Leonard Cohen Thanks For The Dance Out Friday
You know you’re a music-lover of a certain age when the record you’ve been eagerly awaiting is by someone who died three years ago. Leonard Cohen’s 15th studio album brings us nine songs, eight of them new.
For half an hour, a writer who revelled in biblical imagery is resurrected.
Cohen, who had leukaemia, left the tracks half-finished. They’ve been fleshed out by his son Adam, a gifted musician himself and co-producer of Leonard’s 14th album, You Want It Darker. In a neat reversal, the son is midwife to the dad.
Leonard Cohen (above), who had leukaemia, left the tracks half-finished. They’ve been fleshed out by his son Adam, a gifted musician himself and co-producer of Leonard’s 14th album
For anyone expecting a damp squib like Amy Winehouse’s posthumous album, there’s reassurance in the opening track, Happens To The Heart. A flicker of Mediterranean guitar, and there’s that voice, a distant rumble of rueful amusement.
‘I was always workin’ steady,’ Leonard murmurs, ‘but I never called it art. I got my s*** together, meeting Christ and reading Marx.’ Playful, profane, spiritual and scholarly, this is a self-portrait in two sentences.
The vocals are mostly spoken, sometimes hoarse but always very Leonard. Launching the album in London on Monday, Adam Cohen said he’d placed a microphone next to ‘the medical chair’ in his father’s Los Angeles living room.
The music is simple but deceptive, with his son Adam doffing his hat to his dad’s old tricks, from the folk ballads that made his name to the synth-pop of his midlife masterpiece
‘He kept saying, “The grace of the occasion!” ’ Adam added. Some do go gentle into that good night.
The music is simple but deceptive, with Adam doffing his hat to his dad’s old tricks, from the folk ballads that made his name to the synth-pop of his midlife masterpiece, I’m Your Man.
It’s Torn mixes the political and the vividly personal, like Everybody Knows; Puppets touches on the Holocaust, like Dance Me To The End Of Love (but more bleakly); The Hills is a sweeping prophecy, like The Future.
Leonard’s whole life is passing before our ears.
The Night Of Santiago, like Take This Waltz, is adapted from a poem by Federico García Lorca. A melodrama with jokes, it’s roguishly charming, but contains the line ‘Her nipples rose like bread.’ You probably have to be dead to get away with that one.
The credits are like those lists that appear in the papers after a memorial service. There are old flames (Anjani, and possibly others), co-writers (Patrick Leonard, Sharon Robinson), band members (Javier Mas), Cohen interpreters (Jennifer Warnes), distinguished compatriots (Daniel Lanois) and famous acolytes (Feist, Beck).
For Adam, this was a nod to a Jewish tradition: ‘When someone dies, you bring a little rock to the graveside.’
The cameos are classy but you find yourself concentrating on Leonard, willing him to come up with one last gem. And he doesn’t let you down. In The Hills, he declares: ‘The day wouldn’t write what the night pencilled in.’
Best of all is The Goal, a song that takes only 72 seconds. It starts as a dispatch from death’s door and ends with a punchline so satisfying that I’d better not quote it. Leonard Cohen departed as he had arrived, singing the song that only he could sing.
THIS WEEK’S CD RELEASES
By Adam Woods
Westlife Spectrum Out now
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Westlife split in 2012 but the balladry that powered most of their 14 No 1 singles returns in this comeback album, masterminded by Ed Sheeran, who also co-wrote four songs. Cue subtle modernisation rather than flashy reinvention
The Script Sunsets & Full Moons Out now
Rating:
The Script have always been a pop group in rock clothing, as likely to dip into hip- hop as to bash a guitar. Here, the swing from soul-scouring misery to redemptive triumph gets a bit exhausting, but that’s their MO, and the fans still love them for it
Simply Red Blue Eyed Soul Out now
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Having rethought his retirement of the Simply Red name, Mick Hucknall has been making more white soul, encompassing brassy funk, devotional vintage soul, bedroom ballads and one melodramatic Europhile track
Harry Connick Jr True Love: A Celebration of Cole Porter Out now
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The fresh- faced crooner celebrates the songs of Cole Porter in 13 classily arranged selections including Anything Goes and Just One Of Those Things. Clearly in his comfort zone, he’s taking it to Broadway this December