I'm Your Man is the eighth studio album by Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen,[5] released on February 2, 1988, by Columbia Records.

[6] I'm Your Man was recorded in Los Angeles, Montreal and Paris, and while it was the first studio album where Cohen took sole credit for the production, three contributing producers participated: Roscoe Beck, Jean-Michel Reusser and Michel Robidoux.

[8] In his book Leonard Cohen: A Remarkable Life (2010), biographer Anthony Reynolds observes, "...in almost every respect I'm Your Man marked not so much a progression but an evolutionary leap forward...Cohen's new musical canvas was rich and wide, with its bold and bald use of sequencers, drum machines, synclavier and synths all mixed exotically with the lingering eastern European textures of the bouzouki, the oud, and the heart rending (old Russian school) violin."

Cohen felt his singing had improved as well, telling Adrian Deevoy of Q magazine in 1991, "Sometimes I can’t stand the sound of my voice.

Featuring phrases such as "Everybody knows that the dice are loaded" and "Everybody knows that the good guys lost", the song has been variously described by critics as "bitterly pessimistic" yet funny,[9] or, more strongly, a "bleak prophecy about the end of the world as we know it.

[13] The album's opening track, "First We Take Manhattan" (originally called "In Old Berlin"), deals with geopolitical ideas, specifically extremism, as he explained himself in a backstage interview:[14] "Take This Waltz" was originally released as part the 1986 Federico García Lorca tribute album Poets in New York (Poetas en Nueva York)[15] and as a single.

Ever mindful of his reputation as a "flat singer" among critics, audiences always erupted when Cohen sang these lines live.

Cohen also cites Hank Williams, a songwriter he has professed great admiration for, in the song ("...a hundred floors above me...").

Although Cohen had earned a reputation among critics and some listeners for excessive gloominess, several tracks on the album displayed his wry sense of humor and playfulness, such as the lascivious title track and "I Can't Forget", which he cited in a BBC interview with John Archer after the album's release as an example of his simpler approach: "I had to go back to the beginning and determine where I was in regard to my own song and I realized that I'd have to find another kind of language that was much flatter, which I think this record has...I began that lyric just trying to locate myself...That was really close to the bone, and that's where I like to keep my lyrics now."

As recounted in Ira Nadel's Various Positions, Cohen was at a Los Angeles warehouse to watch the filming of Jennifer Warnes's music video "First We Take Manhattan" and was photographed by publicist Sharon Weisz in his dark glasses, charcoal gray pin-striped suit, and white T-shirt chomping on a banana: "Sharon showed it to me later and it seemed to sum me up perfectly.

[6] In the original Rolling Stone review, David Browne called it "the first Cohen album that can be listened to during the daylight hours.

Against a backdrop of keyboards and propulsive rhythms, Cohen surveys the global landscape with a precise, unflinching eye: the opening 'First We Take Manhattan' is an ominous fantasy of commercial success bundled in crypto-fascist imagery, while the remarkable 'Everybody Knows' is a cynical catalog of the land mines littering the surface of love in the age of AIDS.

Side one Side two Musicians Liner notes:Written, produced, arranged and played by Leonard Cohen.Vocals by Leonard Cohen and Jennifer Warnes.Engineers:Ian Terry with François Deschamps at Studio Tempo in Montreal, Leanne Ungar at Rock Steady in Los Angeles.Mixing engineer:Leanne Ungar at Rock Steady in Los Angeles, second engineer: Fred Echelard.