“Going Home,” the first song on Leonard Cohen’s new album, “Old Ideas,” comes from the perspective of his inner self, or, as Cohen—who lived for five years in a Zen monastery—might call it, his Buddha nature. It is this spiritual Higher Leonard who is looking forward to “going home without my burden, going home behind the curtain, going home without the costume that I wore” as he moves through the latter decades of his life. That costume is the Earthly Leonard, in his suit and fedora, “who knows he’s really nothing but the brief elaboration of a tube.” It is Higher Leonard, we learn—without surprise—who is the craftsman and seer behind Cohen’s twelve mostly brilliant studio albums: Earthly Leonard “only has permission / to do my instant bidding / which is to say what I have told him to repeat.”
But Earthly Leonard is a smooth and dapper creature, and even Higher Leonard is not immune to his charms: “I love to speak with Leonard / He’s a sportsman and a shepherd.” Earthly Leonard is not only essential to Cohen’s creative process as a vessel and a scribe; it is this Leonard—racked with longing and “living with defeat”—who has the misadventures his inner counterpart requires to mold into music. The Earthly Leonard is still, thankfully, dancing around the wheel of desire, like the rest of us, eluded by enlightenment.
Despite the title of Cohen’s 1977 album “Death of a Ladies Man” (an unfortunate collaboration with Phil Spector; Cohen later deemed it “grotesque”), we get the sense that, at seventy-seven, Earthly Leonard remains the prowling, problem-causing wolf of his youth, at least in his fantasies. In “Anyhow” he pleads, “Have mercy on me baby, after all I did confess / I know you have to hate me, but could you hate me less?” Though Cohen laments, “I’m old and the mirrors don’t lie,” on songs like “Crazy to Love You” we hear the same corporeal yearning that he has been singing about since “Chelsea Hotel No. 2,” his 1974 ballad about an intimate encounter with Janis Joplin. (He would come to regret having revealed the identity of that song’s subject, calling the admission “the sole indiscretion in my professional life.”)
Ardor can be exhausting, and at one point Cohen quietly howls, “I’m tired of choosing desire, I’ve been saved by a blessed fatigue.” But I hope and suspect that he wrote that line when he was simply in need of a solid nap. A few years ago, I went with The New Yorker’s music critic Sasha Frere-Jones to see Cohen perform at Radio City Music Hall, and I was struck by how much passion that suave septuagenarian can still convey and elicit. He was understated, but irresistible. Listening to Cohen’s raspy tenor live convinced me that his genius lies as much in his sensuality as it does in his profundity.
Sadly, Cohen has yet to announce any shows to promote this new album. Four years after Cohen left the Mount Baldy Zen Center, where he’d pursued the transcendence of Earthly attachment, he discovered that a former manager had detached five million dollars from his life savings. (Cohen sued, and won, but has been unable to recover his money.) A few months after we saw Cohen perform at Radio City Music Hall, his bassist and musical director Roscoe Beck told Sasha, “I asked him, ‘Are you going on the road just because you’re broke?’ And he said, ‘Well, that might have something to do with it.’ ” The material world has its consolations.
Photograph by Joel Saget/AFP/Getty.
