Globe and Mail review
Posted: Fri Oct 29, 2004 4:43 pm
This link comes from Gurinder Brar:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ ... nard+cohen
Traces of a ladies' man
By Robert Everett-Green
Friday, October 29, 2004 - Page R35
Dear Heather
Leonard Cohen
Columbia (Sony/BMG)
Rating: **½
You look and sometimes there's nothing, but if you keep looking, that nothing may turn out to be something after all. Leonard Cohen's musings on emptiness and creativity, in his spoken-word number Morning Glory, apply also to this album, in which rags appear in the same parade as robes of gold.
The robes mostly hang on the shoulders of the elders: Irving Layton, A. M. Klein and F. R. Scott, all of them mentors or teachers for Cohen during his poetic apprenticeship in Montreal. Each gets a song, or a text that somehow gathers music around it, Cohen at this point in his life (he turned 70 last month) being disinclined to sing.
When you tally up those tributes, and see that the album is dedicated to the memory of publishing patriarch Jack McClelland, and that the booklet contains a shadow-heavy photo of Cohen sitting by a portrait of the father who died when he was 9, you wonder whether there's a misprint. Shouldn't this disc be called Dear Fathers?
Maybe, but that would seem like praying, and prayer in Cohen's work is more tellingly linked with the tragicomic spectacle of the poet pleading at the knees of women. The title song is a prayer of sorts, to a woman whose "legs all white from the winter" have got the ogling old troubadour to think that emptiness may not be the whole story after all. In the same wise, Because of notes with humour and hardly any pride that a few of his songs have induced women to be "exceptionally kind to my old age," as if the age were something separate, like a lapdog prone to incontinence.
There are some lovely things here, though a few have been sitting in drawers for a while. The words for at least five of these 13 tracks are old, or borrowed from others. The tunes are often just implications hanging between the chord changes and the narrow melodies of the poet's speech.
Cohen regroups his Passenger band from 25 years ago for The Faith, a good new song whose topicality is wrapped in the old cloth of a Quebec folk song. There's also a well-clad live version of The Tennessee Waltz from the Various Positions tour of 1985.
But mostly Cohen goes for keyboard instrumentals (by himself, or by backup singers-producers Anjani Thomas and Sharon Robinson) that are often so cheesy as to provoke. Or doesn't he care about that sort of thing any more? Is surface musical appeal part of the nothing that really is nothing? The Field Commander doesn't say; he's still waiting for Heather.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ ... nard+cohen
Traces of a ladies' man
By Robert Everett-Green
Friday, October 29, 2004 - Page R35
Dear Heather
Leonard Cohen
Columbia (Sony/BMG)
Rating: **½
You look and sometimes there's nothing, but if you keep looking, that nothing may turn out to be something after all. Leonard Cohen's musings on emptiness and creativity, in his spoken-word number Morning Glory, apply also to this album, in which rags appear in the same parade as robes of gold.
The robes mostly hang on the shoulders of the elders: Irving Layton, A. M. Klein and F. R. Scott, all of them mentors or teachers for Cohen during his poetic apprenticeship in Montreal. Each gets a song, or a text that somehow gathers music around it, Cohen at this point in his life (he turned 70 last month) being disinclined to sing.
When you tally up those tributes, and see that the album is dedicated to the memory of publishing patriarch Jack McClelland, and that the booklet contains a shadow-heavy photo of Cohen sitting by a portrait of the father who died when he was 9, you wonder whether there's a misprint. Shouldn't this disc be called Dear Fathers?
Maybe, but that would seem like praying, and prayer in Cohen's work is more tellingly linked with the tragicomic spectacle of the poet pleading at the knees of women. The title song is a prayer of sorts, to a woman whose "legs all white from the winter" have got the ogling old troubadour to think that emptiness may not be the whole story after all. In the same wise, Because of notes with humour and hardly any pride that a few of his songs have induced women to be "exceptionally kind to my old age," as if the age were something separate, like a lapdog prone to incontinence.
There are some lovely things here, though a few have been sitting in drawers for a while. The words for at least five of these 13 tracks are old, or borrowed from others. The tunes are often just implications hanging between the chord changes and the narrow melodies of the poet's speech.
Cohen regroups his Passenger band from 25 years ago for The Faith, a good new song whose topicality is wrapped in the old cloth of a Quebec folk song. There's also a well-clad live version of The Tennessee Waltz from the Various Positions tour of 1985.
But mostly Cohen goes for keyboard instrumentals (by himself, or by backup singers-producers Anjani Thomas and Sharon Robinson) that are often so cheesy as to provoke. Or doesn't he care about that sort of thing any more? Is surface musical appeal part of the nothing that really is nothing? The Field Commander doesn't say; he's still waiting for Heather.
? 
.