Mojo - The Music Magazine

Leonard Cohen's new album, the astonishing Old Ideas, is released this month, a volcanic event celebrated in the latest issue of MOJO magazine with an exclusive interview. At 77 years of age and in many ways the torch-bearer for the literary aspirations of post-Dylan rock, he disappoints not a jot, with a careful lucid download of sex and death, draped in the unique wry bleakness of his self-analysis. "I'd like to speak with Leonard," he sings at one point. "He's a sportsman and a shepherd / He's a lazy bastard living in a suit." Time, wethinks, to take a wander among the tangled vines of his back catalogue, and marvel at the wonders therein...

Songs Of Leonard Cohen
(Columbia, 1968)

Made in New York, Cohen's compelling, sombre, folky debut has some of his best-loved songs: Suzanne, Sisters Of Mercy, So Long Marianne. Somewhat elaborate arrangements do nothing to ease the intense feeling of dislocation and loss in the poetic lyrics and lugubrious voice. Its intimacy and literacy earned Cohen a 'bard of the bedsit' tag he could never shake off. Robert Altman used the LP as the soundtrack to McCabe And Mrs Miller.

Songs From A Room
(Columbia, 1969)

Cohen's starkest album was recorded in Nashville with Bob Johnston (Bob Dylan's and Paul Simon's producer). Cohen had left the house on the Greek island of Hydra, where he wrote most of its songs of violence and loss, for a cabin in Tennessee. Bleakly beautiful, his second album was his biggest hit - Number 2 in the UK. It fared less well in the US.

Songs Of Love And Hate
(Columbia, 1971)

Some of his darkest songs as well as some of his most beautiful are here, again recorded with Johnston in Nashville (apart from overdubs added in London). It includes the acerbic Dress Rehearsal Rag (written years earlier but unrecorded until now) and Famous Blue Raincoat, which gained widespread acclaim as title track to Jennifer Warnes' Cohen tribute album of 1987.

Leonard Cohen: Live Songs
(Columbia, 1973)

A contender for Most Sombre Live Album Ever, Live Songs starts with an improvised, solo acoustic rumination on curing life's "dissension" and "pain" with songs, and closes with the doleful, oppressed Queen Victoria. A miserablist's dream, then. All but the latter (credited to a "Room in Tennessee") were recorded live on Cohen's 1970 and '72 European tours. His road band at the time nicknamed him 'Captain Mandrax', after the well-known pharmaceutical downers of the time - aka "Mandies" - popular among the rock cognoscenti.

New Skin For The Old Ceremony
(Columbia, 1974)

Cohen put paid to the rumours of his retirement with an album whose title reflected the purity he was pursuing through Zen Buddhism. The singer's Zen master Roshi, in fact, sat in on some of the recording sessions. While the sleeve drawing was too sexual for his American record company who replaced it with a more sober photograph, the production by Joni Mitchell associate John Lissauer was too "elaborate" for Cohen - although later he would warm to the album, which very nearly made the UK Top 20.

Death Of A Ladies' Man
(Columbia, 1977)

Having completed a book of poems near-synonymously titled Death Of A Lady's Man, Cohen decided on an unexpected collaboration with the notoriously eccentric 'Wall Of Sound' producer Phil Spector. Cohen presented him with some of his best lyrics. Spector duly smothered them to death in ludicrously grandiose arrangements. The bizarrest moment arguably occurs in Don't Go Home With Your Hard-On, with Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg singing backing vocals. Horribly. Cohen would say he liked "nothing" about this record, and most fans concurred, though it does have curiosity appeal.

Recent Songs
(Columbia, 1979)

A rather quicker follow-up than his fans had come to expect from the ever-growing pauses between albums, Recent Songs - produced by New Skin For The Old Ceremony's John Lissauer - was welcomed as a return to more familiar Cohen arrangements. The violin and oud give an added whiff of exoticisim, at times recalling Yiddish music. Indeed, in the album's acknowledgements, Cohen thanks his mother Masha, "who reminded me shortly before she died of the kind of music she liked".

Various Positions
(Columbia, 1984)

Cohen had spent the early 1980s writing poetry, books, even a film - anything, it seemed, but songs. But mature, powerful songs such as Hallelujah and If It Be Your Will - sung in a deep, Old Testament voice and given a hi-tech, modern production polish - demonstrated that his skills in that area were far from lost. Still, it was not enough to persuade his American record company to release this first album from Cohen in six years. Memorably, they told him: "Leonard, we know you're great but we don't know if you're any good." (Various Positions eventually appeared in the US on small label Passport.)

I'm Your Man
(Columbia, 1988)

The record that made Leonard Cohen 'cool'. Twenty years on from his existential-poet-of-doom debut, this first self-produced album featured synthesizers, self-deprecation, humour, urbanity and some of his most sophisticated songs: Everybody Knows, Take This Waltz, First We Take Manhattan, Ain't No Cure For Love, I'm Your Man and Tower Of Song (which gave its name to a second Cohen tribute album in 1995). A classic, it sold decently and afforded his career a new lease of life.

The Future
(Columbia, 1992)

Cohen's last album before relocating to a Zen monastery in the mountains is somewhat schizophrenic. A mix of black (almost gleefully so) apocalyptic visions - "I have seen the future, baby/It is murder," he sings in the jaunty opening title track - and love/sex songs whose muse was actress Rebecca De Mornay, Cohen's lover and The Future's co-producer. Namechecking Stalin, Tiananmen Square, torture, murder, environmental disaster, anal sex, and, worst of all, bad poets, Cohen slots in a country song, a torch song, and a cover of Irving Berlin's standard, Always.

Cohen Love: Leonard Cohen In Concert
(Columbia, 1994)

And so Cohen leaves the world of recording for the monastery life, and the trawling of the record company vaults begins. The 13 songs here, most of them among his best-known, were chosen seemingly at random (at least, the liner notes do not explain otherwise) from various concerts in Canada, Spain, Holland and the United States during his 1988 and 1993 tours. They showcase a man whose charismatic performances and ever-deepening voice sound gloriously fuelled by red wine and cigarettes.

Field Commander Cohen
(Columbia, 2000)

The photo on the sleeve is clearly the one on which Recent Songs' cover painting was based, but here he's standing in a road in England. Field Commander Cohen was recorded in 1979 - the year Recent Songs was released - during Cohen's UK tour. It took almost two decades to come out. The Hammersmith Odeon and Dome Theatre, Brighton, shows find him less improvisational and significantly cheerier than on Live Songs, more or less faithfully performing songs from across his career with Passenger, a band who'd worked with Joni Mitchell, and violin and oud players Raffi Hakopian and John Bilezikjian.

Ten New Songs
(Columbia, 2001)

Six years after leaving LA for the monastery, Cohen came down from the mountain and started work on his most collaborative album - "a duet", he calls it. It was written with his longtime backing vocalist and occasional co-writer (Everybody Knows; Waiting For The Miracle) Sharon Robinson, who provided the music - mostly soul and gospel influenced (the country song That Don't Make It Junk excepted). Cohen's first new studio album since 1992's The Future (or would have been if he hadn't recorded it in his garage, aided by Robinson and Leanne Ungar) was widely acclaimed.

Dear Heather
(Columbia, 2004)

Reflective and puzzled, Dear Heather is one of Cohen's most hushed and muted albums. Sometimes his voice is barely there. A whisper on Because Of; a breath in The Letter; a shadow of itself in Morning Glory. Much of the time he abandons all pretence at singing and speaks the words over a female backdrop (Because Of) or jazz (Villanelle For Our Time; To A Teacher). The latter harks back to the poetry readings he'd do in Montreal jazz clubs in the 1950s and early 1960s. Lyrically it's one of Cohen's least ambiguous albums - though of course Cohen might have reached such a level of Zen mastery that the lack of ambivalence is a refined ambiguity. Musically it's melodic and memorable, and as beguiling as ever.

Old Ideas
(Columbia, 2012)

Read MOJO's glowing review of the new Leonard Cohen album in the latest issue of the magazine.On sale now.

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Editor's note: MOJO has seen fit not to include assorted Leonard Cohen compilations but, in a moment of self-promotion, we are happy to recommend MOJO Presents Leonard Cohen (Sony, 2003) - a 23-track career-spanning collection compiled by Sylvie Simmons herself.