Leonard Cohen - The Zen Poet with a Razor-Blade Voice

"By its very nature, a song has to move from heart to heart." This is the poetics and the philosophy with which Leonard Cohen built not only his artistic career, but his very life. From a mountain overlooking Montreal to a Greek island, through an extraordinary journey that took him to Los Angeles, he explored that "remote human possibility", devouring sensations, without remorse. His music draws close to poetry, to the feeling of things barely grazed, allusive only on the surface. His great passion was always writing, the unfolding of words one after another. Over the last thirty years he published eight volumes of poetry, two novels and eleven albums, not all of them familiar to American audiences. In Europe, however, the Canadian singer-songwriter is a true idol. In Poland he outsells Michael Jackson, and Kraków holds a Leonard Cohen Festival every year. Countless rock figures, from Nick Cave to Morrissey, have acknowledged being deeply influenced by the music of this minstrel of emotions. Cohen's time has its own rhythm: "I tend toward sadness, usually. Some songs have taken me several years. None of them has been an easy birth, after all this is our job. Everything else often goes to ruin, to utter bankruptcy, and so what's left is the work, and that's what I do all the time, work, create the opus of my life. Our work is the only territory we can govern and make clear. Everything else remains confused and mysterious."

Born to Jewish parents, Leonard lost his father at the age of nine, an event that would leave an indelible mark on his personality. His artistic career began chiefly as a poet and writer. His first collection of poems, "Let Us Compare Mythologies", was published in 1956 while he was still a university student. "The Spice Box Of Earth" (1961), his second collection, launched him to international fame. After a brief spell at Columbia University in New York, Cohen won a scholarship and left for Europe, eventually settling on the Greek island of Hydra, where he lived for seven years with Marianne Jenson and her son Axel. In Greece he wrote two novels, two small masterpieces: "The Favorite Game", in 1963, a portrait of a young Jewish man from Montreal with artistic ambitions, and "Beautiful Losers", in 1966, with noir undertones, an epic and baffling work laced with sacrilegious and religious overtones. Each of his books would go on to sell over eight hundred thousand copies worldwide. But Cohen's life was always marked by a constant restlessness: "To write books you need a place to stay. When a writer is working on a novel, he tends to surround himself with certain things. He needs a woman. And it's nice to have children underfoot too, since there's no shortage of food. Since I already had those things, I decided to become a 'songwriter'."

But already at twenty he had been drawn to music, founding the country-western band Buckskin Boys: “I was full of the urge to play and to carry on, stomping my feet, celebrating a kind of emotional life together with so many others who felt the same way. Country music, back then, met those needs.” Naturally, following an inner path, Cohen found his own style, and so began his career as the bard of melancholy. Arriving in New York in the thick of the folk revival, with Dylan the toast of Greenwich Village, Cohen crossed paths with Judy Collins, who gave him his debut at the Newport Festival. His talent did not escape the notice of record man John Hammond, who offered him his first contract. From there, it was a very short step to releasing an album.

His debut album, Songs Of Leonard Cohen, released in 1968, is about as far as you can get from the “revolutionary” mood of the times: while songwriters like Bob Dylan and Joan Baez step into the political arena, Cohen turns inward toward the individual. His universe revolves around a series of “pairings”: sex and religion (the very combination on which Nick Cave would build a career, and what a career!), saint and disciple, sin and redemption, winner and loser, slave and master. And the biblical tension found in Dylan becomes, in Cohen, more human and forgiving, though no less “apocalyptic.” Born in Montreal, the French-speaking city of Canada, Cohen is also the most “European” of the overseas singer-songwriters. His repertoire draws on the French chanson of Jacques Brel and George Brassens, on American folk, but also on a distinctive fondness for biblical themes (strongly shaped by his Jewish roots, as is his dark, vaguely Yiddish humor) and for classical mythology. The bard of melancholy, solitude, marginalization and lost loves, Cohen probes the heart of darkness of humanity, painting a fresco of aching lyricism. His ten “Songs” strike the listener at once with the delicacy of his touch, the hushed, romantic tone, the deeply intimate dimension that runs through them, and the extraordinary grace of the melodies.

The opening “Suzanne”, later covered by Fabrizio De André (Cohen's finest disciple alongside Nick Cave), is a song of extraordinary elegance, dominated by the Montreal songwriter's deep register, which lends it a sense of boundless tenderness. The protagonist (who could just as easily be read as a saint, a drifter, a madwoman or a prostitute) becomes the only lifeline, the object of an almost supernatural devotion. Cohen quietly narrates his fairy tale, framed by tender (classical) guitar arpeggios, keening violin, and angelic female choruses. The sinister atmospheres of “Master Song”, with its prominent horns and keyboard reverb lurking in the background, must have taught Nick Cave and his many 90s disciples a great deal. The slave-master dichotomy is read here as a continuous reversal of roles: for Cohen, there is always glory and light in defeat, and the line between the vanquished and the victorious often dissolves. The tone grows even softer and warmer on the slow “Winter Lady”, a melody for flute and harpsichord, while “The Stranger Song” unveils that classical-guitar arpeggio — just a few chords, yet dizzyingly fast — that would become a Cohen trademark (Fabrizio De André would do something similar in “Amico Fragile”).

The combination of his voice, whispering with the delicacy of a medieval minstrel, and his finely arpeggiated classical guitar, is flawless. That pairing alone is enough to cast the spell of “Sisters of Mercy”, another dreamlike ballad poised between a lullaby and a religious psalm — even though its protagonists are prostitutes. Around the voice-and-guitar axis, other sounds surface: flashes of accordion, chiming bells, the tinkle of a xylophone. It is the song that would give its name to one of the “darkest” bands in rock history: the British Sisters Of Mercy. A perfect crooner in jacket and tie, just as on the cover, Cohen never loses his composure. Not even when the tempo picks up, as in the aching serenade “So Long, Marianne”, backed by drums and violin. Not even when it's time to say goodbye, as in the country-tinged ballad “Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye”. And not even when he walks the streets among the desperate souls of “Stories Of The Street”, where he nonetheless bares himself with ferocious honesty. The bleak parable of “Teachers” and the icy “One of Us Cannot Be Wrong” finally close the album on a note of contrite sorrow.

Songs Of Leonard Cohen would teach countless aspiring songwriters how to wring maximum drama from minimal arrangements. The landscape is bare, cold, wintry: a vast emptiness populated by ghosts wandering with no destination, or even “by mistake” (“Some Girls Wander By Mistake” in “Teachers”). And yet, amid so much desolation, emotion lies just around the corner, ready to ambush you and strike at the heart. Because Cohen knows how to crack open the bitter shell of loneliness and lay bare the intimacy of feeling.

Songs From a Room (1969), his second album, continues along the same lines, with spare, claustrophobic arrangements and tales of everyday despair. “Seems So Long Ago, Nancy” is a slow-motion meditation that implodes into a vortex of pure anguish. The epic “Story Of Isaac” and “The Partisan” dig into the relationship between man and the barbarity of war. But the album's absolute masterpiece is “Bird On A Wire”, a desperate parable on freedom and solitude: “Like a bird on a wire/ Like a drunk in a midnight choir/ I have tried my way to be free”. Opening a crack of light amid so much darkness are the closing tracks, “Lady Midnight” and “Tonight Will Be Fine”, delivered by Cohen in fable-like, dreamy tones.

Songs Of Love and Hate (1971) once again confirms Cohen as a master of mortification and bard of solitude. The songs grow longer, and here and there a light string accompaniment surfaces, but the atmosphere remains spare and tense throughout, steeped in a bleak existentialism. The guitar-and-voice pairing continues to work its magic, its original spell undimmed. This time the masterpiece is “Famous Blue Raincoat”, a frozen vignette of a friendship ended and betrayed: “And what can I tell you my brother, my killer/ What can I possibly say?/ I guess that I miss you, I guess I forgive you/ I’m glad you stood in my way”. Cohen's epic spirit, meanwhile, finds its finest expression in the aching ode to a proud, weary Joan of Arc (another song later reinterpreted by De André). “Last Year's Man”, on the other hand, is yet another quasi-religious parable of a man increasingly lost in his own existential torments.

In 1972 came Live Songs, his only live album, featuring an astonishing 14-minute improvisation on “Please Don't Pass Me By” alongside live versions of songs drawn from his first three albums. On New Skin For the Old Ceremony (1973), which musically has a more orchestral sound (courtesy of producer John Lissauer), he continues his investigations into the most hidden recesses of the human spirit.

For a few years after that, Cohen withdrew from the scene, releasing only a greatest-hits album, Best of Leonard Cohen (1975). In 1977 he returned with Death Of A Ladies' Man, an album whose gestation was troubled and controversial: it began as a collaboration with famed producer Phil Spector but ended with Cohen shut out of the final recording sessions. “It was a catastrophe,” Cohen recalled. “The vocals are all badly done, and Phil mixed the record behind my back. I had to decide whether to go to war over it or just let it go. I chose to let it go.”

Recent Songs, from 1979, is an even more complex record. Aided by Henry Lewy, Cohen does not simply dwell on the troubled loves of couples, but begins to reflect on his long explorations into the realm of religion, even joining Scientology for a time before finally arriving at Buddhism. Allen Ginsberg once asked him how he reconciled his Jewish faith with Zen doctrine, and Leonard replied that Zen is more a form of atheistic meditation than a deistic religion. Even in his days living at the Chelsea Hotel, dropping acid, he nursed a deep and never-quite-overcome sense of self-pity. He never blamed his malaise on his family, that is, on the customs of his “tribe.”

Various Positions, from 1984, deepens his religious reflections, but these quasi-psalms, all born of a painful spiritual odyssey (“Hallelujah”, “The Law”, “Dance Me To The End Of Love”, “If It Be Your Will”), sound so fresh and pleasing that they could easily be mistaken for “ordinary” love songs. In truth, by this point the Canadian songwriter's philosophical and religious turmoil ran so deep it had thrown him completely off balance. “There were many sides of myself that I had propped up with religion,” Cohen told L.A. Style in 1988. “If you're dealing with this kind of material, you can't bring God into it. I thought I could illuminate my own world and that of the people around me, and that I could take the Bodhisattva path, the path of helping others. I thought I could do it, but I couldn't. It's a road where people far stronger, more generous and nobler than me have burned themselves out. Once you start handling sacred material, it tears you apart.”

I'm Your Man, the 1988 album, is the distillation of all the bitterness and fear of facing existence. A record finally met with enthusiasm by American critics, who described his voice as “razor-like” — the same critics who had once claimed it was “impossible to listen to one of his albums when the sun is shining outside.” Thanks to formidable ballads like “First We Take Manhattan”, “Tower Of Song” and “Ain't No Cure For Love”, and to a successful fusion of Cohen's folk roots with more rhythmic, modern arrangements, the album reached number one on the charts in several European countries. With this record, Cohen proved he was not merely a glorious fossil of a dead and buried era — that of folk and hippie dreams — but a truly universal songwriter, able to update his sound and his lyrics to the spirit of his time without ever losing his aura of timelessness.

In 1992, with the release of The Future, his eleventh album, Cohen once again raised his voice for an anguished, apocalyptic prophecy on the future of humanity: “Give me back the Berlin wall/ Give me Stalin and St Paul/ Give me Christ or give me Hiroshima/ Destroy another fetus now/ We don’t like children anyhow/ I’ve seen the future, baby: it is murder” (the unforgettable title track). A cosmic pessimism runs through much of the record, carried along by tracks like “Waiting for the Miracle”, “Closing Time” (which some have called his finest song ever) and “Anthem”, once again updating the Cohen sound to the rhythm of the times: no more acoustic folk, but a kind of dark, unsettling art-pop. The album would become a major international success and prove to be the best-selling of his entire catalogue.

Many filmmakers have chosen his music for their soundtracks, from Robert Altman — whose 1971 film “McCabe & Mrs. Miller” became something like a long-form video for his songs — to Nanni Moretti, who used “I'm Your Man” itself in “Caro Diario”. And in 1986 Jennifer Warnes released the successful “Famous Blue Raincoat”, an album made up entirely of Cohen songs.

Besides writing and performing songs, the Canadian artist also enjoys making his own videos: in 1984 he wrote, directed and scored “I Am A Hotel”, a half-hour short that won first prize at the Montreux International Television Festival (Switzerland) and was submitted to the Oscar jury. He collaborated with singer-songwriter Lewis Furey on “Night Magic”, a cinematic rock opera for which he won the Canadian Juno Award for Best Movie Score in 1985. He even made a cameo appearance as an actor in the series “Miami Vice”.

For a long time afterwards, the Canadian master disappeared from the scene. From 1993 to 1999, he lived in a Zen monastery on Mount Baldy, 200 kilometers from Los Angeles. Alone, far from the world, in an unbroken silence. From his voluntary exile, little news filtered through. But music still arrived. It came in the form of Field Commander Cohen, a live album drawn from recordings made during his 1979 tour. A record built on particularly rich arrangements that cast new light on classics like "Lover, Lover, Lover", "Hey That's No Way To Say Goodbye", "The Stranger Song", "Memories" and "So Long, Marianne". An album that sounds remarkably rock, and testifies to Cohen's natural fatherhood over the more cultured, poetic fringes of so-called post-rock.

In 2001, Cohen definitively broke the Zen exile he had retreated into and released Ten New Songs, his first studio work in almost ten years, recorded with the help of vocalist and co-writer Sharon Robinson. By then he had been back in his bachelor apartment for two years, a duplex he shared with his daughter. "As Roshi, my Zen teacher who's now 94, always says: paradise is not on this earth," he quipped ironically in an interview with "Musica". "I've spent years trying to convert him to red wine, but he still prefers sake... I decided to enter Roshi's monastery because I was looking for answers. And I stayed longer than I'd planned, because the master was entrusted to my care and he loved my chicken soup. I wasn't looking for a new religion, nor for the thrill of conversion. I was born a Jew and I'll die a Jew; the family religion already satisfies all my spiritual appetites. Coming home felt good." The record still reflects Cohen's Zen period, though, as some of its songs attest ("Love Itself", "In My Secret Life").

Cohen, who had turned seventy in the meantime, returned on October 25, 2004 with a new album, Dear Heather, featuring twelve previously unreleased songs and a live version of the country standard "Tennessee Waltz", already made popular by artists like Patti Page and Chet Atkins. "The record is like a notebook, a miscellany of ideas and moods, of observations and digressions," writer and critic Leon Wieseltier wrote about him in the label's liner notes. Still accompanied regularly by Sharon Robinson, Cohen pares down the weight of the arrangements and turns many of the songs into an exercise in pure "spoken word". In the title track, it almost feels as though the ghosts of the lovers from his debut album pass by once more, now aged and weary: ""Dear Heather, please walk beside me still/ With a drink in your hand and your legs as white/ As the winter has made them".

"The Letters", on the other hand, picks up the thread of "Famous Blue Raincoat", the letter of a betrayed man to his rival. "On That Day" is his recollection of 9/11, written in his own inimitable way, that is, with intensity and without rhetoric. And there's something moving, too, in the elderly irony of "Because Of", where Cohen sings of naked women shouting "Look at me Leonard, look at me one last time". Almost a melancholy tribute to the (many) lovers who marked his life.

Eight years later, it was Old Ideas that broke Cohen's long silence in 2012. Aided by the experience of his return to the stage, Cohen brought his songs back to their essence, stripping away the mannered sheen that had clouded them on the previous Ten New Songs and Dear Heather. Old Ideas thus recovers the balance that had been missing from the Canadian songwriter's music for at least two decades. Because his verses never needed artificial staging: they only ever asked for the space to let his voice echo.

Cohen's crooning is a whisper in which the weight of time throbs with smoke and desire. On "Going Home" he lets himself be grazed only by an aura of strings and keyboards, alongside the caress of a female counter-melody. The territory he ventures into, face to face with the specter of mortality, is the same one explored on Johnny Cash's Johnny Cash's "American Recordings", and the same one on Dylan's "Time Out Of Mind". And more Dylan-esque than ever are the blues hues wrapping around "Darkness" amid swirls of Hammond organ, pondering in the twilight gloom how much time is left.

Amid flickers of trumpet and the gypsy embroidery of violin, "Amen" is the word that resounds in the desert, speaking of love to thirsty ears. Old Ideas unspools in shades and nuances, drifting from the understated gospel of "Come Healing", led by the Webb Sisters' choir, into the meditative country of "Banjo". There are a few moments of fatigue, but nothing in the album's overall architecture ever sounds out of place.

There is no resignation in Cohen's gaze; rather, the fate one thought one had firmly in hand becomes instead a road to be led down: "Show me the place where you want your slave to go", he murmurs, in the tone of a prayer, accompanied by the piano of "Show Me The Place". The bitter gaze of The Future is far away now, but the questions sound no less urgent: "Show me the place where the word became a man".

God himself looks down on him, scrutinizing his soul like a face whose every wrinkle he knows by heart: “I love to speak with Leonard/ He’s a sportsman and a shepherd/ He’s a lazy bastard living in a suit”. These are the opening lines of "Going Home", in which Cohen sketches, with the unmistakable elegance of his humor, a self-portrait as a restless troubadour, forever searching for a love song capable of teaching him to live with disillusionment. But what matters is the certainty of being on the road home: "Going home without my burden/ Going home behind the curtain".

The old poet takes his Borsalino in his hands and bows his head in a gesture of gratitude. "Going home without the costume that I wore".

In 2014, Popular Problems appeared, almost by surprise, just a couple of years after Old Ideas. Age alone isn't enough to erase the problems that make up the fabric of life, the newly octogenarian Canadian chansonnier seems to be saying. If anything, it allows one to face them with a more disenchanted wisdom in one's gaze.

As if wanting to excuse himself for his past absence from the scene, the insistent beat of "Slow" opens the album with an ironically allusive ode to slowness, while the organ swirls toward blues tonalities: “It’s not because I’m old/ And it’s not what dying does/ I’ve always liked it slow/ Slow is in my blood”. Cohen himself, however, admits he was surprised by how quickly the new record took shape. The acceleration is due above all to his collaboration with Patrick Leonard, producer of Old Ideas and now credited as nothing less than co-writer on almost every track. By Cohen's own admission, most of the album's musical ideas come from him. And this, in fact, is the new work's weak point.

The moods of Popular Problems grow more varied, but — especially in the album's middle stretch — they don't always fully match the balance of its predecessor. It's when the setting grows sparer that Cohen's verses manage to resonate more deeply. Starting with the single chosen to preview the album, "Almost Like The Blues", with a bed of percussion and a molten bassline accompanying the touch of piano and Charlean Carmon's backing vocals.

"Being a songwriter is like being a nun: you're married to a mystery," Cohen reflects with a smile. So, alongside the contradictions of love (the mirror monologue of "Did I Ever Love You") and of politics (the vibrant post-Katrina apostrophe of "Samson In New Orleans"), it is once again the problem of fate that dominates his songs. To the skepticism of the wise, Cohen opposes the simplicity of sinners: “There is no God in heaven and there is no hell below/ So says the great professor of all there is to know/ But I’ve had the invitation/ That a sinner can’t refuse/ And it’s almost like salvation, it’s almost like the blues”.

And so the waters of the Red Sea part to the notes of the liturgical gospel of "Born In Chains", invoking a liberation from slavery able to embrace "the measure of all measures". And David's song echoes once more in the closing of "You Got Me Singing", heedless of the countless versions of "Hallelujah", entrusting itself instead to the folk accents of Alexandru Bublitchi's violin: "You got me singing even though it all looks grim/ You got me singing the Hallelujah hymn". The harshness of the times doesn't matter: nothing can silence the heart when it stands before the Lord of Song with its own song upon its lips.

Already at the time of the release of Popular Problems, Cohen admitted he had a collection of new songs tucked away. He worked intensively on them for a year with Patrick Leonard, then his health suddenly took a turn for the worse. "The situation was dark, the suffering acute, the project was abandoned," he recalls. It was then that his son Adam stepped in.

They had never worked together: the shadow of such a father was too overwhelming for a son determined to follow in his footsteps along the arduous path of songwriting. But this time things were different. "He understood that my recovery, if not my very survival, depended on being able to get back to work." When Adam was 17, he had spent months in a coma after a terrible car accident. His father spent his days at his bedside, reading him verses from the Bible. Life sometimes likes to reverse the roles: "Adam took charge of the project, set me up in an orthopedic chair so I could sing, and brought these unfinished songs to completion."

The album, titled You Want It Darker, came out in October 2016, and it opens with the voices of a choir. Not the usual female backing vocals, but the choir of the Shaar Hashomayim congregation, the oldest Ashkenazi synagogue in Canada. Cohen's own family synagogue. Then the pulsing groove of the bass lays down the carpet for that unmistakable baritone. The choir joins him in intoning the opening of the Kaddish: "Magnified and sanctified/ Be Thy Holy Name." The prayer of praise, the prayer of mourning. A funeral hymn to himself, or perhaps to humanity. "I'm ready, my Lord," Cohen murmurs. But his words are not simply a farewell. They echo Abraham's ancient answer: hinneni, here I am. The gaze of a father who surrenders himself completely.

It took the love of a son to restore to Cohen the rigor of a classic. And that You Want It Darker is destined to take its place among the classics is clear right from the stark simplicity of the cover, with its black-and-white interplay of contrasts that directly evokes the past. It's the final chapter of a trilogy that sheds the residual embellishments of Popular Problems, reaching a sobriety even more measured than that of Old Ideas.

From the piano of "Treaty" rises a tremor of strings that foreshadows the orchestral reprise placed at the album's close. "I wish there was a treaty/ Between your love and mine," Cohen pleads. Not with the resignation of compromise, but with the pained awareness that the other can never be fully won over. The collaboration with Patrick Leonard leaves behind the album's most elaborate musical touches, from the organ that opens the chiaroscuro gospel of "If I Didn't Have Your Love" to the gypsy lyricism of "It Seemed The Better Way," while the only track co-written with Sharon Robinson, "On The Level," helps lighten the record's fabric with its soul-tinged tones.

You Want It Darker is an album of farewells. It is the testament of a man ready to step back from the pull of passion ("I turned my back on the devil/ Turned my back on the angel too," he confesses in "On The Level"), a step back from the daily battle ("I do not care who takes this bloody hill," he proclaims in "Treaty"). A step back in order to finally contemplate the pattern of things, not to give up possessing them. Amid nostalgic twangy reverb and pedal-steel embroidery, "Leaving The Table" sums it up with the plain force of a single image ("I'm leaving the table/ I'm out of the game"), as Cohen finds himself observing the theatre of human comedy with detachment.

"I'm traveling light/ It's au revoir." The journey is long, the baggage light. The choir of "Traveling Light" rings out like the distant song of the women of a shtetl, like the memory of a klezmer dance on violin strings, a "Dance Me To The End Of Love" offered as a gift to Matt Elliott. Only the essentials remain in the suitcase, while that crooning, grave as time itself, intones one last goodbye.

One by one, every useless burden falls away. Shadows of women and the ruins of shopping malls, scars from old wounds and certainties worn thin. Over the chamber arrangements of "Steer Your Way," the old chansonnier moves through them as though they were relics of another time, another life. “Year by year/ Month by month/ Day by day/ Thought by thought”. What remains, above all, is the need to see through to the end what one has begun. And that, in the end, is the very essence of You Want It Darker.

On November 11, 2016, the news that froze everyone arrived, posted by his manager on the official Facebook page: "It is with profound sadness we report that legendary poet, songwriter and artist Leonard Cohen has passed away. We have lost one of music's most visionary and revered artists." Only a few months earlier, Cohen had had to say goodbye to Marianne Ihlen, the woman he met in the 1960s on the Greek island of Hydra, who had inspired songs like "So Long, Marianne" and "Bird On A Wire": "I've always loved you for your beauty and your wisdom," were his words, "but I don't need to say anything more about that because you know it all already. But now, I just want to wish you a very good journey. Goodbye old friend. Endless love, see you down the road."

Speaking to David Remnick of The New Yorker around the release of You Want It Darker, Cohen had shared the lyrics he was still working on. Eyes closed, in a whisper. "Listen to the mind of God, wich doesn't need to be." Jewish tradition calls it bat kol, the voice from heaven: "Another reality that is always singing in your ear from a deep, deep place, even though you're not able, most of the time, to decipher it." Sometimes, to be present means nothing more than to listen. And there is no greater voice than that of one who has learned how to listen. "Listen to the mind of God/ Don't listen to me."

But the closing credits that rolled over the notes of "String Reprise/Treaty" had not entirely exhausted Leonard Cohen's dialogue with his audience; it was a farewell that was, in part, canonical, romantic, pained — yet behind those notes it was easy to glimpse an opening, a hope, one last masterstroke.

It falls, then, to Thanks For The Dance to perfectly close the circle. It's almost as if Cohen's body never knew livor mortis: the heart, though stilled, still pumps blood, and a few tears too, but also a faint, delicate hope.

It doesn't matter that some of these tracks had already been part of other projects — this is not a swan song, but the story of an ugly duckling.

This is a candid, unexpectedly content Cohen reciting "I always worked steady, never called it art / I put in my hours, I've met Christ and I've read Marx," as the notes of a small masterpiece unfold ("Happens To The Heart"), a song that alone would justify the existence of this posthumous album, assembled by the late songwriter's son three years after his death, with the help of numerous musicians, among them Daniel Lanois, Jennifer Warnes, Javier Mas, Patrick Leonard and Beck.

Once again, wonder prevails over reason; Cohen's music and words tear down the Tower of Babel once more, and the universality of art reveals itself with a romantic restraint — at times suspended over a handful of notes in dialogue with the half-sung, half-spoken delivery of "It's Torn," at other times carried along by a dance step intoned in multiple voices (Jennifer Warnes, Leslie Feist), whose charm evokes the warm, rain-soaked notes wrapped in the "famous blue raincoat." The slightly on-the-nose Latin flavor (courtesy of guitarists Carlos de Jacoba and Javier Mas) of "The Night Of Santiago" gives us one of the album's most graceful moments, while Patrick Watson injects some of his ecstatic pathos into the sweeping "The Hills."

The arrangements are almost always intense yet rarefied, often approaching that sonic sublimation reserved only for the word: the true protagonist of this precious, unexpected turn, the driving force behind intense narratives matched to unassuming titles ("The Goal", "Puppets", "Listen To The Hummingbird"), which lead the listener toward the end of the dream, of illusions, but also of pain.

Thanks For The Dance is almost an invitation to celebrate a virtual resurrection, half pagan and half biblical, a further intellectual provocation from one of the greatest poets of our time, chronicler of human frailties and failed virtues, a poet in love with silence and its deafening roar: Ascolta il colibrì, ci implora di trovare la bellezza in Dio e nelle farfalle, Non ascoltare me".

Contributions by Gabriele Benzing ("Old Ideas", "Popular Problems", "You Want It Darker"), Gianfranco Marmoro ("Thanks For The Dance")

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