LEONARD COHEN ‘Thanks For The Dance’

$30.00 Inc GST

Available on backorder

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Description

After finishing ‘You Want It Darker’, which was released just 19 days before his death in 2016, aged 82, Leonard Cohen still wanted to add to his tower of song. Thus, he kept on writing and recording as life ebbed away, and the result is this beautiful posthumous collection, available on both CD and vinyl.

His songwriter son Adam has assembled a stellar cast of musicians, such as Daniel Lanois, Jennifer Warnes and Spanish guitarist Javier Mas, to do justice to the unfinished home recordings.

However, the sparse, sublime instrumentation never takes the focus away from Cohen’s inimitable voice, which is lush, deadpan, warm and poetic, with a hint of frailty adding to the sense of a final statement.

Like those of Marvin Gaye and Prince, Cohen’s oeuvre sought to reconcile the spiritual and the sensual, which both feature heavily again. Any initial chuckles at the fading octogenarian deadpanning about nipples that “rose like bread” disappear as it becomes apparent that he is reliving a distant encounter with startling, undimmed passion: “I’ve forgotten half my life. I still remember this.”

As the pace slows to a transcendent crawl and backing vocals form a heavenly choir, The Hills mocks his ageing body (“The system is shot / I’m living on pills”) and the stunning The Goal finds him “almost alive” and “settling accounts of the soul”. The last poem he recorded, Listen to the Hummingbird, implores us to find beauty in God and butterflies: “Don’t listen to me.” And, finally, there is a vast, empty silence, and he is gone.

“5 stars – a sublime final statement” – The Guardian