Ten New Songs

Description

Voyager in his mind and life, explorer of the human race for forty years, from the heights of Montreal to an island off the coast of Greece, Leonard Cohen continues to release records that do not shake the world but reassure many of those who inhabit it. Storyteller, poet, or novelist depending on his hours and moods, he continues to assert with a legendary calmness, as universal as some of his melodies, that man is better than Survivor or Loft Story.
After five years spent at Mount Baldy (the Zen Center near Los Angeles), the man has come out of retirement to collaborate with Sharon Robinson, a former backing vocalist, and deliver this fifteenth album, his first studio record since 1993. A Thousand Kisses Deep, Love Itself, You have Loved Enough slowly but surely demonstrate that Cohen has lost none of his verve even if his low words require increasingly precise mixing to pass the ramp of the musical dressing that serves as their launch pad. The arrangement is tenuous, the sounds chosen with caution, the tone deceptively placid, and there emanates from this "Ten New Songs" a quiet strength that others besides him would have loved to demonstrate, in politics for example, and in other times.