be there and leaned into the mutual creative trust the last months together had built between them to create something special. 

“We were in Berlin, and Justin Vernon from Bon Iver was in the studio next door to ours, making these incredible, really emotional, stirring sounds. And there was something about the mood that was so captivating and inspiring that it reminded me of my father’s last press conference,” Adam said. He hunted down the audio from the conference and built around that, inspired simultaneously by his father’s words and the music floating through the wall. 

The result? A swansong that honours Cohen’s life, artistry and vision, and that gave his son a place to honour it all too, in his own way.

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