“If you want a lover, I’ll do anything you ask me to / And if you want another kind of love, I’ll wear a mask for you,” he began on 1988’s “I’m Your Man,” going on to offer a bottomless list of concessions to a woman: “If you want to work the street alone, I’ll disappear for you.” Surrender has in fact been the preoccupation of Cohen’s career, a career that began in poetry, saw him move to New York City’s folk scene in his 30s, and continued until death save a few hiatuses, including a years-long stint at a Zen monastery where he practiced the kind of personal abdication he always sang about. That album, though, was not unique in its themes of surrender. “I’m leaving the table,” he announced in the magnificent grumble his voice had become. He has died at age 82, shortly after he said in interviews and song he was ready to die, shortly after he’d written a farewell note to his ailing ex and lyrical muse Marianne Ihlen offering, “it’s come to this time when we are really so old and our bodies are falling apart and I think I will follow you very soon.” Immediate comparisons between his passing and David Bowie’s are fair like Bowie’s Blackstar, Cohen’s October release You Want It Darker is a very moving late-in-life work that sounds preoccupied by death.
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This unflinching worldview underlay his many virtues-his cutting p oetic sensibility, his cracked and ever-deepening voice, his flair for flamenco, and his melodies that became an unending source of inspiration across the musical landscape. He cracked jokes and sang of romance, but as part of the larger, grimmer project we’re all engaged in: “There’s a lover in the story / But the story’s still the same,” he explained in song this year.
He sang of dark beating light, of human attachment as flimsy and breakable, of deep fears being validated inexorably, of the greatest temptation being the embrace of defeat. Anyone despairing about the world, humanity, and evil can turn to Leonard Cohen’s catalogue for the comfort of confirmation.
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