Leonard Cohen – Dear Heather

If life is a riddle and death is the punch line, Leonard Cohen enjoys the last laugh with Dear Heather. Though I don’t mean to suggest the Canadian bard is in any hurry to join Johnny Cash across the great divide, Cohen’s latest offers a series of final farewells suffused with deathbed sensuality, in a dry wheeze that is barely more than a whisper. Since Cohen’s music hits me in a place that few artists ever approach, I hope he releases a dozen more albums, but it’s hard to imagine how the 70-year-old songwriter might follow this.

In a way, Cohen’s musical career has come full circle, returned to its most elemental, fundamental simplicity. He was already a mature artist when he began recording in the late 1960s — a published poet and acclaimed novelist, a songwriter for whom the words were everything and the music practically an afterthought. Yet over the next quarter-century the sound of his songs became every bit as important as the sense of his lyrics, with masterworks such as I’m Your Man and The Future so much more than poems set to melody.

Dear Heather maintains this balance of sound and sense, with the arrangements as spare as the bare-boned lyrics. Yet there’s a playful tension throughout, between the chill of the lyric (borrowed from Lord Byron) and the coo of the backing vocals on “Go No More A-Roving”; the deadpan drollery and the Tinker Toy synth on “Because Of”; the mournful, Dylanesque phrasing and twang of the jew’s harp on the 9/11-inspired “On That Day”; and the delirious repetition of the minimalist verse against the roller-rink organ on the title track.

The concluding cut is a live rendition of “Tennessee Waltz”, recorded in 1985, offered in the spirit of an older man’s reverie as he gazes at a snapshot of his younger self. Though Cohen initially sounds like he’s settling scores on “There For You”, it’s obvious by the end that he’s offering prayer. “Are we moving toward a transcendental moment?” one part of his mind asks another on “Morning Glory”. Preparing to take its leave, the disembodied consciousness continues its passage toward the evanescent eternal.