The first real interaction I had with Leonard Cohen’s body of work (aside from having heard “Hallelujah,” the 1984 single which would later be covered by every band with access to a piano or keyboard with a “strings” setting), was not with his music. It was, oddly enough, his poetry that first caught my attention. More than that, it was the fact that Cohen came across as equal parts Buddhist and hedonist. “You go your way,” he writes, “I’ll go your way too.”
You Want It Darker, in stark contrast, is not nearly as innocent. Cohen’s latest record retains his portrait as an absolute lover almost flawlessly, but it’s also informed by decades of experience. Cohen is explicitly aware that, at 82, he’s nearing the end of his life, and it seems that You Want It Darker addresses the topic in opposing ways. The narrative of the record seems withdrawn to a certain extent. Cohen is glancing back at us over his shoulder. But as a writer and musician, the man is clearly still full of vigour, of life.
And he’s the same old lover. “If the sun would lose its light, and we lived in endless night, and there was nothing left that you could feel,” he sings on the record’s fifth track. “That’s how broken I would be. What my life would seem to me. If I didn’t have your love to make it real.”
The thing that sets You Want It Darker apart from the many other singer-songwriter records out there today, is that Cohen isn’t pandering. The writing in You Want It Darker doesn’t purport to give us anything other than the meditations of a man who has, over the course of his life, dedicated himself to calmly and deliberately capturing all there is to know about feeling, about emotion, only to simmer it down through the lens of his own being before giving it back to us. Cohen’s lyricism is, if not more reserved, as insightful as it ever was.
The difference is that Cohen knows he’s going to die soon, and on tracks like “Traveling Light,” he’s keenly aware that he’s running out of time, of life, of energy. And if there’s anything that’s apparent on the record, it’s that Cohen has, to a certain extent, made his peace with his own mortality. But even facing the road to his own end, love’s on his mind. He’s “just a fool who forgot to dream of the me and you.”
One thing Cohen does a lot of on this record is look back. On “It Seemed the Better Way” he addresses mixed feelings on Roshi (a monk who served as Buddhist mentor and friend to Cohen), having been accused of sexual misconduct. The track only serves to further the aesthetic of coming to grips with things that were, and things that are.
Even his own religion is put to question in tracks like “Steer Your Way.” More than anything, though, it seems as if Cohen’s tidying up his thoughts, trying to make sense of a life that’s been more illustrious than he himself cares to acknowledge.
Well done, Mr. Cohen. There are worse (and less fulfilling) ways to bow out.
