Hallelujah! Leonard’s legacy lingers, thanks to a new album
Fantastic news. A new Leonard Cohen album was released at the weekend. Thanks for the Dance (Sony), a posthumous harvest of new, Spanish guitar-flecked songs from the late Canadian songwriter who died three years ago this month, dropped around midnight on Saturday morning, which, as every Cohen disciple knows, is not a bad time to curl up with that upholstered voice.
The record marks the 15th official album in the Cohen catalogue, which also bulges with several collections of verse, some paintings, a couple of novels and the late-night fumes of at least 20 billion cigarettes. All great sparks still in the air.
The album is hardly 30 minutes long, but it feels like a lifetime.
In love with love – always, wearily, huskily – even from beyond the grave, tumbling one last time into the romantic night like the afternoon sun sinking behind the skyline of Montreal. He’s still our man.
While local opinion may be divided over the merits of the nine new tracks (except for the already widely previewed What Happens to the Heart, which sounds certain to become a classic), here are nine new reasons why anything bearing the old-timey name of Leonard Norman Cohen ought to remain of particular interest to New Zealanders.
1 New Zealand always had a special place in the Leonard Cohen story, as it was where, in 2013, he finally bowed out of live performances.
His last-ever show, a threehour set replete with a final priestly blessing performed when he was still a slip of a lad of 79, took place at the old Vector (now Spark) Arena in Auckland.
2 Today, the city of Montreal sports a larger-than-life mural of Cohen on the side of a tall building in Crescent St. The tourists love it, but for fans who can’t afford a ticket to Quebec, the Tauranga-based mural artist Graham ‘‘Mr G’’ Hoete has also spray-painted an equally strong portrait of the Canadian singersongwriter that can be seen on his house in Otu¯ moetai.
3 The New Zealand Orthopedic Association actually uses one of Cohen’s most-loved Lurianic
lines – ‘‘There is a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in’’ – to promote the excellence of its practitioners. After all, as the site goes on to remind visitors, ‘‘shoulder, elbow and wrist pain can be very debilitating and [this] is a major area of orthopedic surgery’’. Just fancy that.
4 Beginning with early cover versions by John Cale and the late Jeff Buckley, the song Hallelujah has now been covered so many times as to render the track virtually unlistenable. There are exceptions, however, one of the most powerful being the te reo Ma¯ ori version that has become something of a New Zealand classic.
The choral performance has been showcased to impressive effect in a number of local settings, including the opening of this year’s Auckland Arts Festival.
5 Even before every man and his farm dog were producing their own version of Hallelujah, Cohen’s songs were widely covered. One of the earliest collections, I’m Your Fan ,a tribute album from 1991, includes one of the sweetest interpretations of them all: a jaunty rendering of True Love Leaves No Traces, the track that first appeared on the Death of a Ladies’ Man album, by the indie Auckland act Dead Famous People.
6 This has been a year in which New Zealanders have been encouraged like never before to educate themselves on the different major religions. Who better to immerse themselves in than the great high priest himself? He was Jewish, of course, but also lived and served for many years as a Zen Buddhist monk high in the snake-infested hills of San Bernardino, California.
Cohen also rather liked aspects of Catholicism, too, especially the stuff about Mary, and even Protestants have been known to claim him as one of their own. Not forgetting his mid-career burst of interest in the whirling dervish dance and Sufi-style Islamic mysticism.
7 When Cohen died, few tributes came as close to capturing the moment as an impressively precise piece by the Wellington writer Gordon Campbell, who in super-quick time nailed what had been lost and also paid handsome tribute to the ‘‘leavenings of gallows humour that had always been part of his music, but which we’d previously been too earnest to notice, let alone cherish’’.
8 Leonard Cohen’s poetry may be for the ages, and his grand themes are most certainly universal in their scope – whether the meditation happens to be on religion, mortality or (but, of course) sex – but it’s amazing how easy it is to rework the old seducer’s offerings into a New Zealand context.
To wit, this writer’s slight recasting of one of his selfdeprecating poems from the wonderful Book of Longing: New Zealand is filled with many exceptionally beautiful women who don’t desire me I verify this every single day as I walk around the city of Wellington I look into face after face and never once have I been wrong.
9 Speaking of which, how about one of this year’s more offbeat New Zealand books, The Book of Cohen (Steele Roberts), a graveside meditation by one utterly obscure Cohen in New Zealand on another utterly famous Cohen in Canada.
Re-reading it the other day, this writer was again struck by the work’s magisterial command of the subject, the boundless musical knowledge evinced and frequently spine-tingling skill with which it captured and reflected so many of his own perceptions of the late artist.
Talk about a terrific final Kiwi reason to invest in the new album.
By a remarkable coincidence, David Cohen happens to be the author of The Book of Cohen. Leonard Cohen’s Thanks for the Dance is available now.