Quoting Yeats in a recent interview, Leonard Cohen compared writing his latest album to “working in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.” The comparison is characteristically prescient — Cohen is known for his songs’ closeness to the poetic, the spiritual and the sepulchral. Jennifer Warnes, who has worked with Cohen in the past, has described Cohen’s music as “the place where God and sex and literature meet.”
Upon first listen, Cohen’s voice is almost jarring; its deep growl, and later its whisper, are rarely heard outside horror movies or a Tom Waits album, but as the album progresses, the singer’s unusual voice grows on the listener, and at times evokes the thoughtful melodies of “Hallelujah” or “So Long Marianne” or any number of old Cohen songs.
On Old Ideas first track, “Going Home,” which was also published in the New Yorker as a poem, deconstructs the popular image of Cohen as a famous songwriter and as someone to be revered: “I love to speak with Leonard / He’s a sportsman and a shepherd / He’s a lazy bastard / Living in a suit … 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.”
Old Ideas wades through similar lyrical themes of remembrance and reflection that pervade Cohen’s career, but musically, the album breaks new ground for the artist. Thankfully, Old Ideas throws out the late ’80s — Cohen musical stylings that sounded more like a corpse with a synthesizer than the plaintive balladeer that so many of his fans grew to love. On the new album, Cohen mixes gypsy-jazz, a hokey version of the blues, acoustic ballads and carnivalesque lounge music and somehow makes it work.
The album risked being typecast as one of those rock ‘n’ roll swan songs a la old Bob Dylan. And there is some level of similarity between Cohen’s raspy voice and Dylan’s recent records, but unlike Dylan, who seems adrift without his youthful vigor and his songwriting, Cohen was always a little too old to be a rock star. He has always had some level of fixation with mortality. What’s more, Cohen still has a penchant for writing songs while Dylan has relied heavily on covers in recent years.
Throughout Old Ideas, a sense of the sacred pervades the songs. “Come Healing” could easily be played on Sunday morning at any number of local churches and few would bat an eye. As Cohen’s “penitential hymn” plays out, it is hard not to be provoked by the man’s intimate stories, lyrics and song-writing ability. The songs are honest and will undoubtedly leave the listener either disquieted by the artist’s intimacy or enthralled.
As the album closes concurrent, it would seem, Leonard Cohen’s career, the artist seems to be, as Jarvis Cocker notes, “staring death straight in the face.” Cohen’s Old Ideas ends, not as a sorrowful dirge, but in keeping with the traditions of his work, the album is pregnant with poetry, with jubilation, with sad songs and most of all, with honesty.