June Record Club - Leonard Cohen, "You Want It Darker"

Some music sheds light on the experience of another and thus increases my understanding of the world. Some music sheds light on my own experience because I find things that resonate, like they were written in my soul from me to you (tangled up in blue). This album definitely falls into the former camp--an album that was clearly going to be Cohen's final album, akin to "The Wind" by Warren Zevon.

Finishing the album gave Cohen purpose in his final days. He had cancer that started somewhere and spread to his bones. The bone cancer caused his back to degenerate, such that by the time he was recording he had already suffered two compression fractures from simply having to move about the world. He sang his vocals in a special chair to support his back. Allergic to opiates, he relied on marijuana and his years of meditation to provide him some distance from the pain.

Cohen barely sings on most of the album, though there are simple melodies. Melodically there's nothing as beautiful as "Crazy to Love You", one of my favourites from his later albums. Instead, what I hear is a conversation, a dialogue between Cohen and God. This wasn't new territory for him: 1984's "Book of Mercy" was a book of 50 poems that functioned as prayers. "If It Be Your Will", one of his prettiest songs, was written around the same time as Book of Mercy and revealed a humbled man trying to locate acceptance, gratitude and grace.

Those concepts are central to the whole album here, but they come and go like the pain that must have wracked him. "We were broken then / Now we're borderline" in the song "Treaty" to me revisits the concepts in IF It Be Your Will and Book of Mercy. His body is broken now, but his spirit seems stronger, less defeated than his previous attempts at prayer and submission, born of whatever mid-life crisis he was struggling with. On "You Want it Darker" he's defiant at times, and at other times seemingly relieved that the struggle is nearly over. It's an album of a man hobbling his way into grace.

Cohen once said, approximately, that the distance between his will and God's will at any given time was the shape of his predicament. He also said, in a different interview, that he had no particular gift for religious thought. Though some of the songs on this album ponder things like the sermon on the mount, I don't hear them as being more than metaphor. To me, his will is what he wants (obviously), and God's will is simply what is. On this album, "what is" means: pain, cancer and death. Presumably he didn't want any of those things, but going to war against them would be pointless--hence his desire for a treaty.

The album is not entirely spiritual in nature, of course. There are winks to societal observations: "As He died to make men holy / Let us die to make things cheap" is dark humour for those who want it dark(er). There are also reflections on the passing of his desire for "the me and you", namely romantic or erotic love--he's traveling light now. Elsewhere, he sings "I don't need a lover / so blow out the flame".

The line that stands out the most for me, that encapsulates the whole album, is "Hineni hineni / I'm ready my lord". First, I have to mention how incredibly low his voice goes on the "hineni"s--it's almost like Tuvan overtone singing, or like a skull with tattered vocal cords. It's more than the sound, though--it's that notion of here I am, I'm ready to die. Though the album reveals bitterness and regret at times, to me it is the hinenis that ultimately win the war and signify acceptance.

It's not an album I listen to a lot, but I'm grateful that it exists and that he pushed his way through into giving the world one last gift of his insight and experience. 17 thumbs up.

Oops, I meant to write a review before I left, but now I'm at conference.

Well, I'd certainly have to be in the right mood for this album. I like my dark and gravelly meditations on mortality with a little more instrumentation, so track 6 was my favorite if I recall correctly. This is the sort of poetry where I more enjoy reading the analysis of others than the work itself I think.

Ok. I really do own this album but have never listened to it. I work from home tomorrow, so I'm going to give it a listen.