Leonard Cohen – Thanks for the Dance

LEONARD COHEN

Thanks for the Dance

Columbia/Legacy Records

leonardcohen.com

Three years ago, Leonard Cohen released You Want It Darker. As I wrote at the time, the album was “a masterwork filled with conversational and hypnotically mesmerizing song-poems layered with meaning that both reveal more every time they are heard and suggest new avenues of meaning and interpretation rendering them ever mysterious.”

When Leonard died less than three weeks after You Want It Darker was released, it was assumed that it was his final work. The album was produced by Adam Cohen, Leonard’s son, himself an accomplished singer-songwriter. As we now know, rough sketches for more songs – essentially Leonard reciting or gently singing his song-poems – were recorded during those sessions. Near the end of his life, Cohen the father tasked Cohen the son with completing the songs. The result is Thanks for the Dance, yet another Leonard Cohen masterwork of nine song-poems, seven of which have musical settings composed or co-composed by Adam.

The album opens with “Happens to the Heart,” a sometimes-oblique look back at love and relationships and searches through religion and philosophy. A key verse seems to be an ultimate rejection of the Zen master Leonard studied with and served for several years (and who was eventually revealed to be a sexual predator). Aside from Leonard’s deeply compelling voice – it is compelling throughout the album – the track is highlighted by the Spanish laud virtuosity of Javier Mas (Mas also plays guitar on several of the other songs on the album).

Then comes “Moving On,” a lovely Mediterranean-sounding reminiscence of Marianne Ihlen. Marianne – who inspired several of Leonard’s greatest early songs, including the anthemic “So Long, Marianne” – died just four months before Leonard. Later in the album, Leonard sings “It’s Torn,” which I suspect may also have been inspired by Marianne’s passing.

The Spanish poet, Federico García Lorca, was one of Leonard’s literary influences and I suspect that “The Night of Santiago,” was at least partially inspired by Lorca’s poem “Santiago,” which was inspired by James, the patron saint of Spain. Leonard’s song, with its gentle flamenco arrangement, is a detailed, dream-like evocation of a seduction of a seemingly forbidden woman.

“Thanks for the Dance,” the album’s title song is a re-imagined version of a song that originally appeared on Blue Alert, a 2006 album by Anjani Thomas, produced by Leonard. This version, perhaps a farewell to another lover, is set as a quiet waltz.

In “The Goal,” a very short poem-song at just over a minute in length, Leonard seems to be poignantly reflecting on his condition, knowing that death is near.

“Puppets,” a rumination on the Holocaust, war and political chaos is certainly one of the most powerful songs on the album. Its arrangement features profoundly performed vocals by two choirs: Cantus Domus, a choir of women from Berlin, and the Shaar Hashomayim Men’s Choir, from Leonard’s home synagogue in Montreal (the Shaar Choir’s vocals were also a highlight on two songs from You Want It Darker).

In “The Hills,” the penultimate song, Leonard again seems to be pondering the end of life. “The system is shot/I’m living on pills/For which I thank God,” he sings in the refrain.

Finally, in “Listen to the Hummingbird,” Leonard seems to be telling us what is ultimately important for us to pay attention to: “Listen to the hummingbird… Listen to the butterfly… Listen to the mind of God/Don’t Listen to Me.”

Like so much of Leonard’s other work, I suspect that more layers of meaning will be revealed each time I listen to Thanks for the Dance.

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–Mike Regenstreif

Leonard Cohen – You Want It Darker

LEONARD COHEN

You Want It Darker

Columbia

leonardcohen.com

You Want It Darker, following rather quickly on the heels of Popular Problems, released in 2014, and Old Ideas, from 2012, is the third in a series of remarkable and deep late-career albums from Leonard Cohen that followed in the wake of his equally remarkable years of late-career tours and live albums. Like the previous two albums – in fact, like most of Leonard’s recordings dating back to Songs of Leonard Cohen from 1967, almost a half-century ago – You Want It Darker is a masterwork filled with conversational and hypnotically mesmerizing song-poems layered with meaning that both reveal more every time they are heard and suggest new avenues of meaning and interpretation rendering them ever mysterious.

The album begins with the title track, which Leonard released on Internet on September 21, his 82nd birthday. It is a song that only an older man could have written; a song from the perspective of someone who has lived long and is prepared for death.

Much was made of Leonard having released the song on his birthday. I think, though, what’s much more significant than his birthday is that he released the song during the Jewish month of Elul, a time when Jews prepare for the High Holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

It is a song Leonard sings directly to God. “Hineni, hineni, I’m ready my lord,” he sings in the chorus, echoing the words of the biblical patriarch Abraham as he prepared for the near-sacrifice of his son Isaac. But, while Abraham might have been ready to face the death of his son, Leonard, here, seems prepared to confront his own mortality; something Jews traditionally think about during the High Holidays.

The melody – despite having been composed by collaborator Patrick Leonard – seems like it comes directly from the synagogue music Leonard heard growing up at Congregation Shaar Hashomayim in Westmount (a city within the city of Montreal). And, indeed, he turned to Cantor Gideon Zelermyer and the Shaar choir to sing with him on the song. The choir’s haunting harmonies are heard from the beginning of the song, Leonard himself sounds like he’s singing from the depths of his soul, and the final minute of the song is devoted to Zelermyer repeatedly, and seemingly distantly, singing the word “hineni.”

It is a stunning performance from Leonard, the choir and the cantor. And I must extend kudos to Adam Cohen, Leonard’s son and a talented singer-songwriter himself, who produced this track and much of the rest of the album.

The Shaar choir appears again later in the album to sing haunting harmonies that contrast beautifully with Leonard’s recitation-like singing on “It Seemed the Better Way,” another song – also with a melody composed by Patrick Leonard – in which he muses on the possibility of death.

One of the most affecting songs is “Traveling Light,” which I think may be a farewell song for Marianne Ihlen who died in July. The song can be interpreted as look back to Leonard’s times with Marianne – that inspired such songs as “Bird on the Wire” and, most notably, “So Long, Marianne – as well as an affirmation of the affection that remained after 50 or more years had passed since that time.

Some of the other songs reflect on love, or broken love, but always from a perspective of maturity and with possible layers of interpretation of the kind of love Leonard is referring to.

As I have noted before about Leonard’s songs, they are always open to interpretation and layered with ideas: ideas he had when he conceived the songs; ideas that continued to grow over the days, even years that he worked on them; and the ideas that each of us hears and develops from listening and re-listening to the songs. What I hear in these songs is not necessarily what you will hear, or, perhaps, not even what Leonard Cohen – part Jewish mystic, part Zen monk – might himself have intended.

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--Mike Regenstreif