WATCH: A new Leonard Cohen video to mark the 5th anniversary of his death

A new music video for the song “Puppets” by Leonard Cohen was released today ahead of the fifth anniversary of the beloved Montreal singer-songwriter’s death on Nov. 7, 2016. The track comes from his posthumously released album Thanks for the Dance, which was released in 2019.

“Puppets” is the last of five videos created for tracks from Thanks for the Dance, all of which were directed by Daniel Askill. Askill collaborated closely with Leonard Cohen’s son Adam Cohen, who also produced the posthumous album in conjunction with friends and collaborators including Patrick Watson.

“It has been such a gift to have the opportunity to create these visual responses to the music of Leonard Cohen. Cohen has an incredible ability to create a bridge between the sublime and the prosaic — the metaphysical and political. In ‘Puppets,’ he does that while addressing dark themes with a poetic insight.

“This video for ‘Puppets’ has been born out of a wonderful ongoing dialogue with Adam Cohen. It is in some ways a darker counter point to the first film we made for ‘Happens to the Heart.’ Shot on location in New York, this film follows the symbolic journey of a single figure through darkness towards a transcendence. In many ways, it is visually pointing to the idea that Leonard often beautifully evokes in different ways — that the darkness and the light of our experience is deeply entangled — and maybe at a fundamental level they are in fact one and the same.”

—Daniel Askill

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