Leonard Cohen really means it this time
On his 14th studio album, You Want It Darker, the celebrated poet and pop icon, 82, declares he’s ready to die
“Been working out, but it’s too late, it’s been too late for years.”
Those words were delivered by Leonard Cohen with all the gravelly, baritone weight of absolute finality during his late-set “recitation” of the updated poem “A Thousand Kisses Deep” at Toronto’s Sony Centre on June 6, 2008.
He was so convincing that this writer rushed back to the office and breathlessly spewed a review that opened with: “It’s a humbling thing, being in the presence of true greatness, especially when you get the gnawing sense that this is the last time you’ll share an audience with it.”
Obviously, that wasn’t the last time Leonard Cohen would utter those words. Indeed, he would play the Sony Centre again the next night on that tour — his first in15 years, reluctantly undertaken at 73, owing to personal finances gone wrong — and carry on touring on both sides of the Atlantic for another two years, no doubt selling the same material with the same portentous, shatteringly mortal resignation night after night after night.
How do I know that? When a noticeably creakier but still cucumbercool Cohen sashayed back to Toronto for two more gigs at the Air Canada Centre in December 2012, on his Old Ideas tour, it was, once again, a recitation of “A Thousand Kisses Deep” that completely sucked the air from the room — nay, from an entire NHL hockey rink — and left 16,000 less lyrically astute human beings gazing into the black void of mortality.
More shows, here and abroad, would follow, so you were forgiven at the time for eventually shrugging off whatever grim business Cohen, by then 78, was bringing to the stage as practised showmanship.
Indeed, he had been stating in interviews here and there all year long that he still had at least another album’s worth of songs ready to go.
Rumours of Leonard Cohen’s imminent demise, it appeared, were greatly exaggerated. Much like his American pop-poet-laureate counterpart, Bob Dylan, or fellow CanCon icon Neil Young, in fact, he seemed to be drawing renewed creative energies from his proximity to death.
Now, with the release of his 14th studio album, You Want It Darker, looming on Friday, Leonard Cohen himself is responsible for further propagating renewed rumours of his imminent departure from this world — although, somewhat hearteningly, it appears he hasn’t stopped working on new material.
“I don’t think I’ll be able to finish those songs,” the Montreal-born master, now 82, confesses in the Oct. 17 issue of the New Yorker. “Maybe, who knows? And maybe I’ll get a second wind, I don’t know. But I don’t dare attach myself to a spiritual strategy. I don’t dare do that. I’ve got some work to do. Take care of busi- ness. I am ready to die. I hope it’s not too uncomfortable. That’s about it for me.”
You Want It Darker definitely does appear to be staring life’s grand finale squarely in the face.
The first words heard on the record, in the title track, are “If you are the dealer / I’m out of the game,” then a few seconds later the music drops out and Cohen intones “I’m ready, my lord.”
Another number is entitled “Leaving the Table.” The phrase “too late” turns up all over the place.
It’s hard not to listen to tracks about the settling of old romantic scores without thinking about the passing earlier this year of Marianne Ihlen, the one-time Cohen girlfriend and muse who inspired “So Long, Marianne” and other songs back in the day.
“Well Marianne, it’s come to this time when we are really so old and our bodies are falling apart and I think I will follow you very soon,” Cohen wrote to her earlier this year in a touching letter that her family made public after her passing. “Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine.”
By the time it’s over, You Want It Darker on the whole feels like it’s sifting through a lifetime’s immersion in spiritual and religious study of all stripes, only to conclude that there is no grand, overarching way to make sense of life’s nonsensical end — that the only true peace comes in accepting one’s fate.
Or something like that. Cohen is too crafty a poet to give up what’s really on his mind that easily. Like life and death themselves, You Want It Darker’s meaning is open to interpretation.
Nonetheless, this time around, Cohen’s musical flirtations with the grave are receiving some corroboration in cold, hard reality. In a recent email interview with Maclean’s magazine’s Brian Johnson, he alludes to being knocked down lately by severe back problems — not necessarily the sort of problems that are fatal in and of themselves, but the sort of thing that can motivate a man used to getting around (and getting up onstage) with ease start to muse about it maybe being time to leave his aging body behind.
“At this stage in the game, you know that all your activities are subject to abrupt cancellation,” he says dryly, also noting that son Adam Cohen, who produced the new album, “got me out of bed to finish this record.”
Adam himself doesn’t pull any punches in the interview, conceding that “there were only a few hours a day that we could work.”
“I was dealing with an ailing old man,” he tells Maclean’s, “but an ail- ing old man who was showing paranormal levels of devotion and focus.”
It doesn’t look good for our Leonard, then, although it does the heart good to read that he and his son enjoyed “hilarious, esoteric arguments fuelled by medical marijuana” and “episodes of blissful joy that sometimes lasted hours, where we’d listen to one song on repeat like teenagers” during the recording process.
Perhaps Leonard Cohen isn’t totally “out of the game” yet, perhaps he really is about to say goodbye. As with Gord Downie, another great Canadian poet who has lately been readying us for his eventual passing, it does us no good to think about inevitable eventualities.
All we can do is delight in the presence of greatness while it’s still here. We’ll always have the work. We won’t always have the personality.