Old Ideas is, in its own tender, smirking, Leonard Cohen-y way, a clever title. In one sense, the ideas here are ones we've heard from Cohen before: Life is a nostalgic, sorrowful experience punctuated by the occasional joke; language can clarify as much as it can obscure; and lust is one of the highest forms of prayer. In another sense, Cohen is telling us that the ideas on this album-- home, healing, origins, and endings-- are ideas that take on a starker, more metaphorical weight as time goes on. We can trust Cohen to know: Over the past 77 years, he has, in a graceful but inevitable way, become old.
Cohen's voice has always sounded deep, flat, and naturalistic-- the kind of performance that attempts to sound like it's no performance at all. To describe the changes in it over the past 10 or 15 years, I defer in part to those little booklets that come around the necks of good Scotch: A powerful body of peat smoke with a briny finish. In essence, a whisper-- the voice of a voice whose center has been carved away. Old Ideas doesn't remind me of Bob Dylan as much it does of late Johnny Cash records, or even Charlie Louvin's Steps to Heaven: documents of voices so heavy and close that to hear them is to smell the singer's breath and see the gradient of yellow on their teeth.
It's easy to think of Cohen as a folksinger since "folksinger" is common shorthand for musicians who tend to privilege words over music. Cohen, though, tends to go where his musical collaborators and arrangers lead him, whether it's grimy dive-bar ballads, disco, bare-bones guitar blues, or orchestral elaborations. For a Zen monk who started his career as a poet, Leonard Cohen has used a lot of synth horns.
Old Ideas is a spare, low-key album rooted in blues and gospel-- maybe the closest thing he's made to "folk" music since the early 1970s. Backup singers sing passionate, wordless melodies; the bass sounds like the big, upright kind. I think it's his first studio album in 20 years to not rely exclusively on drum machines for percussion. The musical setting suits the state of his voice, which is meant as a mixed compliment: One of the great things about hearing his 1980s and 1990s albums was trying to reconcile his heroic presence with all the Casios. Some of the best moments on Old Ideas-- like the bizarre foregrounding of synthesizer during the album's first thirty seconds-- prove that Cohen and his collaborators have the wits to remind listeners that as soon as tape is rolling, nothing-- no croak, no wail, no plea-- is all-natural.
Cohen's voice alone, though, is a gorgeous, singular instrument. It carries in it a quality that is difficult to discuss without either becoming sentimental or appealing to the misguided idea that just because you play an acoustic guitar or sing close to the microphone, what you do is more honest than someone who attempts to create an experience of truth in some other way. It's a voice that mimics states of human yearning: The point at which we start to sound too tired or worn-down to speak, the point at which we start to cry, the way we whisper to people whom we are very, very close.
Maybe it's only context that makes me think that songs such as "Show Me the Place", where his voice becomes so weak it nearly falls silent in the middle of a line, is anything more than maudlin. Maybe the past 40-plus years of music serve as some kind of apology, as though to publicly reckon with the fact that according to the World Bank you are fast approaching life expectancy is something Cohen-- or any human being-- needs to earn their right to.
This is not the best album Cohen has put out. It is also not The Bucket List-- certainly not cheap or trivial or trading on his age alone. The songs are decent, the singing is stunning. He claims to be naked and filthy. He claims to be a lazy bastard. He claims to have been a slave for love. But he has claimed these things before. He is as old as he has ever been.
