Leonard Cohen Receives Posthumous Grammy Nomination for Best Folk Album

Shiryn Ghermezian

Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen performs at the Glastonbury Festival 2008 in Somerset, southwest England, June 29, 2008. Photo: Reuters / Luke MacGregor.

The late legendary Jewish singer Leonard Cohen has received a posthumous nomination for a 2021 Grammy Award for Best Folk Album, it was announced on Tuesday.

“Thanks for the Dance,” Cohen’s fifteenth and final studio album, was finished by his son, Adam Cohen, and released last November. The album is made up of half-finished songs and vocal takes Cohen recorded during sessions for “You Want It Darker,” his 14th studio album released in October 2016, shortly before his death.

Leonard, who was already suffering from leukemia and compression fractures of the spine when he recorded his final vocals, died on Nov. 7, 2016, in Los Angeles, California, after a fall.

Adam Cohen, a musician who also served as a producer on “You Want It Darker,” said he and his father discussed finishing the half-completed songs before the latter’s death.

“The conversations were about what instrumentation and what feelings he wanted the completed work to evoke — sadly, the fact that I would be completing them without him was a given,” he recalled.

Leonard Cohen won his first Grammy, for Album of the Year, as a featured artist on Herbie Hancock’s “River: The Joni Letters” in 2007.

In 2017, he won the Grammy for Best Rock Performance for “You Want It Darker” and was nominated for Best American Roots Performance for “Steer Your Way.” He was honored with a Recording Academy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010, and “Songs of Leonard Cohen” was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2015.

Cohen is one of several Jewish artists who made the 2021 Grammys nominations list, including the members of sister rock band “Haim,” Tiffany Haddish, Jack Antonoff and Drake.

The 63rd Grammy Awards will air Sunday, Jan. 31 on CBS.