Herald Scotland LEONARD Cohen has always been too old to be a rock star. His first album, Songs Of Leonard Cohen, appeared in 1967 when he was already 33, too old to die young as so many of those whose paths he crossed did. Now he’s really, really old. At 77, he remains standing, performing and producing new material that belies the ravages of age. Dressed in a suit and a fedora, looking like he ought to have a part on Boardwalk Empire and sounding like a volcanic eruption, he offers on this, his 12th studio album, 10 songs ransacked from the rag-and-bone shop of his overworked heart. Old Ideas finds Cohen at his most meditative and his most spiritual. With echoes of Tom Waits, Bob Dylan and, less complimentarily, Lee Marvin, he wants to be shown “the place where suffering began” and talks of having no future. “I know my days are few,” he sings on Darkness. Intimations of mortality run through Old Ideas like a creek that runs dry in a drought. Regrets – he has a few. Backed by Sharon Robinson and The Webb Sisters, who do much to sweeten the pill, and by a band that is beautifully understated, Cohen’s poetry is afforded sublime, melancholy context.
If songs such as Going Home (“Going home/without my sorrow/ Going home/sometime tomorrow”) have an air of valediction about them, then so be it. For his faithful devotees, the journey is what it’s all been about. Does Cohen still have it? You should know better than to ask such an impertinent question.
Alan Taylor
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