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Leonard Cohen - Going Home

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Leonared Cohen: Old Ideas (Columbia / Sony)

3:51

Released: Now

- Leonard Cohen is an incredible wordsmith. Well, duh. Seriously though, I've often thought that was like the thing he had. He wasn't a musician so much as a poet standing slightly uncomfortably against a musical background. I even got to feeling like he shouldn't perform his own music, that he should pen these incredible songs and let other folks interpret them, although if I hear another abysmal cover of Hallelujah - y'know the one where the busker can't do Jeff Buckley's high notes but tries anyhow? Lord help me.
I saw this rather bargain-basement documentary on Cohen back in the late 90s or early noughties. It just showed him living in his house with his little Protools studio, making hideous midi backings for songs that the public had never heard before. He had some collaborator, a woman whose big gospel backing vocals crashed incongruously with his ever so quiet, smoky, dark vocals. At best it looked like a cult figure of the last few decades growing old eccentrically. At worst, it sounded exactly like I described it. Cohen's subsequent stoush with his manager and apparently associated bankruptcy passed me by almost unnoticed and then when he announced his world tour I figured "I know what I heard, I don't need to fork out good money for that." Still, friends of mine went and told me I missed something amazing. It made me wonder.
Old Ideas is Cohen's first record since 2004, before he crashed to his lowest point and got back up again, forced to get back out there where the money is and remind the world who Leonard Cohen was. Gotta be tough on a guy in his 70s, doing a world tour to stave off the repo men. It couldn't be better fuel for Cohen's kind of inspiration, could it? Maybe he got a good backing band to replace that awful midi, too. Wow, no he didn't. Right there at the beginning, the awfully cheesy synth trickles in. All the ingredients are, terrifyingly, exactly as I remember them. Yet when Leonard's confessional whisper almost imperceptably appears - it really is a struggle to hear those low mumblings, like they're drifting out of the basement - it fits perfectly. More broken down than ever before, he huskily rasps out little profundities about love and death. The subject matter is as dark as any of Cohen's work, but there is a peacefulness in his delivery. It takes some of the sting out of his biting words, but not the power: there's a dignity in this quiet man who's seen it all. These broken little bits of blues, jazz and gospel with their synthetic cheapness - each one is infused with a busted-up beauty that is a little difficult to believe. I'm reminded, a little uncomfortably reminded, of another recent return from obscurity. Gil Scott Herron, newly released from prison, his voice a hollow echo of its former strength, delivering over incongruously electro / industrial beats, songs about what you're left with at the end of life, and songs of profound power too. The parallels to Cohen are sometimes a little too close, especially considering how little time we got with the newly returned Scott Herron before he passed away. Cohen, at 77, has clearly got his eye on the clock, you've only gotta listen to his record to know that. I do hope we have the opportunity to hear him grit out a few more records yet. Another tour too, would be nice, I'm buying tickets this time.