I was invited yesterday to an exclusive listening session of Leonard Cohen’s new album, “Old Ideas”, his first in nearly eight years. The 77-year-old music legend showed up as his usual self, dressed in a double-breasted black blazer and coiffed with his signature fedora. He slowly made his way to the stage like gentleman gangster. “Don’t suspend your alcohol interest, I won’t be in the room, he said with a smirk. I heard the album before. I won’t be monitoring your expressions. After, if questions don’t arise, we’ll share a drink, thank you friends”. Cohen set the tone.
Leonard Cohen rarely speaks to the media. No pictures, no tape recording and no video taping were allowed, so I frenetically scribbled on my notepad (so 2008) every word coming out of this old soul. It’s a short album, 41 minutes total. I am in no way qualified to critic this album, and will relay the laborious task to music specialists, but I will say this: I was taken away by the intricate yet simple melodies and hypnotized by his voice. Here are snippets of what “Laughing Len” had to say:
The opening line of the first song on the album is “I love to speak with Leonard, he’s a sportsman and a shepherd, he’s a lazy bastard living in a suit”. Where were you when you wrote that? “In trouble!” This song was only an experiment and Pat Leonard (producer on the album) convinced him to record it. Click here to listen and read the lyrics.
Since he chose this title to open the album, I asked him where he considered home to be at this moment in his life. “I have two homes, Montreal and Los Angeles”. A fellow reporter asked him if he had reached with age some sort of epiphany and had become more joyful. He quoted one of his mentors, Canadian poet Irving Layton who died in 2006: “Leonard’s mind has never been contaminated by a single idea”.
Cohen admitted “Show Me The Place” is his favorite song on the album. “It was one of those graceful periods which come out rarely in ones’s life, the songs came at a gratifying speed. Usually it takes a long time, it’s unsual in my world”, said the eternal perfectionist about the creation process.
Listening to his new songs, I couldn’t help but wonder how low could his baritone voice go. Your voice seems to be lower than ever, is that the case? “My voice is lower because I gave up smoking. As I mentionned before, I would like to take up smoking again when I’m 80, I expect it to rise. It’s one of those things that would convince me to tour again, smoking on the road”. Cohen finished an astonishing 250-date tour in 2010.
“For some financial reasons (his fortune was ripped off by his former manager in 2005), I was forced to go back on the road, to repair the fortunes of my family and myself. Suddenly I was dealing with living musicians and it did have a great effect and warmed some parts of my heart that had taken a chill”.
One of the songs is called “Banjo” and the chorus goes like this: “There’s something that I’m watching. Means a lot to me. It’s a broken banjo bobbing on the dark infested sea”. Cohen explained: “The origin of every song is pedestrian and obscure. I do have to remember that the song rose out of Katrina. Somehow, I saw that culture dismantle. That image of a broken banjo flotting in the dark infested sea came right out of that deep discomfort imposed from the disaster of Katrina”.
Asked to tell a New York anecdote, Cohen shared this one about the Chelsea Hotel, where he stayed in the ’60s and 70′s and composed the famous “Chelsea Hotel N°2″ (1974), an homage to Janis Joplin. Cohen’s room was near Andy Wahrol’s muse, Edie Sedwick’s. “She was extremely beautiful, all the beautiful people were in her room, and I was obviously not part of them. There was this store on 7th Avenue selling love powders and magic products. I was so desperate that I started to believe in these products. I bought a book about candles. At a certain point, I was invited into Edie’s room. It was filled with a glittering crowd and candles everywhere. I had no credentials and nothing to say other than: “This display of candles is extremely dangerous” like I was some expert in candles. Needless to say, I didn’t stay long. Her room burned down the next day and my prestige soared”.
-Old Ideas comes out on January 31st.
Photos courtesy of Sony Music Entertainment Canada Inc.
