Leonard Cohen

Thanks For The Dance

SONY

Famous friends flesh out final curtain call.

When Leonard Cohen’s last album, You Want It Darker, was released in October 2016, a month before his death, preparations were already under way for what the singer-songwriter knew would be the posthumous part of his career. Diagnosed with leukaemia, the 82-year-old entrusted his producer-arranger son Adam to add instrumentation and melody to a series of isolated recordings of him reciting new or less celebrated lyrics.

“Maybe I’ll get a second wind, I don’t know,” he told New Yorker magazine during his last days. “But I don’t dare attach myself to a spiritual strategy. I’ve got some work to do.” Prior to assembling Thanks For The Dance, however, Cohen junior curated The Flame, a collection of lyrics and poetry published in 2018 which, it now transpires, served as a prelude to this last long player.

Both open with Happens To The Heart, a suitably wry summation of a man nearing the end of a journey, peppered with the wit that often goes unnoticed among casual Cohen observers: ‘I’ve broken every window, but the house, the house is dark/I care, but very little, what happens to the heart.’

Elsewhere there is other material that will be familiar to Cohen fans. The Hills, another sombre reflection on mortality, is adapted from his 2006 poetry collection Book Of Longing, the closing Listen To The Hummingbird was first recited at a promotional event for You Want It Darker, while the title track first appeared on Blue Alert, a 2006 album by Cohen’s girlfriend and backing singer Anjani Thomas.

It all makes for an intriguing but brief album (the nine songs clock in at just over 30 minutes), but throughout there’s a nagging sense of Cohen’s spoken-word skeletons fleshed out with arguably too little musicality. Each song’s lyric tends to follow a rigid metre, a noticeably even number of syllables in every line, which ultimately makes it easier for Adam to embellish in the studio.

The result is a soundscape that occasionally comes across as formulaic, adhering to chord sequences and structures that had served Cohen well in the past, yet performed with pristine clarity by the younger man and musician fans including Beck, Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Parry, Damien Rice and Leslie Feist, not to mention long-serving collaborators such as Jennifer Warnes. While there’s nothing radically off-blueprint in the finished article, it’s obvious that every note has been pored over with love and respect. ■■■■■■■■■■