One last dance with Leonard Cohen

THANKS FOR THE DANCE

Leonard Cohen Columbia

The voice is deep, low and reassuringly familiar, resonant with warmth and empathy even as it offers cold truths in sharply turned epigrammatic verses. Like a beloved ghost, returned to comfort the bereaved, Leonard Cohen is back with a posthumous album as great as any from the late period of his considerable canon. And that is very great indeed. The Canadian singer-songwriter’s last album, You Want It Darker, offered a bleak but beautiful farewell. And yet, inevitably, here he is again.

Posthumous releases of famous musicians tend to offer a mixed bag of pleasures, culled from archives of rejected material. Yet these are not B-sides and out-takes but new songs, recorded by Cohen in his home studio as sparse sketches, during his final years. Backing tracks have been completed, at Cohen’s request, by his son Adam Cohen, himself a talented songwriter, adhering closely to his father’s melodic style and signature instrumentation. The result is a life-enhancing coda to Cohen’s glorious swan song.

Thanks for the Dance forgoes some of the apocalyptic gravity that burned through its predecessor. It is an album with a twinkle in its eye, on which Cohen mischievously enshrines a long ago onenight stand in the sensuous The Night of Santiago. You don’t expect to hear an ailing octogenarian rhapsodise about nipples that “rose like bread” but there is a lusty truth-telling in his admission that “though I’ve forgotten half my life/ I still remember this.”

Memory is at the centre of the experience, cherishing past moments even as Cohen prepares to let them go. In the epic Happens to the Heart, Cohen looks back over his life with wry wit. “I was always working steady/ But I never called it art,” he modestly begins, but there is a hint of self-validation in his addendum that “It failed, my little fire/ But it’s bright, the dying spark.”

There are several short pieces recited essentially as poems lightly shaded by music. The frailty edging into his voice on Moving On, It’s Torn and The Goal suggests that these may have been final thoughts.

The meditative closing track, Listen to the Hummingbird, concludes with the old sage advising “don’t listen to me”. But it is a bit too late for that. Some of us have been listening to Cohen all our lives and will continue to do so as his extraordinary songs light the path to our own inevitable end. It is so good to hear that voice again. Thanks for the dance, Leonard. NMC