Leonard Cohen: Ten New Songs

Columbia Records

Playing Time: 52:49

D. Malcolm Fairbrother

That the tiny resort of Mount Baldy, California has a Zen Centre is not nearly as remarkable as the fact hat Leonard Cohen spent eight years there. It was not so much a quest to explore the depths of a new source of spirituality that compelled the remarkable Canadian poet/singer into such a prolonged retreat as it was a more intrinsic and earthly reward that he sought: the escape from chronic depression and a growing dissatisfaction with the material possessions and remunerations concomitant with his success. Ultimately, the pleasures of the flesh proffered no release for the soul, nor any sign of the location of the more ephemeral path to such peace of mind.

Like many writers of quality, Leonard Cohen writes to please an audience of one, perhaps to entertain the critic within, perhaps to exorcise his personal demons. If the listener chooses to walk similar terrain and peer into similar mirrors, perhaps uncovering glimpses of one's own personal truths, so much the better for the art and the artist. But this much has always been clear: Leonard Cohen would walk the very same road in solitude.

Ten New Songs...the title, like an epigram, is deceptively simple. By choosing to extract neither a fragment of a lyric nor the title of one of the compositions, Mr. Cohen has emphasized the seamlessness of this opus. Like an impressionistic mosaic, each song contributes a part to the vision; to select one song as the thematic heart of the matter is to produce an effect not unlike removing a line from a simple line sketch and trying to decode its message. It is meant to be a part of a picture the meaning of which is more than the sum of its parts.

All compositions on Ten New Songs are collaborations with keyboardist Sharon Robinson, a partnership that has served Cohen well on past numbers such as Everybody Knows and Waiting For The Miracle. Miss Robinson's presence on the choruses and her harmonies throughout the work, are like little sparkles of light that glint throughout the gravelly coarseness of Cohen's voice, a remarkably disintegrating baritone, assaulted by time, cigarette smoke and alcohol -- yet nonetheless able to transfix the listener with its world-weary mixture of suffering and self-knowledge. Moreover, it is Robinson's minimalist instrumentation that serves as a sonic landscape so stark that the introduction of a strummed guitar on one song, and the delicate hint of swirling strings on another, produces an almost jarring shock to the listener.

The CD opens with In My Secret Life, a slowly unfolding song of commingled sadness and strength with the singer using familiar imagery to explore the symbiotic nature of life and love, now clarifying, now obscuring his thesis, as is Cohen's wont. Melodically, the song is his standard fare: the focus is on the lyric while the tune serves as a mere framework to differentiate the song from a poem. The song, and so many others on this opus, comes replete with the usual fusion of images drawn from the collective mythologies of both the secular and the spiritual world. The singer sees himself as a soldier in the battle of love in a song addressed to an unnamed adversary, now perhaps a past lover, now perhaps a rival...the shifts are subtle. First the stranger, now the singer is on the move, a reflection of the uncertain landscape of love and sex which constantly shifts underfoot; one moves, or one sinks and is swallowed. A Thousand Kisses Deep is a visit to the secular world of young girls, gambling, selling out for sex, and the Scavengers like me who pick through the wreckage of Boogie Street, yet manage to find some sanctuary a thousand kisses deep, the location of which is as unfathomable as the soul of the singer.

That Don't Make It Junk finds Cohen reflecting on the worth of pawned objects and personal earthly battles with a simply stated elegance, not to mention his laconic humour ( 'I fought against the bottle/But I had to do it drunk' ). The chaos and catastrophes of our failures do not necessarily undermine our value, just as a pawned diamond is nonetheless still a gem albeit in a less than majestic setting. Love Itself is an exploration of the ephemeral brevity of love; like light, and with about as much substance, love comes, illuminates, teaches, then disappears. What is learned is the 'formless circumstance' found between 'the Nameless and the name'. Ultimately, love cannot be explained, nor even defined except by examining the changes, barely perceptible or profound, in those who love. Beyond this earthly interpretation lies the suggestion that so it is with the spiritual world, evidenced only by its effects upon the humanity of being.

By The Rivers Dark (and what is a Leonard Cohen work without water imagery and a visit to Babylon?) is, in tandem with Here It Is, the thematic centre of the album. The former has all the familiar signposts on which are hung images of the flesh (Babylon and a heart cut by love, the hunter) and spirit (the flowing river and the flowing 'holy song' of the hunted.) It is a painfully exquisite allegory of a fated love. Here It Is, by comparison, is weighted down with symbols of crowns and rings and worldly accoutrements that may or may not define life in all its hope and misery; the distillation of these objects, symbols all of the complexities of the human condition, is wrapped in a simple prayer:

May everyone live.

May everyone die.

Hello, my love,

And my love, Goodbye.

The concluding song, The Land Of Plenty, serves as a prayer for the survival of humankind in the material world, one more psalm in a modern hymnal; the artist knows that our values have become polluted by a quest for the trappings of wealth so that, blinded by the lights, we do not see the light.

After eight years on the mountain, Leonard Cohen -- poet, seer, prophet, and human being has come back to tell us, with his unique elegance and his confounding combination of clarity and ambiguity, that things are more or less the same as when he left. We still live in Babylon, visit Boogie Street to try to heal our psychic pain, seek the answers to life's ineffable mysteries by exploring love, and come away wounded and wiser. He is our prophet whether we appreciate it or not. His feet are planted firmly on the ground while his soul soars like a glorious multifaceted kite. His song is the string.