Old Ideas

I’ve been reading and/or listening to Leonard Cohen for a half-century. I wrote about his novel, Beautiful Losers, as part my master’s thesis. Any list of my favorite songs would include several Cohen titles like “Thanks for the Dance,” “Dance Me to the End of Love,” “Bird on a Wire” and “Going Home,” a new favorite from this, his latest album. The lyrics for “Going Home” were published as a poem in The New Yorker, a distinction not many popular songs can claim. Sung from his muse’s point of view, it starts: “I love to speak with Leonard/ He’s a sportsman and a shepherd/ He’s a lazy bastard/ Living in a suit.” As his fans know, Cohen was an old-fashioned print poet before he cut his first album during that great burgeoning of creativity in the mid ‘60s, a time when it seemed not at all surprising to hear intelligent lyrics written and sung by an honest-to-God poet. And he’s been giving us good stuff ever since. His previous album, Dear Heather, released some eight years ago, was a winner, and so is this one. You don’t have to be old to appreciate Old Ideas, but it probably won’t hurt.