Leonard Cohen's new album, Old Ideas, comes out Jan. 31.
In a recent
public conversation with fellow rock bard
Jarvis Cocker about the new recording
Old Ideas,
Leonard Cohen
answered the younger man's suggestion that his songs are "penitential
hymns" (a phrase Cohen himself employs in his new song "Come Healing")
with jocular humility. "I'm not sure what that means, to be honest,"
Cohen reportedly replied. He continued, "Who's to blame in this
catastrophe? I never figured that out."
The
catastrophe he mentions is life itself — a description Cohen probably
picked up from a fictional character he admires, Zorba the Greek, who
embraced the "full catastrophe" of a well-connected, joyfully physical
existence. The Buddhist teacher Jon Kabat-Zinn has also borrowed it
for a book title,
which is relevant, since Cohen's writing is famously philosophical,
connecting his Jewish heritage to years of Zen meditation and an
enduring existentialist bent.
But this
spiritual master is a sensualist, too: His artistry is grounded in the
careful examination of how the body and the soul interact.
Old Ideas,
his 12th studio album, was recorded after a triumphant world tour that
had Cohen performing three-hour shows night after night — no mean feat
for a man in his late 70s. It throbs with that life, its verses rife
with zingers and painful confessions, and its music sounds more richly
varied than anything Cohen has done in years.
Its
depth comes in the tenderness and refined passion Cohen brings to his
thorough descriptions of being human — a state in which pain and failure
dance with transcendence and bliss, as he growls in harmony with his
angelic backup singers in the beautiful "Come Healing," "The heart
beneath is teaching to the broken heart above."
Old Ideas provides plenty of new lines like that, worthy of a
Quotable Cohen
anthology. (My favorite right now is from the folksy waltz "Crazy to
Love You": "Crazy has places to hide in that are deeper than any
goodbye.") But what makes this album special is its sound, which steps
back from the synthesizer-heavy arrangements dominant on Cohen's other
late-period work and explores a range of styles, from countrypolitan
twang to gypsy jazz to Dylanesque blues.
Bobby Zimmerman, in fact, is a clear reference point throughout
Old Ideas. At times, it seems like a response to
Time Out of Mind,
the 1997 release that marked the beginning of Dylan's epic
lion-in-winter phase. (That he was only 57 when he made it shows how
long a pop star's old age can last.) Like that album,
Old Ideas
contemplates mortality in the bitter light of failed romance; it
fearlessly broaches emotional extremes while still dropping the wisdom
of an elder who should know better. "The Darkness," with its funky
undertow, and "Banjo," an easy talking blues, are especially Dylanesque,
with Cohen adding tartness to his own gravelly growl and his band
getting into a loose Americana groove.
In the
end, of course, Leonard Cohen remains his own man, with a unique sound
that brings the temple to the cabaret and a sensibility balancing humor
and profundity on the crystal stem of a glass filled with red wine of an
ideal vintage. In "Going Home," whose words were
recently featured in
The New Yorker by
poetry editor Paul Muldoon, Cohen's inner spirit pokes fun at his
pop-star self: "He's a lazy bastard living in a suit," the enlightened
voice says. But you know what? That suit still fits, and the cut is
perfection.
