Old Ideas

Every song on Leonard Cohen’s first album of new material in eight years takes place in the wee small hours. Tempos are at a kingsnake crawl and the sound is full of caresses, variations on the classy but louche cabaret tunes Cohen once dubbed the European blues. The vocals and music unfold in a whisper, and each cut waits tremulously for the dawn, with no guarantee that this time the darkness will not be permanent.

The first words belong to God himself, who wants to have a talk with Leonard, that “lazy bastard living in a suit.” Cohen, it seems, has been busy trying to write his love songs and manuals for living with defeat instead of delivering God’s message, which is all the 77-year-old has been put here to do, and which is: Time to go home, a trip you make naked and burdenless to a place better than this one.
And th-th-that’s all, folks! Three minutes and 50 seconds, titled “Going Home,” sum up the story Cohen has been telling since he first left poetry for music in 1967 (after 11 years as Canada’s most famous poet, he was 33 and thought the money would be better). When Cohen calls this album Old Ideas, he means not just that these are the thoughts of a septuagenarian, but that he’s been turning over these cards for a long while: sex, love, God, and the way the three can be shuffled to relieve the pain of existence.