essential recording
Leonard Cohen’s deeply personal first LPs came out at a time when many of his peers were issuing furious, counterculture-inspired rants; he clearly had little interest in sticking with the pack at the time. So it makes a certain kind of contrary sense that Cohen would put out an offbeat topical collection two and a half decades later. The Future is an odd duck of an album; it’s also brave, funny, and fascinating. “Give me back the Berlin Wall / Give me Stalin [Read More...]
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When the air turns cold and the daylight hours diminish, I think of when I became familiar with Leonard Cohen’s the Future. One December, my mother, whose love of unconventional, eclectic music I inherited, used Christmas money from my grandparents to expand her CD collection, including the purchase of the Future, an album from which the two best songs of her adored Natural Born Killers soundtrack were taken. I gave the album a few trial listens, as I had always expanded my tastes by waltzing through Mom’s tape and CD collection.
The Future, however, was much different from the Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin I picked-up from her. To a high school student whose favorite bands were mostly FM radio staples, Cohen sounded dark, sober and distant. The Future’s simplistic arrangements, slow pace and Cohen’s gritty, tuneless voice made the Future a failure on the scale that I rated Led Zeppelin IV and Hot Rocks as classics. Yet, the brooding articulateness of the album was something I slowly found to be spell-binding. Lines such as “Things are going to slide/Slide in all directions/Won’t be nothing/Nothing you can measure anymore/The blizzard, the blizzard of the world/Has crossed the threshold/And it has overturned/The order of the soul,” had both an immediate impact and an abstraction and complexity about them that made the lyrics mysterious and affecting after several listens, even after memorization. Songs of love and of anger I had heard but the precise lyrics of Cohen, speaking of that disappointed feeling of one who loosens-up in celebration and struggles to find a hand to hold (”Closing Time”), of desperate patience (”Waiting for the Miracle”) and intellectualized hope (”Deocracy”) were fresh, exotic and intriguing to me. Even the slow-paced music began to engage me, with its sleekness, craftiness and exact appropriateness to the song. All in all, to a high school student whose favorite bands were mostly FM radio staples, Cohen was somebody bizarre and astonishing.
He was a musical persona more multifaceted and more vibrant than any other I had known, a writer of consciously futile protest mantras; a desperate romantic always embraced by love to the point of entanglement, a witty old man (three times my age) sitting lonesome at the edge of a bar waiting for someone to pour his wisdom and wry observations into. This was the person I saw as a listened to the Future, relentlessly - with headphones on the bus, driving to my part-time job, alone in my room - always surrounded by cold air, falling snow and the sense of wonderment only a poet can provide. The Future was my introduction to a more cerebral, more mature side of popular music. Even today, after absorbing the Velvet Underground and Nico, Astral Weeks and Blood On the Tracks, I have yet to hear an album that stimulates me in the way the Future does. I am thankful that I discovered Leonard Cohen’s best album during that lush, white Pennsylvania winter at the age in which every new discovery in music seemed supernatural.
You simply cannot fault this album. Some say it’s a far cry from his earlier recordings but it has to be said that the wistful, sad, , incisive, cutting, dark, and romantic Mr Cohen is still alive and well. Majority of the songs on the album are over 5 minutes long, but you never seem to notice, in fact, I often wish they were longer! The rythmn and melody, accompanied by the deft, poetic story telling of Cohen, takes you on a ride that can be exhillarating (The Future, Closing Time), profoundly moving (Anthem, Tacoma Trailer, The Miracle) cutting and ry (Democracy), and incredibly sexy and erotic (Light as the Breeze, Be For Real). There simply has never been a more angelic song than Anthem. I still am moved by it after literally thousands of listenings, particularly the final instrumental break where the strings pluck and the vocals soar. Incredible. Classical music purists generally only consider the obvious greats as musical geniusses, (Beethoven, Mozart, Bach etc) but I put this question to you, Was musical genius confined only to previous centuries? With The Future, Leonard Cohen prooves that he is up there with the best of them. If he had written this album in the 1700s, it would be played today by The London Philharmonic, Sung by Pavarotti, performed in The Met, and Royal Albert Hall, it would be played at Royal funerals, and after hundreds of years, would still move people. I re-iterate this point, you cannot fault this album, and if there was a fault, it has to be said, “…there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”