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Leonard Cohen: The Future

 A l b u m   D e t a i l s


Label: Columbia Records
Released: 1992.11.24
Time:
 59:37
Category: Folk Rock
Producer(s): Leonard Cohen, Steve Lindsey, Bill Ginn, Leanne Ungar, Rebecca De Mornay, Yoav Goren
Rating:
Media type: CD
Web address: www.leonardcohen.com
Appears with:
Purchase date: 2015
Price in €: 1,00





 S o n g s ,   T r a c k s


[1] The Future (L.Cohen) - 6:41
[2] Waiting for the Miracle (L.Cohen/S.Robinson) - 7:42
[3] Be for Real (F.Knight) - 4:32
[4] Closing Time (L.Cohen) - 6:00
[5] Anthem (L.Cohen) - 6:09
[6] Democracy (L.Cohen) - 7:13
[7] Light as the Breeze (L.Cohen) - 7:14
[8] Always (Irving Berlin) - 8:04
[9] Tacoma Trailer (L.Cohen) - 5:57

 A r t i s t s ,   P e r s o n n e l


Leonard Cohen - Vocals, Arranger, Producer, Programming, Saxophone, Violin

Bill Ginn - Performer, Producer, Programming, Synclavier
Yoav Goren - Arranger, Performer, Producer, Programming
Steve Lindsey - Arranger, Keyboards, Mellotron, Organ, Piano, Producer, Wurlitzer
John Barnes - Bass, Synthesizer Bass
Bob Blaub - Bass
Lenny Castro - Percussion, Tambourine
Vinnie Colaiuta - Drums
Jim Cox - Piano
Steve Croes - Programming, Synclavier
Brandon Fields - Tenor Saxophone
Mike Finnigan - Organ
Jeff Fisher - Arranger, Keyboards, Performer, Programming
Bob Furgo - Saxophone, Violin
James Gadson - Drums
Bob Glaub - Bass
Ed Greene - Drums
Dennis Herring - Electric Guitar
Paul Jackson, Jr. - Guitar
Randy Kerber - Keyboards
Steve Meador - Drums
Bob Metzger - Bass, Acoustic, Electric & Steel Guitar, Pedal Steel
Dean Parks - Guitar, Acoustic Guitar, Mandolin, Weissenborn
Greg Phillinganes - Piano
Lon Price - Tenor Saxophone
Lee Sklar - Bass
Leland Sklar - Bass
Greg Smith - Baritone Saxophone
Greg "Frosty" Smith - Baritone Saxophone
Lee Thornburg - Horn Arrangements, Trombone, Trumpet
Freddie "Ready Freddie" Washington - Bass

David Campbell - Arranger, Conductor, String Arrangements, Strings, Background Vocals
Ronald Clark - Strings
Larry Corbett - Strings
Joel Derouin - Strings
Bruce Dukov - Strings
Donald Ferrone - Strings
Berj Garabedian - Strings
Suzie Katayama - Strings
Suzie Kattayama - Strings
Daniel Smith - Strings
Raymond Tischer - Strings
Thomas Tally - Strings
Sid Page - Strings

Peggi Blue - Vocals, Background Vocals
Jean Johnson - Vocals, Background Vocals
David Morgan - Vocals, Background Vocals
Valerie Pinkston-Mayo - Vocals, Background Vocals
Anjani Thomas - Vocals, Background Vocals
Jennifer Warnes - Vocals, Background Vocals
Tony Warren - Vocals, Background Vocals
Edna Wright - Vocals, Background Vocals 

Jacquelyn Gouche-Farris - Background Vocals

LA Mass Choir:
Donald Taylor - Choir Director, Director
Perla Batalla - Choir/Chorus, Vocals, Background Vocals
Gigi Bailey - Choir/Chorus
Cynthia Bass - Choir/Chorus
LaVan Davis - Choir/Chorus
Lashanna Dendy - Choir/Chorus
Brenda Lee Eager - Choir/Chorus
Aladrain Elmore - Choir/Chorus
Patricia Finnie - Choir/Chorus
Julie Christensen - Choir/Chorus, Vocals, Background Vocals
Nysa Larry - Choir/Chorus
Sonya Griffin - Choir/Chorus
Raven Kane - Choir/Chorus
Carmen Twillie - Choir/Chorus
Julia Waters - Choir/Chorus
Oren Waters - Choir/Chorus
Maxine Willard Waters - Choir/Chorus

Leanne Ungar - Engineer, Mixing, Producer
Rebecca de Mornay - Arranger, Producer
Airiq Anest - Engineer
Ray Blair - Engineer
Chad Blinman - Engineer
Richard Cottrell - Engineer
Enrico DePaoli - Engineer
Mark Guilbeault - Engineer
Rob Hart - Engineer
Richard Kaplan - Engineer
Charles Paakkari - Engineer
Duane Seykora - Engineer
Talley Sherwood - Engineer
David Shoeber - Engineer
Ian Terry - Engineer
Ben Wallach - Engineer
Tom Winslow - Engineer
Bernie Grundman - Mastering
Michael Petit - Cover Design

 C o m m e n t s ,   N o t e s


As with most every Leonard Cohen album, a new record means a new means of musical exploration. With The Future, Cohen adds chiming synthesizers and eerie orchestrations to his brooding anthems about life's darker half. One of the last of Cohen's full-length albums, The Future is definitely one of the most direct. More notable tracks include "The Future" and "Waiting for the Miracle," both of which were featured on the Natural Born Killers soundtrack. Closer to spoken word poetry set to music than simply songs, the entire album is one long manifesto calling all to challenge the concepts of righteousness and despair in our modern world. Regardless of the music behind the man, Cohen still manages to bring to The Future what he brought to his earlier recordings: one man against the world with nothing but a gruff voice and a cause.

Christopher Fielder - All Music Guide



The star procession flowed over a garish red carpet and into the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion for the 1992 Academy Awards. Amid the swell of celebrated people, Leonard Cohen (who arrived on the arm of his lover and occasional coarranger, Rebecca De Mornay) went wholly unnoticed. It suited him fine. Cohen hovers above popular success. He comes and he goes, from time and from place, like a shadow. Once an isolated romantic who wrote intensely personal poems and set precedent for modern brooders like Morrissey, Cohen is now third person omniscient.

The Future, Cohen's eleventh album, is epic. In the late Sixties, he wrote detailed stories of fleeting moments by rivers or in hotel rooms. Now that he's fifty-eight, his themes are political and cultural, sweeping. His deep, sepia-toned voice has always lent his love songs a haunting intimacy. When on "So Long, Marianne" (from Songs of Leonard Cohen, 1968) he sang. "Your letters they all say that you're beside me now/Then why do I feel so alone? I'm standing on a ledge/And your fine spider web/Is fastening my ankle to a stone," he captured love's ambivalence. His voice deeper still on this nine-track album, Cohen explores the world with the same precision with which he's studied the rumpled sheets of many unmade beds.

On "Democracy," which starts with a drumroll and tumbles into a march, Cohen questions America's premise with wit and Canadian objectivity: "It's coming from the sorrow on the street/The holy places where races meet/From the homicidal bitchin' that goes down in every kitchen/To determine who will serve and who will eat/From the wells of disappointment where the women kneel to pray/For the Grace of God in the desert here/And the desert far away/Democracy is coming to the U.S.A." His creepy growl sounds like Tom Waits, only with better enunciation. His lazy phrasing lets the words seep instead of attack.

The album's two borrowed songs – the obscure "Be for Real" and Irving Berlin's classic "Always" – are simple tunes complicated by the songs that surround them. Amid spiritual emptiness ("Closing Time"), personal disillusionment (the wrenching "Waiting for the Miracle") and occasional schmaltz (the overwrought "Light as the Breeze"), lyrics like "I'll be loving you, always/With a love that's true, always" are almost laughably quaint. Sung in a bluesy, barroom style, they're made ironic. "Be for Real" cries, "I don't want to be hurt by love again" – funny coming from the man who wrote the book on despair and loss.

The title track, a rocker with a gospel chorus, describes the advanced decay of our society. Cohen sings, "Give me crack and anal sex/Take the only tree that's left and stuff it up the hole in your culture/Give me back the Berlin Wall/Give me Stalin and St. Paul/I've seen the future, brother: It is murder." He's nostalgic for order and boundaries; without them, where does anyone belong? When the forbidden becomes commonplace, there is no mystery, no chance for illicit pleasure or even romance. Chaos negates freedom. Apocalyptic mood established, he sings, "The blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold/And it has overturned the order of the soul/When they said repent, I wonder what they meant."

The album closes with "Tacoma Trailer," an instrumental (in which Cohen's voice is replaced by the moans of an upright bass) that stretches out, vast and desolate, like a wasteland. Cohen, who has published two novels and more verse, has a great command of language and form. That gives him the freedom to move gracefully – from Montreal to Hollywood or from classics to folk music and finally, on this track, to silence. The Future might as easily have been a book: A more troubling, more vexing image of human failure has not been written. (RS 647)

Christian Wright - Jan 7, 1993
RollingStone.com



The Future is the ninth studio album by Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, released in 1992. After touring successfully in support of his "comeback" album I'm Your Man (1988), Cohen took a year off to help his son Adam convalesce after a serious car accident in the West Indies left the young man in a coma for four months. Cohen also began a romantic relationship with the actress Rebecca De Mornay. Anthony Reynolds notes in his book Leonard Cohen: A Remarkable Life that work on Cohen's ninth studio album "was not forged in one concentrated effort. The number of studios used ran into double figures and was spread between Montreal and L.A., although the original plan was to record it in Montreal only, with the same personnel that had worked on I'm Your Man. The cast brought to bear on the album was more akin to a movie production and included both a choir and an orchestra..." The songwriting process had not gotten easier for Cohen over the years; in an interview with of The Q Magazine, the singer admitted, “I’ve never found it easy to write. Period. I mean, I don’t want to whine about it or anything but...it’s a bitch! It’s terrible work. I’m very disciplined in that I can settle down into the work situation but coming up with the words is very hard. Hard on the heart, hard on the head and it just drives you mad. Before you know it, you’re crawling across the carpet in your underwear trying to find a rhyme for ‘orange’. It’s a terrible, cruel job. But I’m not complaining."

According to Ira Nadel's 1996 Cohen memoir Various Positions, the title track was originally called "If You Could See What's Coming Next," and underwent extensive rewrites, taking up almost sixty pages in Cohen's notebook, while "Closing Time" took two years with Cohen even starting over from scratch on the song as late as March 1992. Nadel also reveals that "Anthem" was borrowed from Kabbalistic sources, especially the sixteenth-century rabbi Isaac Luria. In the Paul Zollo book Songwriters on Songwriting, Cohen explains that it takes him so long to finish songs because "Nothing works. After a while, if you stick with the song long enough it will yield. But long enough is way beyond any reasonable estimation of what you think long enough may be...'Anthem' took a decade to write. And I've recorded it three times. More." In the same interview, Cohen spoke at length about "Democracy," admitting that he wrote 60 verses for it:

This was when the Berlin Wall came down and everyone was saying democracy is coming to the east. And I was like that gloomy fellow who always turns up at a party to ruin the orgy or something. And I said, "I don’t think it’s going to happen that way. I don’t think this is such a good idea. I think a lot of suffering will be the consequence of this wall coming down." But then I asked myself, "Where is democracy really coming?" And it was the U.S.A....So while everyone was rejoicing, I thought it wasn’t going to be like that, euphoric, the honeymoon. So it was these world events that occasioned the song. And also the love of America. Because I think the irony of America is transcendent in the song. It’s not an ironic song. It’s a song of deep intimacy and affirmation of the experiment of democracy in this country. That this is really where the experiment is unfolding. This is really where the races confront one another, where the classes, where the genders, where even the sexual orientations confront one another. This is the real laboratory of democracy.

Political events and history are found elsewhere on the album, with Cohen making references to Tiananmen Square, Stalin, World War II and Hiroshima. "I was living in L.A. through the riots and the earthquakes and the floods," the singer told Uncut's Nigel Williamson in 1997. "And even for one as relentlessly occupied with himself as I am it is very hard to keep your mind on yourself when the place is burning down, so I think that invited me to look out of the window." Although the tone of the album is at times somber, it does contain much of the wry humor that is evident on Cohen's previous LP I'm Your Man. The Future also contains two cover songs, including Irving Berlin's "Always" and Frederick Knight's "Be For Real," as well as "Tacoma Trailer," the first instrumental that Cohen had ever placed on one of his studio albums. Several producers are credited on the LP, including Cohen and Rebecca De Mornay.

Three songs from this album, "Anthem," "The Future," and the menacing "Waiting for the Miracle" (co-written by Sharon Robinson) were prominently used on the soundtrack for Oliver Stone's 1994 film Natural Born Killers. Songs from the album have also appeared in the films Wonder Boys starring Michael Douglas and The Life of David Gale starring Kevin Spacey. A cover version of "Light as The Breeze" by Billy Joel appears on the tribute album Tower of Song: The Songs of Leonard Cohen released in 1995. Billy Joel included his version on his compilation "Billy Joel Greatest Hits volume III" in 1997. A cover version of "Anthem" appears on the album Matador: The Songs of Leonard Cohen released by the Canadian singer Patricia O'Callaghan in 2012.

The album charted as high as #36 in the U.K. and was phenomenally successful in Canada, going gold, platinum, and double-platinum.[4] Cohen also won the Canadian Juno Award for Best Male Vocalist in 1993 for The Future. In his acceptance speech, he quipped, "Only in Canada could somebody with a voice like mine win Vocalist of the Year."[5] The music video for Cohen's song "Closing Time" also won the Juno Award for Best Music Video in 1993.[6] In the original Rolling Stone review, Christian Wright called the album "epic," enthusing "The Future might as easily have been a book: A more troubling, more vexing image of human failure has not been written." Christopher Fielder of AllMusic calls the LP "one long manifesto calling all to challenge the concepts of righteousness and despair in our modern world." In 2010 biographer Anthony Reynolds called The Future "classic big budget AOR yet with lyrics by Lorca, Bukowski and Lowell, sang by an old wino from Skid Row who really wanted to sound like Ray Charles at the Apollo."

Wikipedia.org
 

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