Review of Leonard Cohen's Ten New Songs (2002)

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The god of love preparing to depart
24 July 2002
I've been listening to Leonard Cohen again, his latest release, imaginatively called Ten New Songs. It's been out for about six months and I haven't played it since April or May. Stupid, really, because like almost every other album of his, the more you play it, the better it sounds.

He's nearer seventy than sixty now. The voice is as gravelly as ever, almost tuneless, but with an intimacy that seduces so many women and not a few men. And on most tracks it is supported by the understated but crystal clear vocals of Sharon Robinson. The songs are all quiet and slow, to the unaccustomed ear late night music to fall asleep to. (Cohen credits the settings of many of the songs to Robinson.)

Close your eyes if you must. But don't fall asleep. Listen to the words. Listen, and listen again. Cohen has always been one of the most imaginative wordsmiths in modern music. The titles alone - In My Secret Life, A Thousand Kisses Deep - are better than a whole Spice Girls album. Then listen to the words, especially to the heartbreaking Alexandra Leaving:

Suddenly the night has grown colder.
The god of love preparing to depart.
Alexandra hoisted on his shoulder.
They slip between the sentries of the heart.

The song is both a lament and a celebration. There's only Cohen and Robinson, with a slow drum beat and gently plucked bass guitar. You don't know who Alexandra is, you don't know what she looks like, how long she stayed, how she dressed, how she laughed, her smile. You only what know what she did for you. She brought you back to life and self-respect. Now she's going, you have to deal with it like an adult, and you can:

As someone long prepared for this to happen
go firmly to the window, drink it in.
Exquisite Music. Alexandra laughing.
Your firm commitments tangible again

They're all love songs on this new album. More accurately, since this is Cohen, they're all songs about love. Devotion, longing, loss. And the music leans to the quiet side - few instruments, gentle pace, Cohen and his companions speaking / singing at little more than a whisper. Very different from the upbeat sardonism* of The Future with its images of individual and civil breakdown:

When you've fallen on the highway
and you're lying in the rain
and they ask you how you're feeling
of course you say you can't complain

I lift my glass to the Awful Truth
which you can't reveal to the Ears of Youth
except to say it isn't worth a dime

Can't run no more
with the lawless crowd
while the killers in high places
say their prayers out loud

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I've been a Cohen fan since the late 1960s when I heard his first album at boarding school. The voice was lighter then, hardly touched by alcohol and cigarettes, and the accompaniment was seldom more than a guitar, but the near-mystical imagery was there from the beginning, in tracks from Suzanne to Master Song and The Stranger Song, while the beauty of So Long, Marianne and Hey, That's No Way To Say Goodbye opened doors into emotions that I had not known existed.

Cohen has few aficionados. Others hear the monotonous voice or a minor key or a phrase they do not understand and their minds close. "Depressing" is the commonest criticism, yet depressing is the least accurate description of his work. His songs are celebrations of experience, both good or bad, of people, love and change.

There is even humour, often hidden but most evident in the 1988 album I'm Your Man, with its frequently meaningless but evocative lyrics "And I thank you for those items that you sent me: the monkey and the plywood violin. I practiced** every night and now I'm ready. First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin." (I'm Your Man also has two of his masterpieces: Everybody Knows and Take This Waltz, the latter based on a Lorca poem.)

There have been some turkeys, as there are in any artist's career. The Phil Spector collaboration was a big mistake and several of the songs on New Skin For The Old Ceremony have few redeeming features. But we all make mistakes and Cohen's failures, as the cliché goes, are far more interesting than most other people's successes.

We had to wait nine years for Ten New Songs; during much of that time he was living in Buddhist monastery in California. But he's not one to hurry. In an interview with Pulse magazine he notes wryly that his first album, The Songs of Leonard Cohen, went gold after 33 years. His comment: "That's a pace I'm comfortable with."

visit LeonardCohen.com and / or Ten New Songs
For the obsessed... LeonardCohenFiles.com
* the word exists now.
** US spelling

Fiction by Martin Foreman

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