by Leonard Cohen · 2024
The song Avalanche by Leonard Cohen is about the struggle with inner pain, alienation, and the complex relationship between suffering, love, and identity, as seen through the metaphor of a wounded, misunderstood figure addressing both himself and a distant, searching companion.
This song has been Shazamed over 600,712 times. As of this writing, Avalanche is ranked 168
Avalanche’ by Leonard Cohen is a haunting song about pain, love, and the complicated ways we try to heal. We’re going to break down the feelings and ideas in this song, one piece at a time. ⬇️
️ The world Cohen paints here is bleak and snowbound, as if every word is muffled by cold, falling snow. It’s a landscape of emotional isolation, where the narrator is buried beneath layers of suffering and self-awareness.
At the heart of “Avalanche,” the chorus (or recurring phrases) carries a desperate honesty—”You who wish to conquer pain, you must learn, learn to serve me well.” It’s not just a plea, it’s a challenge thrown at anyone who tries to fix or understand another’s brokenness. We feel the ache of someone who’s tired of being saved, who wants to be seen for their scars and not pitied for them, and we sense a kind of strange pride in that vulnerability, a refusal to let others define their worth.
The verses twist and turn like windblown snowdrifts—sometimes biting, sometimes soft, always unexpected. Cohen sings, “I myself am the pedestal for this ugly hump at which you stare,” tossing aside any need for rescue, insisting on his own autonomy even in pain. And when he confesses, “The crumbs of love that you offer me / They’re the crumbs I’ve left behind,” we see a reversal: the supposed beggar is really the one who has given, who has been strong, who refuses to let pain be currency in the economy of love.
By the end, lines like “I have begun to long for you, I who have no greed…It is your turn, beloved, it is your flesh that I wear” flip everything upside-down; the narrator, once buried, now wears the other’s vulnerability like a borrowed coat, blurring the line between giver and receiver, sufferer and comforter.
Cohen’s true revelation is that suffering and intimacy are tangled together like roots beneath snow—no one comes away clean, and the avalanche inside us all is both our burden and our shelter.
Writer(s) of Avalanche:
