Play Louder review

[jarkko]

This link comes from Anne Riise
http://www.playlouder.com/review/+dearheather/

4 1/2 out of 5
Dear Heather
Leonard Cohen

"Well my friends are gone and my hair is grey/I ache in the places where I used to play," sang Leonard Cohen in ‘Tower of Song’. If these felt like the words of a man dealing with the awareness of late middle age back in the 1980s, then the songs of 'Dear Heather' are those of a man who knows that he is well into his twilight years. Leonard Cohen is 70 now. I think of that and his 80,000 cigarettes that carved this rich, velvety voice that's half croon, half narration...

Now I have found ‘Dear Heather’, and listened to it over and over. And for the first time in my awareness of Leonard Cohen, his words made me feel the heartache that he usually cures. I have worried for Cohen’s mortality for some time, and now it seems that he is expressing this awareness of an end, too.

"So we’ll go no more a-roving" go the backing singers at the album's opening. Then Cohen, cutting in "So we’ll go no more a-roving / so late into the night / though the heart be still as loving / And the moon be still as bright / for the sword outwears the sheath / the soul outwears the breast / the heart must pause for breath / and love itself have rest".

I had tears in my eyes the first time I listened to ‘Dear Heather’. There's humour here - "because of a few songs /wherein I spoke of their mystery / women have been exceptionally kind" he sings with a wry glint in his eye on 'Because Of'. But this aside, there is an unrelenting feeling of a fading face at a train window, a last glance before a long voyage that may be without end. It is so hard to hear that Leonard Cohen may be saying farewell, because for over a decade he has meant more to me than any other artist I could name. I remember, when my dad used to play Leonard Cohen in his study, bellowing along; I’d be there complaining about this ‘suicide music’, joking about getting the razorblades out.

And then I suppose I reached a certain age of adolescence when I went to find a teacher beyond my father. And my father, in a way, had provided that teacher for me. I dug through his Leonard Cohen records, in the cabinet that had a certain musty scent that to this day is the scent of music, and I was transfixed. Leonard Cohen taught me more about a certain idea of love and women and yearning and beauty than any other person has ever managed, be they someone known to me, or a stranger.

From the shared experience of Cohen that I have had with so many of my friends over the years, I've come to realise that he is the one artist who reaches through three generations with his soul, rather than musical heritage. Cohen is never remembered in the same way that perhaps the Beatles are, certainly Dylan. They are passed down like musty heirlooms, becoming increasingly tattered with each inheritance. Cohen's music, not being music, is timeless. His poetry can never die.

Of course Cohen can’t sing, but what matter that when the words are so rich? After all, he is a reluctant musician, initially writing the likes of 'Susanne' for female folk singers. In ‘Villanelle for our Time’, based on a poem by Canadian poet Frank Scott, his voice pours from the speakers, caressing the ears like warmed treacle that stops them from hearing anything else save these words.

The musical backing the songs of 'Dear Heather' is simple, bringing together of all the ties Cohen has employed over the past thirty or so years, excepting the vastly under-rated use of synthesisers on ‘I’m Your Man’ and ‘The Future’. There’s the kangaroo-twangs of the Jews harp, Spanish guitar, the mournful viola that was all over ‘Recent Songs’. It’s beautifully arranged; most sweepingly in one with the last track (I’m not counting the pointlessly tacked on live cover of ‘Tennessee Waltz’) ‘The Faith’.

I cannot go far enough to persuade you how much you must hear this album, for Leonard Cohen’s poetry speaks for itself. I just hope that 'Dear Heather', this note-to-self, to women, to love, to the world, to all of us, is not Leonard Cohen's self-penned epitaph.

Luke Turner

reviewed on 24 Oct 2004