ROLLING STONE: Leonard Cohen has confirmed the September 23rd release of his new album Popular Problems, set to be unveiled just two days after his 80th birthday. The album will feature nine new songs and was produced by Patrick Leonard, who worked with Cohen on his 2012 album Old Ideas. Fans that pre-order the album will receive an instant download of Cohen’s new song “Almost Like the Blues.” MORE
PREVIOUSLY: The Great Man glides onstage in black pinstripes and a fedora like a gangster cantor, double-breasted and tie-less, his crisp creamy blue shirt buttoned-up to the neck David Lynch-style. He seems to walk on air. He was born like this, he had no choice, he was born with the gift of a golden voice. Now his friends are gone and his hair is grey, he aches in the places he used to play. After all these years, he’s still crazy for love but he’s not coming on. At 74, broke and hat in hand, he is still paying his rent every day in the Tower of Song.
For the next three hours, he dispenses what amount to be prayers and we will need them where we are going. For he has seen the future, baby, and it is murder. Everybody knows the war is over, everybody knows the good guys lost. Everybody knows the rich have got their channels in the bedrooms of the poor. And, he says, there is a mighty judgment coming, though he might be wrong. But this much is true: we may be ugly, he insists, but we have the music. Because everybody knows the rich write history, but the poor write the songs. His mind is still sharp as a razor blade and he remembers them all: the one who gave him head in an unmade bed, the sisters of mercy with dew on their hem, the one in the famous blue raincoat who was gonna go ‘clear,’ the bird on a wire, the drunk in the midnight choir. All of them, the Great Man included, have tried in their own way, to be free. MORE