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Leonard Cohen: You Want It Darker

 A l b u m   D e t a i l s


Label: Columbia Records
Released: 2016.10.21
Time:
 36:07
Category: Rock
Producer(s): Leonard Cohen, Adam Cohen, Patrick Leonard
Rating:
Media type: CD
Web address: www.leonardcohen.com
Appears with:
Purchase date: 2016
Price in €: 1,00





 S o n g s ,   T r a c k s


[1] You Want It Darker (Leonard Cohen / Patrick Leonard) - 4:44
[2] Treaty (Leonard Cohen) - 4:02
[3] On the Level (Leonard Cohen / Sharon Robinson) - 3:27
[4] Leaving the Table (Leonard Cohen) - 3:47
[5] If I Didn't Have Your Love (Leonard Cohen / Patrick Leonard) - 3:35
[6] Traveling Light (Adam Cohen / Leonard Cohen / Patrick Leonard) - 4:22
[7] It Seemed the Better Way (Leonard Cohen / Patrick Leonard) - 4:21
[8] Steer Your Way (Leonard Cohen) - 4:23
[9] String Reprise/Treaty (Leonard Cohen) - 3:26

 A r t i s t s ,   P e r s o n n e l


Leonard Cohen - Vocals, Producer
 
Patrick Leonard - Bass, Composer, Drum Programming, Keyboard Bass, Keyboards, Organ, Percussion, Piano, Producer, String Conductor
Zac Rae - Celeste, Engineer, Floor Tom, Electric & Nylon String Guitar, Keyboards, Mandolin, Mellotron, Octaphone, Piano, WurlitzerBill Bottrell - Electric & Pedal Steel Guitar, Engineer
Michael Chaves - Bass, Drum Programming, Keyboards, Engineer, Mixing
Adam Cohen - Nylon String Guitar, Cover Photo, Producer
Tom Hemby - Bouzouki
Rob Humphreys - Drums
Sean Hurley - Bass
Brian Macleod - Drums
 
Roï Azoulay - Conductor
Cantor Gideon Y. Zelermyer - Soloist 
David Davidson - Violin
Etienne Gara - Violin
Michelle Hassler - Viola
Luanne Holmzy - Violin
Yoshika Masuda - Cello
 
Athena Andreadis - Background Vocals
Dana Glover - Background Vocals
Alison Kraus - Background Vocals
 
Florian Ammon - Engineer
Howard Bilerman - Engineer
Bruce Gaitsch - Engineer
Stephen Marcussen - Mastering
Kezban Özcan - Executive Assistant
Sammy Slabbinck - Design
Dianne Lawrence - Images

 C o m m e n t s ,   N o t e s


2016 CD Columbia / Sony Music 88985365072
 
 
 
Given the subject matter in its title track, Leonard Cohen's advanced age (82), it's tempting to hear You Want It Darker as a last album. In advance of its release, he even told The New Yorker that he was ready to die, only to walk the comment back later. Whether it is or isn't, You Want It Darker is a hell of a record. Cohen wrote these songs alone and with old friends Sharon Robinson and Patrick Leonard. Son Adam produced, stepping in while his father was suffering from a severe back injury that required him to sing from a medically designed chair.
 
Cohen's sepulchral voice expresses a wealth of emotion through its grainy rasp. He remains defiant even while acknowledging failures, regrets, brokenness, and even anger. Redemption arrives, if at all, through unflinching honesty. The title track single is introduced by a choir and a foreboding bassline. Its lyric is as much an indictment of religion as a reflection, personal confession, and doubt. Cantor Gideon Y. Zelermyer engages with the sacred even as Cohen wrestles with it. For every, "Hineni, Hineni/I'm ready my Lord…" there is a counter: "...Magnified and sanctified/Be thy Holy Name/Vilified and crucified/In the human frame/A million candles burning/For the help that never came…." In the final verse he asserts: "If you are the dealer/I want out of this game," but he's answered by Zelermyer's and the choir's resolute devotion. "Treaty" recalls the melody of "Anthem" as piano, synth strings, and chorale highlight the poignancy in the lyric. Cohen equates past hopes and perceived truths with his guilt: "We sold ourselves for love but now we're free/I'm sorry for the ghost I made you be…." "Leaving the Table" is a bittersweet country waltz where Cohen reveals things he no longer needs (even if he wishes he did), and underscores impending exit: "I don't need a pardon/There's no one left to blame/I'm leaving the table/I'm out of the game." The intersection of the blues, Yiddish folk, and gypsy musics on "Traveling Light" flows through bouzoukis, mandolins, and drum loops. Their union recalls the haunted musical qualities on 1984's Various Positions.
 
In song after song, Cohen delivers lyric juxtapositions that settle scores with God, past lovers, and himself. He sounds like a spent Jeremiah muttering to himself and arguing with his creator in a cave rather than the biblical one transported to heaven in a fiery chariot of victory. But even after all this, Cohen can't quite give up the ghost. The tender stringed reprise of "Treaty" closes the set with a faint -- and perhaps desperate -- twinge of hope: "I wish there was a treaty/between your love and mine." Despite his long list of gripes, sins, and losses, Cohen's instinctive opening to whatever light remains prevails on You Want It Darker. When all contradictions are nakedly exposed in truth, all one can do is embrace them and wish for the best. Brilliant.
 
Thom Jurek - All Music Guide
 
 
 
Leonard Cohen, the acclaimed composer of "Hallelujah", continues to astonish his audience. At age 82, he presents his uncompromising and urgent new album, You Want It Darker. Described by early listeners as a "masterpiece" and "classic Cohen," You Want It Darker, is the latest chapter in Leonard's significant contribution to contemporary music and thought. These startling songs have been beautifully realized in this his 14th studio album featuring 9 new tracks including the title track, all produced by his son, Adam Cohen. 
 
Amazon.com
 
 
 
You Want It Darker is the 14th studio record from Leonard Cohen. At once musician, poet, storyteller, and all around Renaissance man, the singer-songwriter has experimented with a variety of instrumentation throughout his 60-year career. These sounds have captured the minimal essence of gentle acoustics from previous works such as his ever popular record Songs from a Room (1969), to the more recent blues heavy Popular Problems (2014). Cohen has proven over this immense career that he can always find just the right music to convey the story that he’s telling. In You Want It Darker, there is a darker, more somber reflection taking place than in previous work. This is portrayed not only through a combination of excellent usage in different sounds, but also with superb lyricism.
 
Title track “You Want It Darker” sets the overall tone for the record in its minimalism. While the track is primarily a light beat, some orchestral keys and light singing in the background, these small parts do create a largeness to them. This largeness becomes stronger when Cohen’s lyrics come in with lines such as, “They’re lining up the prisoners now / The guards are taking aim / I struggled with some demons / They were middle-class and tame / I Didn’t know I had permission / To murder and to maim / You want it darker…” The particular story becomes haunting and heavier with the background allowing it to have room.
 
The record narrows in on specific themes that include politics, religion, love, and age. “Treaty” is one of the stronger sorrowful moments, opening with the lines: “I seen you change the water into wine / I seen you change it back to water too / I sit at your table every night / I try but I just don’t get high with you…”, eventually leading into “…I wish there was a treaty / Between your love and mine.” This is backed by gentle keyboards and lighter strings that fill the background. This combination is a giant pool of emotion, made of these droplets to create such an effective story. Cohen’s storytelling is at some of his best with this record, and his lyricism is at once playful, poetic, sorrowful, and alive.
 
“On the Level” comes in with the same keys as before, but with the first time we get more of a prominent guitar. What happens within the next minute is this jump to a soulful chorus where the guitar adds more of a drive. This is a pure soul track with large doses of what makes catchy gospel music. “Leaving the Table” takes a long curve around the bend to deliver a strong country twang, that then transitions into a steady peaceful country song (while not losing its somber edge). The track primarily focusing on guitar and strings, creating a relaxing stroll through the lyrics.
 
“If I Didn’t Have Your Love” switches gear lyrically with new focus on love. Whereas the previous three songs were of losing love in the walking away sense, this is a losing love in what it means to have that special someone not with you when you care for them. Halfway through the album we see the majority of instrumentals utilize keyboards, guitar, and strings. While the music itself is very beautiful, its main role is in enhancing the story. “Traveling Light” has the “fastest” introduction in the sense of the picking notes. Even at this point Cohen has proven himself worthy of creating scenes with his music. There’s lots of movement of the characters in each song, whether it’s in where they travel, or their actions interacting with others in the stories.
 
“Traveling Light” creates a late night stroll of twinkling stars, and moon light reflecting in water. “It Seemed the Better Way” begins with some beautiful strings that lead into the first time the record ever feels “dreamy”; the gentle airy energy in the background, accompanied with the simple rhythm creates a heavy mist. There is this dark almost sinister tone to this song not even near being captured close previously. It is a welcoming sound and adds an extra level as far as mystery to the lyrics. The strings make a bright appearance towards the end, being the only thing pulling the listener in from the heavier side of darkness.
 
“Steer Your Way” feels bigger in itself than just one song telling a story. The instrumental is playful, and each following note hits like a footstep, which plays strongly into the idea that this song is conveying traveling. The song itself feels it is the embodiment of an entire journey. Cohen’s lyrics not only discuss what the character views in the moment, but that which they reflect on within. In a way this is the one time that the record takes a major step away from any dark vibes and portrays something lighter and upbeat. The record goes back to a much darker place after with the final track “String Reprise/ Treaty”. The strings at their heaviest and most sorrowful, we return to perhaps the saddest song on the track. The echo in each draw vibrates a loneliness, only more powerful with Cohen’s voice as he states, “I wish there was a treaty we could sign / It’s over now, the water and the wine / We were broken then, but now we’re borderline / And I wish there was a treaty / I wish there was a treaty/ Between your love and mine.”
 
In You Want It Darker, Leonard Cohen presents a body of work that feels whole and complete with its large moments and small steps of reflection, loss, and discovery. Cohen’s work throughout the years has captured reflection in an attempt to understand what is going on with the world at the time. What You Want It Darker accomplishes isn’t just powerful instrumentation in minimalism, or strong poeticism, but that of an artist baring their soul, and the sharing of sincere truth.
 
Michael Pementel - 24 October 2016
© 1999-2016 PopMatters.com
 
 
 
Leonard Cohen has rarely been seen in public since he wrapped up his "Grand Tour" at the Vector Arena in Auckland, New Zealand, on December 21st, 2013, with a joyous encore of the Drifters' "Save the Last Dance for Me." That five-year, 387-date global odyssey – where he played for well over three hours a night – was a massive musical (and financial) success. But not long after, Cohen began to suffer serious physical problems. "Among many other things, he had multiple fractures of the spine," says his son Adam. "He has a lot of hard miles on him."
 
The 82-year-old singer-songwriter now lives on the second floor of a house he shares with his daughter Lorca in the Wilshire neighborhood of Los Angeles. (Lorca is raising a five-year-old daughter whose father is Rufus Wainwright.) In Cohen's words, he's "confined to barracks" due to severe mobility issues, but he was determined not to let that stop him from recording his new LP, You Want It Darker. He began work on the album about a year and a half ago, but he had to stop when producer Patrick Leonard (who worked with Cohen on his last two albums) suffered what Adam Cohen describes as "very serious personal problems." Cohen then invited Adam, a singer-songwriter in his own right, to come in and complete the project. "It's increasingly rare for children to be so useful to their parents," says Adam. "To be in such intimate circumstances for such a lengthy period of time with my father was filled with sweetness for me."
 
Adam turned Cohen's house into a makeshift recording studio, placing an old Neumann U 87 microphone on the dining room table and filling the living room with computers, outboard gear and speakers. He also brought in an orthopedic medical chair for his father. "It's designed to accommodate someone spending many, many hours on it," says Adam. "You can sleep in it, eat in it and practically stand in it." A laptop ran ProTools – Leonard merely had to sing. "Occasionally, in bouts of joy, he would even, through his pain, stand up in front of the speakers, and we'd repeat a song over and over like teenagers," Adam adds. "Sometimes medical marijuana intervened and played a role." The vocal tracking became a form of therapy for Leonard. "At times I was very worried about his health, and the only thing that buoyed his spirits was the work itself," says Adam. "And given the incredible and acute discomfort he was suffering from in his largely immobilized state, [creating this album] was a great distraction." 
 
In typical Cohen fashion, he obsessed over every lyric of the nine songs, most of which were written in the past few years (though "Treaty," featuring the lyric "I don't care who takes this bloody hill/I'm angry and I'm tired all the time," dates back a decade). Some of the songs were dictated into his phone; others he jotted down on a notepad he keeps in the breast pocket of his jacket. "It comes, kind of, by dribbles and drops," he said at a recent L.A. press event. "Some people are graced with a flow. Some people are graced with something less than a flow. I'm one of those."
 
Although Cohen was never able to make it to the recording studio, where a team of about a dozen musicians, including organist Neil Larsen, guitarist Bill Bottrell and bassist Michael Chaves, worked on the material, he was still very much in command of the sessions. "I spoke to him at length, got his instructions before every session," says Adam. "Then I faithfully tried to serve what I understood his vision to be in the studio. He also had final say and veto power. If you listen to this record versus the other recent ones, it's a little bit more sparse and acoustic."
 
Today, Cohen is in slightly better health than he was during the making of You Want It Darker. But any sort of tour in support of the album, or even a single live appearance, is highly unlikely. "He's meticulous and requires a lot of rehearsing," says Adam. "It's just not in the cards." But there are at least three songs that didn't make the album, and they may provide a beginning for the next one. "They say that life is a beautiful play with a terrible third act," says Adam. "If that's the case, it must not apply to Leonard Cohen. Right now, at the end of his career, perhaps at the end of his life, he's at the summit of his powers."
 
Andy Greene - 2016.10.15
© Rolling Stone 2016
 
 
 
Leonard Cohen's 14th studio album feels like a pristine, piously crafted last testament, the informed conclusion of a lifetime of inquiry.
 
Leonard Cohen has been bidding his farewell for decades, since before we ever met him. In 1966, he opened Beautiful Losers—his mystical, lysergic, gleefully obscene second novel—with the sunset plea, “Can I love you in my own way? I am an old scholar, better-looking now than when I was young. That’s what sitting on your ass does to your face.” He was just 32 then, rakish without ravaging, not yet celebrated for pairing wry, elegant sacrilege to folk melodies—a year before courting “Suzanne,” 18 from raising his “Hallelujah.” But even then, he was conscious and deferential to the light waning around him.
 
Which is a placidity his followers don’t always share; what other 82-year-old artist could possibly acknowledge his impending mortality and alarm his fans enough to recant? After The New Yorker’s remarkable recent profile quoted him as “ready to die”—depicting a mentally dexterous, physically frail ascetic “confined to barracks” in Los Angeles, solemnly tidying his affairs—Cohen took pains to console his fans, with familiar drollness: “I’ve always been into self-dramatization. I intend to live forever.” But even as he demurs, it’s hard not to play his 14th studio album, You Want It Darker, and hear a pristine, piously crafted last testament—a courtly act of finality that extends to the title. (Notice it’s not a question; it’s a prescription.)
 
Cohen has always kicked up his heels in the ambiguities of love and spirituality—casting prayers to the carnal, getting off on enlightenment. And so this new darkness he offers has dimensions instead of declaratives—it feels, in turn, to lyrically reference the encroaching blackness of death, the insularity of plumbing the soul ever-deeper, a fresh fatalism toward the spinning world. “I’m leaving the table/I’m out of the game/I don’t know the people/In your picture frame,” he laments, achingly, on “Leaving the Table,” over a warm and minimal waltz. Later, he intones, “I’m traveling light/It’s au revoir/My once so bright/My fallen star” (“Traveling Light”). It’s delivered with a wink, and no more dramatically brooding than his past work, but it is inescapably morbid; every track is vivid yet still enigmatic as it conjures loss and lamentation of some variety.
 
This darkness also apparent in the newly fathomless boom of his baritone, which already stripped the floorboards on recent albums Old Ideas and Popular Problems. Whereas the rough edges of his younger, nasal reediness suggested chic bohemian nonchalance, now his low caroling is edged in defiance, and Darker’s production is singularly complementary to it. When he imagines, not so subtly, the stars above him losing light (“If I Didn’t Have Your Love”), his intoning dips below cherubic organs, hinting at what these enamored lyrics soon reveal—that this bright devotional is of the spiritual sort, hewing closer to his past career as a monk than as an Olympic-level ladies’ man. (The most jarring thing about Darker is how utterly devoid of lust it is.) The gracious, spare production adds to the spell—contributed by his son, Adam Cohen, who almost wholly replaces his father’s proclivities for tinny keyboards and stately, gospel-esque female harmonies in favor of violins, warm acoustic guitar, and a cantor male choir. The elder Cohen’s familiar scaffolding of flamenco-influenced guitar remains, a bridge to history.
 
Cohen is not a songwriter who panders; he speaks above us, sometimes quite literally to higher forms, but also to universality instead of common denominator. Topicality, to him, remains somewhere around the Romantic era. But Cohen is also keen to experiment here. He embraces spry, rootsy bluegrass strings on “Steer Your Way,” which nods back in a few directions—to his college stint in a country band, to 1971’s Songs of Love and Hate (which featured Charlie Daniels on fiddle), to brighter moments on Popular Problems. The album’s final track, for the first time, is a string reprise; it bows out “String Reprise/Treaty,” Cohen’s difficult conversation with his higher power (“I wish there was a treaty we could sign/It’s over now, the water and the wine/We were broken then, but now we’re borderline”) with delicate, mournful dignity.
 
The album’s heart is exposed early, and plainly, in the title track. Its religious tones veer toward disdainful (“If you are the dealer/I’m out of the game/If you are the healer/I’m broken and lame”) but his oaky growl quickly becomes rapturous. Three times, as the choir drops out, he chants, “Hineni Hineni”—a Hebrew cry of devotion, the reply of a ready worshipper who hears their calling from God and is ready to act in service. Often, it’s the service in the afterlife. His is not a yelp of fervor, or excitable in any shade; the moment is his most quaking, sunken baritone delivery on the album—so deep, it would sound sinister without such compassion imbuing it. It’s the informed conclusion of a lifetime of inquiry. Hopefully, it is one holy dialogue of more still to come. But in this moment, he sounds satisfied; he has loved us in his own way, and he is ready for what awaits him next. But that doesn’t mean we are.
 
Stacey Anderson - October 24 2016
The Pitchfork Review
 
 
 
The story goes that it was Leonard Cohen’s son Adam who pressed his father for a back-to-basics album, one where the most magnificent mutter in rock could operate unhindered by Cohen Sr’s taste for flamenco guitar and synths. We may have something as banal as pester power to thank, then, for this exquisite 14th album from the Montreal poet, held by recent Nobel laureate Bob Dylan – gnomic as ever – to be “No 1” to his “zero”.
 
The facts are these: Cohen is 82 and – after having toured solidly for five-odd years, remaking the fortune he lost to a thieving former business manager – is winding down. These eight and a half songs (the ninth is a reprise) were demoed in Cohen’s home studio; they are most often simply structured and direct. Once Cohen Jr and returning collaborator Pat Leonard (1980s Madonna) had buffed them up, they remain sparsely arranged, and are all the more powerful for it.
 
A few soulful angels alight on On the Level; some arpeggiating guitar and keening violin sweeten the sadness of Traveling Light. Here are Jewish cantors and Celtic fiddles, but mostly, Cohen’s voice is front and centre: the parchedness of Methuselah often matched by a roué’s playfulness.
 
This is an album of killer couplets, even the bleakest delivered with a half-smile. Finality is a theme. “I’m leaving the table/I’m outta the game,” growls Cohen on Leaving the Table, as a hollow-bodied guitar prangs lonesomely. The song is actually about the end of a relationship (or many relationships); of the death of a ladies’ man. (“I don’t need a lover,” Cohen rattles, with weary irony, “the wretched beast is tame.”) But the hair stands up on your arms nonetheless at these repeated leave-takings. Cohen’s gimlet-eyed title track doesn’t mess about, either. “Hineni, hineni,” he sings in Hebrew; (“Here I am”) “I’m ready my Lord.” On Traveling Light: “it’s au revoir” – to a lover. As it happens, Cohen has back-pedalled in recent days, when the internet jumped to conclusions about the state of his health: there are more projects in the pipeline.
 
You Want It Darker could be addressed to fans pining for a return to Cohen’s bleakest songwriting; or a lover, or a higher power. As befits a lifelong spiritual seeker, born into a storied Jewish family, but well versed in scripture and Buddhism, the love songs have religious overtones, and the spiritual passages pack a lover’s passion. Treaty, for instance, seems to beg for a truce between warring lovers, but amid the rueful reminiscing is talk of water and wine, snakes and sin.
 
On the opposing side is It Seemed the Better Way, perhaps the most sombre song of all, one that tussles with approaches to faith. We did want it darker, it’s true, and Cohen has obliged. “It sounded like the truth/ But it’s not the truth today,” rasps Cohen, quite bitterly.
 
 
Kitty Empire - Sunday 23 October 2016
© 2016 Guardian News and Media Limited
 

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