Leonard Cohen initially saw himself as a novelist and poet rather than a musician, having spent six largely unsuccessful years pursuing a literary career before turning to songwriting almost as a fallback. Returning to North America after years living in Greece, he found the "folk-song renaissance" of the 1960s already in full swing, and it was this scene that convinced him music, not prose, could sustain him — a shift that reshaped both his own career and the wider folk landscape he joined.

In a 2006 interview, Cohen explained that he only started writing songs "as an interim activity" to make a living, since novel-writing hadn’t paid off, and cited four contemporaries already established on the folk scene as key influences: Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs and Judy Collins. Despite arriving late to songwriting and with a background more rooted in country music, Cohen quickly absorbed enough from these four to become a major force in his own right, with the article suggesting his impact on the genre ultimately matched or exceeded theirs.