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Leonard Cohen

Leonard Cohen "Old Ideas" album

- Release date : January 2012 -

Old Ideas is the twelfth studio album by Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, released on January 31, 2012.

"Old Ideas" album tracks and lyrics

"Old Ideas" album reviews

If long-term music fandom teaches you anything, it is that the value of your investments can go down as well as up. Your idols can develop feet of clay and ears of cloth. And then there's idols like Leonard Cohen. The Montreal poet found an acoustic guitar thrust into his hand in the mid-Sixties, the better to prostitute his art via the medium of pop. It is not wild hyperbole to say that he might be the finest master of his craft alive today, with a body of work on the human condition told in riddles and coated in tar. "Hallelujah" is one of his that has, itself, been prostituted widely. Even Cohen's latterday works (Ten New Songs, Dear Heather) maintain a high pleasure-to-piffle ratio.

In our hero, we also have an ordained Buddhist who would have sat out his twilight years up a mountain, smiling down upon our worldly foibles were it not for the fact that a former confidant made off with his pension pot . He is 77 – not the sort of age when a monk can easily give up non-violence. So the sage has swapped robes for natty suits, come down off the mountain, toured the world for two years, sired a grandchild, and made one more album for the road.

"I've got no future, I know my days are few," he rumbles cretaceously on "The Darkness", the album's pre-release taster. "I thought the past would last me, but the darkness got that too." The guitar parts and piano are just as exquisite as the lyrics. "Going Home" opens Old Ideas with a self-deprecating address setting the album's tone: dark, with twinkles; an implacable higher power just offstage.

Old Ideas is not all about death, betrayal and God, juicy as these are. As the title suggests, it is more of the stuff that has made Cohen indispensable for six decades: desire, regret, suffering, misanthropy, love, hope, and hamming it up (here's a line from "Banjo": "There's a broken banjo bobbing on a dark infested sea"). So sepulchral is Cohen's famous baritone on the devotional "Show Me The Place" that it's hard to suppress a giggle.

If you have to find fault, Cohen's pleas for reparation ("Come Healing") can never quite skewer you as comprehensively as his bleaker material. But anywhere you dip your net, you catch some depth. "Crazy To Love You" is vintage Cohen, prostrating himself (before some woman, or is it his song-craft?), referencing his own "Tower Of Song", throwing out glittering runes: "I'm tired of choosing desire/I've been saved by a blessed fatigue/The gates of commitment unwired/And nobody trying to leave." But for the weight of experience, the simple guitar accompaniment takes you right back to his first albums.

The musicianship throughout is uncluttered and swinging – a relief for those still rueing Cohen's lengthy synth phase. A bodyguard of angelic female voices (longtime collaborator Sharon Robinson, the Webb Sisters) wafts about, adding to songs like "Different Sides", and not distracting overmuch elsewhere.

No fan would ever have wished Cohen's misfortune upon him. But his loss has undoubtedly been our gain. This is no hasty hackwork, aimed at shoring up the bank balance, but a work of wry righteousness. Updates of "Hallelujah" are conspicuous by their absence.

*** by Kitty Empire, The Observer ***

When Leonard Cohen astonished his fans by deigning to visit the UK for a brace of shows in the summer of 2008, at least in London the loudest cheer of a night almost idolatrous in its appreciation came with the delivery of two lines from Tower of Song. "I was born like this, I had no choice," sang the then 73-year-old Quebecer, "I was born with the gift of a golden voice." With the clock hands now pointing at a quarter to 80, if anything the old boy’s voice has become more gravely resonant than it ever did. At certain points during Old Ideas it’s not difficult to imagine whales and dolphins surging out to deeper waters in fear of an earthquake.

In modern music it is commonplace for ageing performers to attempt to prove that they have a lust for life capable of defying gravity’s pull. But one of the striking things about this always striking album is just how unvarnished is the sound of its creator’s relative fragility: "I love to speak with Leonard, he’s a sportsman and shepherd," sings the narrator on Going Home, before adding, "He’s a lazy bastard living in a suit." On the second line Cohen’s voice cracks with such emphasis as to suggest this suit might be one of the last he wears. For a man with a gleam in his eye of such impishness as to make Sir Les Patterson seem decorous, this is startling stuff indeed.

As with any album to which Leonard Cohen puts his name, Old Ideas is a work which displays great finesse. The music presented is gentle, even fragile, with backing vocals and instrumentation similar to that heard during his brace of UK concerts four years ago. But as ever, it is the author’s sense of poetic balance that renders this release as being a work of art. It is said that for every verse that makes it onto the lyric sheet, a further 10 make it to the floor. Such prudence bears dividend throughout this album. On the mysterious Banjo, he sings of an object of dread floating on "a dark infested sea": "It’s coming for me darling, no matter where I go / Its duty is to harm me, my duty is to know."

A quite brilliant release from an unmissable artist.

*** by Ian Winwood, BBC Music ***

Every song on Leonard Cohen's first album of new material in eight years takes place in the wee small hours. Tempos are at a kingsnake crawl and the sound is full of caresses, variations on the classy but louche cabaret tunes Cohen once dubbed the European blues. The vocals and music unfold in a whisper, and each cut waits tremulously for the dawn, with no guarantee that this time the darkness will not be permanent.

The first words belong to God himself, who wants to have a talk with Leonard, that "lazy bastard living in a suit." Cohen, it seems, has been busy trying to write his love songs and manuals for living with defeat instead of delivering God's message, which is all the 77-year-old has been put here to do, and which is: Time to go home, a trip you make naked and burdenless to a place better than this one.

And th-th-that's all, folks! Three minutes and 50 seconds, titled "Going Home," sum up the story Cohen has been telling since he first left poetry for music in 1967 (after 11 years as Canada's most famous poet, he was 33 and thought the money would be better). When Cohen calls this album Old Ideas, he means not just that these are the thoughts of a septuagenarian, but that he's been turning over these cards for a long while: sex, love, God, and the way the three can be shuffled to relieve the pain of existence. A Jew who disappeared up a mountaintop to ponder Zen Buddhist koans, Cohen has sought rapture anywhere and everywhere he can find it – prayer, LSD, the thighs of a woman – and tried to unite the spiritual and the physical since he first made a sensation with a song about a girl named Suzanne, who touches your perfect body with her mind.

Dylan dreamed he saw St. Augustine. Cohen has walked the earth trying to be St. Augustine. He has never made a pretense of his confessions being anything other than personal – there really was a Suzanne, just like there really was a Marianne. But as time has gone on, Cohen has shorn the ornament from his language to move from the personal to the universal. The lyrics on Old Ideas reach for the stark power of prayers, hymns and religious riddles. The music is just as basic: a keyboard or guitar breaks the stillness, a drummer tries to simulate a Casio rhythm box, backup girls offer comfort to the weak, a stringed instrument gives a final blessing.

The song titles tell the story: "Going Home," "Amen," "Darkness," "Crazy to Love You," "Come Healing." His basso profundo cracked by both the frailty and the wisdom of his years, COhen holds forth on the forces of love and forgiveness, and those of hate and darkness. Which ones will win is a given. What it means is still up for grabs. In an album almost empty of imagery, it stands out when, toward the end, Cohen describes watching "a broken bajo bobbing on the dark, infested sea." It's been carried there by the waves, maybe off of someone's shoulder, maybe out of someone's grave. Some New Orleans horns swell in the distance, neither mournful nor celebratory. Just there. As if to say: life or death. It's up to you. The music goes on.

*** by Joe Levy, Rolling Stone ***