‘When I gave up smoking, I thought my voice would rise to a soprano’

You can see it in the Canadian icon’s eyes and in the way he moves.

It’s obvious when he humbly doffs his trademark fedora.

It really is there when he gives his favoured salutation, “Hello buddies,” and in the
broad smile that follows.

And it can be identified in his unmistakeable growl and his deeply spiritual
lyrics. As a result, it comes as no surprise to locate that 77-year-old Cohen’s
new album, Outdated Tips, is brimful of grace.

He employs the medium of music to confront not just his personal mortality but the
fate that awaits us all and he does it with a blend of gravitas and
self-deprecating humour.

The songs are offered hymn-like arrangements with heavenly girl choruses and
biblical imagery but you couldn’t phone it an overtly religious album. These
are universal themes that speak to the heart.

And, of program, no Leonard Cohen album would be total with no passing
references to the pleasures of the flesh. (“Dreamed about you infant/You
had been wearing half your dress.”)

Old Ideas, 10 authentic compositions spanning 41 minutes, is only the artist’s
12th studio effort in a music occupation spanning 45 a long time.

It arrives eight many years right after the release of Dear Heather and is additional
proof of a man enjoying a breathtaking renaissance in his eighth decade.

The revival dates back to Might 2008 when, chastened by losing his fortune to
his dodgy former manager, he headed out on an epic globe tour to re-coup his
losses.

It included two wonderful stints at London’s O2 Arena as effectively as a really
sublime performance at Glastonbury which located all generations united in awe
as the sun set above Worthy Farm.

Triumph

Now, here we are in 2012 and more confirmation of Cohen’s stature comes
with the prestigious PEN New England award for his lyrics of literary
excellence.

He says of the honour: “The thing I like about it is that I’m sharing this
award with Chuck Berry — that is quite excellent. You know, ‘Roll
more than Beethoven and inform Tchaikovsky the news’. I’d like to compose a
line like that!”

And I’m happy to report that Cohen’s fleeting return to Britain final week to
present Old Tips to a small invited audience proved to be one more triumph.

I was fortunate adequate to be there for SFTW, to see, just a handful of yards in front of
me, the man who wrote Suzanne, Bird On A Wire and Hallelujah explaining the
believed processes behind his most current opus.

We watched slides of his lyrics and drawings as the gently-paced yet momentous
album filled the air. Then came a revealing, charming, sometimes
haphazard interview carried out by Pulp’s gangly frontman Jarvis Cocker.

How, asks Cocker, does Cohen feel about sitting in a space with all these
individuals listening to his album? Is it strange?

“I guess I’m testing it above and more than once more, hoping it will locate favour with
the listeners,” he replies softly and modestly.

“I am also listening from a technical point of view, wondering if I’ve
ratcheted it up to specifically the correct degree of excellence, but primarily I am
pondering if I myself could be swept along by it.”

Like the rest of us, Cohen would seem subject material with his efforts: “I do believe this
particular record invites 1 to be swept along with it, even if you
occurred to write it oneself.”

It really is obvious to all present that his inimitable “basso profundo” voice is
obtaining ever deeper, a point not lost on the singer himself.

“It really is what transpires when you give up cigarettes, contrary to public viewpoint,”
he jests. “I believed providing up smoking would destroy my complete position. I
thought my voice would rise to a soprano.”

He reveals that one more tour, in which he could play the new songs live, “is
always in the back of one’s thoughts.

“Also, I’ve decided that I will start off smoking once again when I am 80. I will be 78 this
year and, if I go on tour for a couple of years, I will be ready to begin
smoking on the road. I’m searching forward to that tour!”

The intimate Old Concepts begins with the startling Going House, which finds Cohen
acquiring a enormous dig at himself in the 3rd man or woman — “I love to
speak with Leonard/He’s a sportsman and a shepherd/He’s a lazy bastard
living in suit”.

He says the song would never have come to fruition with no the prompting of
collaborator/producer Patrick Leonard.

“Pat explained, ‘This would make a wonderful song’. I explained, ‘Are you mad?! This song is
a piece of self-indulgent introspective writing that does not deserve to see
the light of day’. Under his prodding, even so, I lastly began to see there
may be a song there.”

So how straightforward does he discover the creating procedure all these a long time into his occupation?
“I’ve never ever had a approach,” he affirms. “I often felt like I was scraping
the bottom of the barrel just trying to get the song together, the
starting, middle and an finish.

“I never ever had the sense that I was standing in front of a buffet table with a
multitude of choices. There are individuals who work at it with a wonderful sense of
abundance. I’d love to be 1 of people.

“Now and then, by some grace, some thing stands out and one thing invites you
to function on it, elaborate it or animate it in some way. It’s a mysterious
approach.”

After Going Property, we hear the near eight-minute confessional Amen which segues
neatly into the intensely moving Show Me The Spot. On these songs, Cohen
owns up to sins and searches for redemption, and yet again it feels like he’s
also singing for you and me.

Up coming up is the black, bluesy and brilliant Darkness, reputedly the first song
composed for the album, and filled with a sense of impending doom. “I’ve
got no future/I know my days are handful of.”

Cohen provides this telling insight into the song: “It requires the position of a
man standing up in the encounter of a thing that is irrevocable and unyielding
and singing about it. It’s the position that the Greek Zorba had — when
things get actually bad, you just increase your glass, stamp your feet, do a
small jig and that’s about all you can do.”

The slow, smoky, half-spoken Anyhow follows and the mood remains sombre. It
finds the singer reflecting on his bad behaviour to an ex-lover and incorporates
this excellent line: “I know you have to detest me/But could you detest me much less?”
In spite of nonetheless becoming mired in regret, a degree of warmth returns to the album
with the stunning Crazy To Really like You, 1 of 3 tracks featuring Cohen on
acoustic guitar.

He explains that the song was co-composed with “my dear buddy Anjani Thomas”
(that’s Len-speak for current adore interest).

“It is on a record she place out named Blue Alert. It’s quite a various
therapy but I always loved that song and I asked her to decrease it to
guitar chords that I could master.

“Her piano is so a lot more subtle and the chords are so a lot far more
sophisticated than the ones I could finger on my guitar. So she lowered it
to chords that she knew I could play. We rehearsed it for a while and then
did it in a single take.”

The topic of Cohen’s guitar playing, understated and accomplished on this
track, brings up an old grievance: “Journalists, particularly the English
journalists, are very cruel to me. They mentioned I only knew a few chords when I
knew five!”

Perhaps the most hymn-like song, lyrically and structurally, is Come Healing.
It opens with Dana Glover’s exquisite lead vocal before Cohen sings of the
“darkness yielding”. Redemption is lastly at hand, it appears.

He also asks the heavens hear this “penitential hymn.” “I’m not certain what this
indicates,” says its writer. “Is the penitence suitable to God or man? I indicate
who is to blame for this catastrophe?”

Quibble

The following song is the lilting Banjo, which consists of 1 of the most
uncommon and vivid images on Outdated Suggestions. “It is a broken banjo bobbing on
the dark infested sea.”

Was the broken banjo a thing Cohen had actually noticed? “I don’t know whether
I really saw it. I surely imagined it,” he replies, acknowledging that
there’s something “hilarious” about the instrument even in this dark and
dangerous setting.

Right after Banjo, the becalmed and stunning Lullaby feels like the ideal closing
song but there is one particular much more, the Hammond organ-fuelled Various Sides, which
comes above as an argument set to music.

If there is one criticism of Old Suggestions, it really is that this last track, the most
upbeat sounding, does not feel as if it belongs with the rest of the album,
but it really is a minor quibble.

Total, the ten songs emphatically demonstrate that Cohen’s nevertheless got it regardless of
his advancing a long time. Never neglect that this is the man who, in the Nineties,
retired from touring for 15 years and retreated from the globe altogether
for 5 many years to dwell as a Zen Buddhist monk.

“I was sort of like Ronald Reagan in his declining many years,” he suggests. “He
remembered he’d had a good part, the part of president in a film, and I
felt that somewhere I’d been a singer. But getting back on the road (from
2008) actually re-established me as a worker of the globe and that was a
really satisfactory feeling.”

He also reflects on the extraordinary response he got from the tour and how it
inspired him to compose new music: “I was touched by the reception of folks
all across the world.

“I’m not insensitive to that kind of appreciation so it did have an
invigorating effect. When I completed the tour, I did not sense like stopping
so I wrote the record. Perhaps that will carry above into an additional record and
maybe a new tour.”

Lastly, I’d just like to add that Cohen might have Outdated Ideas, suggestions that
reflect the flawed human condition because our time on Earth began.

But it will take a special talent to reflect them with this kind of grace.

RATING: 5/five

Music – The Sun