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

Leonard Cohen – Popular Problems

LEONARD COHEN
Popular Problems
Columbia 
leonardcohen.com

Thinking about an introduction to my review of Popular Problems, released last month to coincide with Leonard Cohen’s 80th birthday, I’m drawn to back to what I wrote in 2012 at the release of Old Ideas, when Leonard was but a kid of 77:

“The songs of Leonard Cohen have been an important part of my life since 1968, when – like almost everyone in Montreal (or, at least, English-speaking Montreal) into music and/or poetry – I sat down with his newly-released first LP, Songs of Leonard Cohen, a masterwork of songwriting. I lost myself in Leonard’s voice, his music and his words on that album. Especially the words. I’ve been listening to those songs, over and over again, and to the songs on every album he’s released since, and I still find layers of meaning and new ways to interpret so many of them. A well-established man of letters, a poet and novelist, who was well into his 30s before recording that first album, Leonard has never been a simple singer-songwriter churning out ephemeral pop music.

“Even the songs on Leonard’s minor albums like Death of a Ladies Man or the somewhat uneven Dear Heather have kept me enthralled. And I’ve stayed enthralled when listening, over and over again, to albums like I’m Your Man built around mechanical-sounding, programmed keyboards, an approach to music-making I generally loath and have no time for in the hands of almost anyone but Leonard Cohen.

“Curiously, despite using variations on that pre-programmed keyboard approach on much of his recorded work since 1988, his concert tours in that same period have featured ensembles of world-class musicians and harmony singers and impeccable arrangements.”

Leonard was already an established poet for more than a decade before he emerged as a songwriter and it occurs to me as I’ve listened and re-listened to the songs on Popular Problems that it is Leonard the poet as much as Leonard the songwriter that we’re listening to. Many of them are sung in a way that suggests recitation as much as singing and some of them have musical accompaniments that bolster the singing/recitation with pulse or heartbeat rather than melody.

And the songs, for the most part, are not narratives whose meanings are clear. For example, in “Nevermind,” he is singing about the aftereffects of a war – but so much is unclear. There are allusions to spies and refugees, but are they literal? Figurative? There’s a haunting repeated passage from one of the back-up singers that sounds like it is in Arabic which suggests the Middle East – but that certainly doesn’t narrow down which war he might be singing about.

Among the most interesting songs is “Born in Chains,” a prayer-like meditation on the biblical legend of the Jewish Exodus from slavery in Egypt, and on faith lost and then found again. It is a song that Leonard has said he worked on for 40 years – but is that statement an allusion to the 40 years the Children of Israel spent wandering in the desert following the Exodus.

Another is “Samson in New Orleans,” a further deliberation on the city of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina – perhaps a continuation of what I believe he began with “Banjo” on Old Ideas.

In the final song, “You Got Me Singing,” Leonard again sounds like a folksinger in what could be a love song, or a prayer, or even a post-apocalyptic meditation.

Despite that pre-programmed keyboard approach that Leonard (and producer Patrick Leonard who composed the music for seven of the nine songs) uses on several of the tracks, Popular Problems is yet another compelling masterwork. These are songs I fully expect will continue to reveal more layers of meaning with every hearing.

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--Mike Regenstreif