Later, he intones, “I’m traveling light/It’s au revoir/My once so bright/My fallen star” (“Traveling Light”). “I’m leaving the table/I’m out of the game/I don’t know the people/In your picture frame,” he laments, achingly, on “Leaving the Table,” over a warm and minimal waltz. And so this new darkness he offers has dimensions instead of declaratives-it feels, in turn, to lyrically reference the encroaching blackness of death, the insularity of plumbing the soul ever-deeper, a fresh fatalism toward the spinning world. (Notice it’s not a question it’s a prescription.)Ĭohen has always kicked up his heels in the ambiguities of love and spirituality-casting prayers to the carnal, getting off on enlightenment. I intend to live forever.” But even as he demurs, it’s hard not to play his 14th studio album, You Want It Darker, and hear a pristine, piously crafted last testament-a courtly act of finality that extends to the title. Which is a placidity his followers don’t always share what other 82-year-old artist could possibly acknowledge his impending mortality and alarm his fans enough to recant? After The New Yorker’s remarkable recent profile quoted him as “ready to die”-depicting a mentally dexterous, physically frail ascetic “confined to barracks” in Los Angeles, solemnly tidying his affairs-Cohen took pains to console his fans, with familiar drollness: “I’ve always been into self-dramatization.
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