You Want It Darker by Leonard Cohen
September 21, 2016 7:20 PM   Subscribe

They're lining up the prisoners
And the guards are taking aim


I struggled with some demons
They were middle-class and tame
I didn't know I had permission
To murder and to maim

Hineni, hineni
I'm ready, my lord

Today on Leonard Cohen's 82nd birthday, he released the first single "You Want It Darker," from the album of the same name, which will be available on October 21.
posted by tclark (37 comments total) 51 users marked this as a favorite
 
Lyrics, with some explanatory annotations on Genius.
posted by zachlipton at 7:31 PM on September 21, 2016 [7 favorites]


Damn, I've got chills.
posted by octothorpe at 7:43 PM on September 21, 2016 [2 favorites]


Happy Birthday!

This is better than I expected. I'm still a "Songs From A Room" Cohen fan but I don't think he's doing himself any injustice with this later work.

And damn he's old! I wonder who the oldest person to record a folk/pop album is.
posted by dis_integration at 7:44 PM on September 21, 2016 [2 favorites]


And damn he's old! I wonder who the oldest person to record a folk/pop album is.


Dock Boggs?

I have a long and complicated relationship with L.Cohen, mostly due to how much my dad loved him and getting angry when I said I preferred Bob Dylan. I was probably the only teenage goth who listened to The Future instead of Nine Inch Nails or Marylin Manson, though.

I'll listen to this, though. Between it and the new Nick Cave album, it's a good week for mopey songwriters.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 7:46 PM on September 21, 2016 [4 favorites]


Two early thoughts:

This is damn dark.

Cohen has just given thousands of rabbis and cantors a giant gift by dropping this a few weeks before Rosh Hashanah.
posted by zachlipton at 7:46 PM on September 21, 2016 [8 favorites]


Dock Boggs?

So I looked it up, and Dock Boggs was 9 years younger than Cohen is now when he died. So Cohen is winning that one. Cohen has a ways to go if he wants to outdo Pete Seeger, though.
posted by dis_integration at 7:48 PM on September 21, 2016


The cigarette in that video is smoking. Nice touch.
posted by nushustu at 7:50 PM on September 21, 2016 [4 favorites]


Love it and dark for even Cohen. Thanks for putting this up, i re-read The Only Tourist in Havana Turns His Thoughts Homeward not a comparsion in subject matter but those lines, by measure, that just grab you by the ear.

"a perfumed barge for Lords of Memory"
Sums it up. Ya, it's as if an inner dialogue through music creates a narrative of suggestion, a, hey, maybe we should do this, but re think it sober.
First, we take Manhatten
Uhn, see, aforethought. Because Berlin, Berlin. So, perhaps we get a taste of that, that sound from selling snow, to under-developed nations from this song.
Odd to think of Cohen as from my father's generation.
posted by clavdivs at 8:10 PM on September 21, 2016 [1 favorite]


better than Hallelujah
posted by philip-random at 8:12 PM on September 21, 2016 [1 favorite]


This song is great and thanks for putting it up, tclark. I don't always like Cohen's catalog, but I love this!
posted by Silverstone at 8:26 PM on September 21, 2016


This washes Hallelujah right out of my brain. Thank God.
posted by maudlin at 8:26 PM on September 21, 2016 [7 favorites]


Oh wow. Thanks for sharing this.
posted by bunderful at 8:42 PM on September 21, 2016


I've been trying to figure out how to cover "Everybody Knows" (annotated lyrics on Genius) in a way that is mine, but still keeps its weight... and I've come to the conclusion that is impossible.

"Everybody Knows" is a dark song, and this is like its coda. Thanks for this!
posted by kmartino at 8:42 PM on September 21, 2016 [3 favorites]


He's still got it. And the future is still murder.
posted by gwint at 8:47 PM on September 21, 2016 [10 favorites]


Hoo boy.
posted by rtha at 9:02 PM on September 21, 2016


Darker than Dress Rehearsal Rag ?
posted by unliteral at 9:20 PM on September 21, 2016 [1 favorite]


How much darker could it be? None. None more darker.
posted by Cookiebastard at 9:21 PM on September 21, 2016 [8 favorites]


i think it's less dark than either everybody knows or dress rehearsal rag, i think that hope exists in the idea of being ready to leave the earth, and stating that explicitly.
posted by PinkMoose at 9:44 PM on September 21, 2016 [1 favorite]


the bard speaks
posted by mr. manager at 11:38 PM on September 21, 2016


I can't decide whether Cohen's hineni is about acceptance or defiance. Maybe a little of both?
posted by Two unicycles and some duct tape at 11:45 PM on September 21, 2016


And damn he's old! I wonder who the oldest person to record a folk/pop album is.

Dr Ralph Stanley?

(Died June 23, 2016, aged 89; Ralph Stanley & Friends: Man of Constant Sorrow was released January 19, 2015.)
posted by On the Corner at 12:15 AM on September 22, 2016 [3 favorites]


Happy Birthday Leonard, thank you for the song, all the songs and all the words. You have the best words.
posted by valetta at 12:35 AM on September 22, 2016 [6 favorites]


None. None more darker.

I have a vague memory of one of his songs that goes something like: "There were three of us this morning/Then the soldiers came."
posted by Coda Tronca at 1:41 AM on September 22, 2016 [1 favorite]


The Partisan: "there were three of us this morning/ I am all alone this evening/ but I must go on"

If I remember correctly.

Yes. Dark.
posted by Philby at 1:52 AM on September 22, 2016 [2 favorites]


one of his songs
"La Complainte du Partisan" ("The Partisan") is a song about the French Resistance in World War II. The song was written in 1943 in London by Emmanuel d'Astier de la Vigerie and the music by Anna Marly.
---
[Hy] Zaret wrote the lyrics for an English translation of the French Resistance song "La Complainte du Partisan" ("The Song of the French Partisan"). The song had initially been written in Russian by Anna Marly in 1943 [in London], and then translated into French. The song became popular after it was recorded by Leonard Cohen and others as "The Partisan".

Hy Zaret (August 21, 1907 – July 2, 2007)[1] was an American Tin Pan Alley[2] lyricist and composer best known as the co-author of the 1955 hit "Unchained Melody," one of the most recorded songs of the 20th century.[3]
Wiki, Wiki
posted by Mister Bijou at 2:19 AM on September 22, 2016 [3 favorites]


He's my man.
posted by chavenet at 3:43 AM on September 22, 2016 [2 favorites]


Press release idea:

Stuff this up the hole in your culture: New Leonard Cohen album lands October 21.

I'm glad he's still with us. Happy birthday!

Charlemagne In Sweatpants: I was probably the only teenage goth who listened to The Future instead of Nine Inch Nails or Marylin Manson, though.

This makes perfect sense, though. I wasn't a goth but was very much sympatico with the ones I went to high school with. I mean the title of Some Girls Wander by Mistake is from "Teachers" which is one of my favourite dark Cohens. I think that has as much to do with the musical arrangement as it does with the words:

I walked into a hospital
where none was sick and none was well,
when at night the nurses left
I could not walk at all.

Morning came and then came noon,
dinner time a scalpel blade
lay beside my silver spoon.

Some girls wander by mistake
into the mess that scalpels make.
Are you the teachers of my heart?
We teach old hearts to break.

posted by mandolin conspiracy at 4:00 AM on September 22, 2016


My ex-gf from a few years ago is the one that got me into Leonard Cohen. It's one of the few things from that relationship that no longer makes me cringe. A kind of nice walking-away from the relationship gift. So thanks Erin.
posted by Fizz at 4:42 AM on September 22, 2016


I do hope this isn't another Lazarus, 2016 has been awful enough as it is.
posted by epo at 5:24 AM on September 22, 2016 [2 favorites]


Offhand, it fits right in with much of Book of Mercy and Various Positions. That was a rich lode to mine, and I can see that he went back for more, especially at this stage in his life.

I look forward to this, and to those works yet to come. He may be ready, but I'm certainly not.
posted by Capt. Renault at 6:47 AM on September 22, 2016 [2 favorites]


I'm still too heartbroken to get into new Cohen. My wife was a big Cohen fan and I wanted so badly to be her own private Leonard Cohen, the associations his name, face, and voice evoke in me now are still too much to stand.
posted by saulgoodman at 7:01 AM on September 22, 2016 [1 favorite]


Ooh, this was great! I love Leonard Cohen. Today shall be "listen to Leonard Cohen and stare out the window at the misting rain" day at work!
posted by aka burlap at 7:15 AM on September 22, 2016 [1 favorite]


And damn he's old! I wonder who the oldest person to record a folk/pop album is.

Christopher Lee had that metal album a couple years ago...
posted by notsnot at 8:09 AM on September 22, 2016 [2 favorites]


So Season 3 True Detective has its theme song.
posted by jindc at 1:16 PM on September 22, 2016 [3 favorites]


At first I was disappointed that he's not really singing but on closer listen there are fragments of implied imagined melody and that's even more appropriate somehow.
posted by speicus at 1:06 AM on September 23, 2016


Wow, threatening god.

When I first met my husband he was very much into Cohen, who I found dismal and boring. Forty years later his current songs resonate with me so much and oddly enough spouse can longer bear to listen to him.
posted by glasseyes at 2:59 PM on September 24, 2016


SLNewYorker: "Leonard Cohen Makes It Darker"

At eighty-two, the troubadour has another album coming. Like him, it is obsessed with mortality, God-infused, and funny.

posted by MonkeyToes at 4:37 PM on October 12, 2016 [1 favorite]


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