Hail and Farewell, part 3: Cohen

While David Bowie did almost all the work for which he's best remembered by the age of 33, Leonard Cohen didn't even begin his recording career until he turned 33. He was already famous, in Canada anyway, before he ever made a record. I first became acquainted with him through the "Selected Poems" which I'd read obsessively before I ever heard him sing. And while Cohen wrote many, many great songs in the first 20 years of his musical career- from "Suzanne" to "Hallelujah", from "Bird on the Wire" to "If It Be Your Will" - he didn't even begin to figure out how to make effective records until he was well into his 50s. And after making "I'm Your Man" and "The Future" Cohen retreated from the world into a monastery. By far the most productive and rewarding portion of his musical career came after he turned 75, forced back into activity by a larcenous financial manager. Which is certainly a unique career arc.

Cohen's early music is based on his own guitar playing, the half dozen chords he'd mastered along with a flamenco approach to finger picking. In his old age, he discovered his voice had dropped about an octave and the only way he could still play those songs was by tuning his guitar down several steps. But he'd turned much of the musical work over to his collaborators anyway. He'd also learned to let the voices of his female collaborators - Julie Christensen, Perla Battala, Sharon Robinson, Hattie and Charlie Webb - do the heavy lifting of carrying his melodies (and it's always overlooked, but Leonard Cohen came up with beautiful melodies) while the poet half-sang, half-intoned lyrics that he'd famously spent years polishing. Sometimes decades.

This last record was preceded by news of his failing health, and that he was "ready to die." He appeared at a press event the day of its release, noticeably short of breath, but in his usual good humour. He said he had a tendency to be overly dramatic and that he intended to live forever. He was gone three weeks later. You Want it Darker was recorded at his laptop in his living room, the essentially immobile artist singing from a medical chair and exchanging emails of the backing tracks with his collaborators. Cohen had been asked about the place religion had in his life and work. He said he had no spiritual strategies he could recommend, only that he'd grown up with a certain vocabulary and was comfortable using it. And so in the title track, we hear him singing fom the Torah, "Hineni, Hineni (Here I am) - I'm ready my Lord." There's an overwhelming sense of a man putting his affairs in order. It runs a brief 37 minutes and has little time for the usual jokes, and little time for many of the old obsessions - "I don't need a lover / That wretched beast is tame."  I love all of it, of course, especially "Steer Your Way" and the impossibly gorgeous "Treaty," which gives us one last magnificent melody.

I wish there was a treaty we could sign
It's over now, the water and the wine
We were broken then, but now we're borderline
I wish there was a treaty
I wish there was a treaty
Between your love and mine