the track. Johnston reportedly arranged to fly with Cohen to Paris, for "authenticity" according to Maurice Ratcliff, to record a trio of female singers and an accordion player, whose work was overdubbed on to the track. The song fades into an intro, followed by nine verses and an outro that fades out; the first five verses are sung from Zaret's English, followed by verses six, seven and eight being sung in French, and the final verse nine being a repeat of the English verse five. In May 1969, CBS released the album track, "The Partisan", in Europe as a 7-inch single with, in the initial format, "Bird on the Wire", and in a later format, "Suzanne" on the B-side. "The Partisan" was to be Cohen's first commercial recording of a song he didn't write; writing about Cohen's cover versions of other's songs, in his article for Pitchfork, published soon after Cohen's death, Marc Hogan refers to Cohen's "The Partisan" as a "wonderfully affecting ... haunting version", and Josh Jones, writing for Open Culture, describes it as having a "folk melody and melancholy lyricism", with what Ratcliff calls a "plodding bass line underpinning the simply strummed guitar and an occasional accordion" and "a rare excursion ... into political territory". Tim Nelson, in his BBC review of Cohen's albums, also refers to the song's "biting political commentary". Cultural impact Alex Young writes that "[Cohen] is often incorrectly credited as the composer of the [original] song – although he is certainly responsible for its survival", Douglas Martin states that The Partisan' gained popularity" in the United States thanks to Cohen's recording, and Josh Jones writes that the song "[has] become so closely associated with Cohen that it has often been credited to him", with Cohen reportedly remarking, "I kind of re-introduced ['The Partisan'] into the world of popular music. I feel I wrote it, but I actually didn't" (bracketed content in source). Hogan writes that Cohen's version "became one of his signature songs, leading to renditions by Joan Baez, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Electrelane, First Aid Kit, and many others." Evans writes about a Polish translation of Cohen's—Zaret's—song being adopted as an unofficial anthem of the Solidarity movement for democracy in the detention camps of communist Poland, one of the countries in which Cohen performed while on the Various Positions Tour in 1985, supporting his album that spawned "Hallelujah", Various Positions. Other cover versions Luke