Leonard Cohen Releases Album: Old Ideas

Going Home, Amen, The Darkness Stellar Tracks

Old Ideas is the first major LP from Leonard Cohen since the renowned 2005 bankruptcy, in which $5 million was stolen from him by his former manager, Kelley Lynch and since his previous 2009 release, Live in London.

The funds had allegedly been assigned for the singer's retirement fund, leaving him with only $150,000 and prompting the return to form seen here. Lynch was issued a subpoena for her financial records in a 2006 civil suit, which she ignored. Cohen says this misappropriation of the Cohen estate is something from which he doesn't expects to fully recover.

Old Ideas: "Going Home," "Amen" & "The Darkness" Standout Tracks

Cohen begins the album by speaking as his own muse in "Going Home", informing the listener that "he just doesn't have the freedom/to refuse." Leonard's obedience to his muse is a common theme running throughout the album.

In terms of aural anthems, however, the album truly begins with "Amen", in which a lonesome banjo line begins the slow enunciation of love's enduring ache, and is joined by Cohen and his foils - the fantastic female vocalists - who manage, along with the resonant flugle horn emerging in the middle of the track, to paint a picture of the lover's journey as a path that is always both well-trodden and painfully raw.

Cohen's track "The Darkness", with its reed organ blues at once convincingly masculine and lovingly regretful, conveys a powerful sense of 20/20 hindsight. At 78, the singer's reflection on living toward the end of one's life - perhaps tainted by the debacle with Lynch - is related in the lines "I got no future/I know my days are few/The present's not that pleasant/Just a lot of things to do".

Many tracks, such as "Lullaby" and "Come Healing", are strong with Leonard's poetry, but rather weak in their composition; it could be argued that Old Ideas is a lyrical rather than melodic triumph.

Cohen No Longer Ladies' Man?

Lynch was Cohen's lover in the '90s, so the lyrics in Old Ideas reflecting betrayal, suffering, miscommunication, and forgiveness may be an ode to the love/hate relationship between Cohen and Lynch.

Old Ideas, both lyrically and musically, painstakingly animates the life of a celebrity in love - with God, with grace, and with love itself - articulating long-standing spiritual motifs of defeat, forgiveness and reconciliation, all the more personally relevant given the events of the past decade.

This is a Leonard who is "tired of choosing desire / been saved by a sweet fatigue," a passionate man learning to deal with aches less carnal than existential. But as his fans will tell you, Cohen has spent his life preparing for wisdom.

Old Ideas: Swan Song of an Aging Legend?

Overall, the effectively stark stage set by Cohen in Old Ideas - minus such powerful folk n' blues ballads as "Amen" and "The Darkness" - outline the grim, sultry silhouette of a man the world already knows and loves, but sloughed of some of the erotic tension enabled by a younger body and mind.

Old Ideas, it would seem, aims and largely succeeds at being the long-whittled vessel for a vivid and hungry spirit, just now beginning to learn what it means to rest. Pick up the Old Ideas CD and see for yourself.