The gospel according to Leonard Cohen
by Matt Ashare
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| Leonard Cohen, Old Ideas (Columbia) |
Leonard Cohen is unquestionably — and unabashedly — one of the stranger dudes to ever have sustained a musical career in the modern era. Sure, Dylan's eccentric, at times aggressively so. And there are plenty of oddballs who have gotten their 15 minutes over the past half-century. But Cohen has single-mindedly taken unconventional to a whole new level in his five-plus decades as a recording artist and performer.
He alludes to as much in the opening verse of the portentous "Going Home," the first song on Old Ideas, his 12th proper studio album since he was first signed by the legendary Columbia A&R talent scout and producer John Hammond amid the flurry of the ’60s folk revival. "I Love to speak with Leonard/He's a sportsman and a shepherd/He's a lazy bastard/Living in a suit," he half-sings/half-whispers in that immediately recognizable cracked baritone that remains one of his many distinctive, if somewhat difficult, qualities — a sagacious voice that paradoxically manages to convey a sense of both genuine intimacy and cool detachment. Buoyed by little more than a few quiet organ chords, a choir of women's voices, and intermittent string embellishments, he continues what amounts to an internal monologue, intoning, "He will speak these words of wisdom/Like a sage, a man of vision/Though he knows he's really nothing/But the brief elaboration of a tube."
That's Leonard Cohen in a nutshell: a suit-and-tied prophet of verse, confronting mortality, contemplating the dark depths of the soul, straining against the vicissitudes of life, embracing with wry wit his own unorthodoxy, finding humor and a kind of agnostic salvation in deceptively simple rhymes. It's what he's been, and it's what he remains on Old Ideas, a title that may indeed reflect his own realization that, to a large degree, he's still tackling many of the same themes — love, sex, religion, obsession, depression — that have marked his songwriting since his first album, 1967's Songs of Leonard Cohen.
Perhaps it was merely an accident of timing that Cohen has typically been cast among the folk luminaries who came of age in the turbulent ’60s. But Cohen was already an anomaly when he joined Dylan, Joan Baez, and their cohort in NYC. For starters, the now 77-year old Cohen grew up in the pre-rock and roll days of big-band jazz, beat poets, and Sinatra crooners. And he'd already established himself as a promising young writer of fiction and poetry before he embarked as a singer-songwriter. So it's not entirely surprising that he took a somewhat skewed approach to folk, or that, despite his many accolades (a Grammy lifetime achievement award, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction, etc. . .), he’s always been a commercial outsider.
But, if success can be measured by the number of other artists who have covered your songs, Cohen's career has been a triumph. From Judy Collins' 1966 version of "Suzanne," to the late Jeff Buckley's hymnotic reinterpretation of "Hallelujah," the Cohen songbook has been cherry picked by dozens upon dozens of performers from nearly every corner of the musical map. There are three Leonard Cohen tribute albums, featuring performers as diverse as R.E.M., U2, Nick Cave, the Pixies, Suzanne Vega, and Peter Gabriel. And, if you listen closely to Nirvana's "Pennyroyal Tea," you'll hear Kurt Cobain make this reference: "Give me a Leonard Cohen afterworld, so I can sigh eternally.”
The cult of Cohen simply endures. As does his timeless talent. There are echoes on Old Ideas of his folksinger days, most notably the fingerpicked acoustic tune "Crazy to Love You," a meditation on lost love that reaches the level of spiritual allegory when Cohen gently rasps, "I'm tired of choosing desire/Been saved by a sweet fatigue/The gates of commitment unwired/And nobody's trying to leave."
Elsewhere, Old Ideas is shot through with gospel inflections, both in the musical arrangements and lyrics. The pitch-perfect female background harmonies that play call-and-response with Cohen’s gruff pronouncements on "Amen"; lines like "Show me the place where the Word became a man"; and the blues structure that underpins the aptly titled "Darkness," with its smooth groove, organ soloing, and, again, those gorgeous background vocals, all conjure images of the church — the Church of Leonard Cohen.
And yet, Cohen is uniquely adept at sermonizing without resorting to the dogma of preaching. “Oh let the heavens hear it/The penitential hymn,” he proclaims in “Come Healing,” one of the sparest and most affecting tracks on the album, “Come healing of the spirit/Come healing of the limb/Behold the gates of mercy/In arbitrary space/And none of us deserving/The cruelty or the grace.” It’s one of those quiet, reflective moments with the power to make you stop and listen beyond the strangeness of Cohen’s voice. And then, as with so many of the songs here, you just might want to go back and hear it again.
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