Perfect pitch
Eighty-two years old and still at the top his game while mining the depths, says Sylvie Simmons.
Leonard Cohen You Want It Darker
THERE’S NO question mark in the title; darker is clearly what we want. And Cohen’s so good at dark – black humour; darkness of the soul; the depths he mines for the poems he calls songs. Maybe psalms, given how many are accompanied by organ, choir or cantor on this, Cohen’s third studio album in five years. Miraculous! He’s hardly been prolific – 14 albums in 49 years and most seemed torn from him. But after the remarkable tours that earned back his embezzled savings, he returned to his old job, writing, with gusto. “Time speeds up the closer it gets to the end of the reel,” he told me around the time of Old Ideas (2012). “You don’t feel like wasting time.” Releasing …Darker on his 82nd birthday, like Popular Problems on his 80th, might be some card game he’s playing with time. There’s no mistaking the urgency. This is one of his most intense albums. It feels personal too. His son Adam Cohen is the producer (a fine job) and plays nylon-string guitar. The title track, with its synagogue choir and a reference to the Lord’s Prayer, seems to reach back to Leonard’s youth, when he sat with his old rabbi grandfather discussing, night after night, the Book of Isaiah. The song’s repeated word “hineni” was the prophet’s answer to God’s commandment to talk to the people: I am ready, Lord. Which could be Cohen’s mission statement – or a declaration of his preparedness to meet his maker. Layers melt into layers. Like a magician, Cohen makes images reappear in different songs and guises: angels, devils, candles, flames, dealers, prisoners, Jesus. Water turns to wine and back to water; things that were embraced are relinquished. There’s righteous anger at the material world – “As he died to make them holy let us die to make things cheap” (Steer Your Way) – but also non-attachment, acceptance. He needs no lover now – “the wretched beast is tame” (Leaving The Table; almost ’60s country pop) – but love is everything (If I Didn’t Have Your Love). In Treaty – a song some 20 years in the writing and reprised with an eloquent string quartet – he’s a wise, weary old Tom Waits in the confession box: “I’m sorry for the ghost I made you be; only one of us was real and that was me.” Cohen wrote roughly half the melodies, many blues-based, and Patrick Leonard wrote most of the rest, bar Sharon Robinson’s beautiful On The Level, wherein cowboy Cohen turns his back on angels, devils, lovers, everything and goes it alone. There are violins, piano, steel, new musicians mostly, and less female harmony than usual. But Cohen’s deep voice has tenderness enough. And darkness.