Back during the time when he was carving out a niche as self-confessed “minor poet”, Leonard Cohen took a film crew to his favourite after hours dharma-bum drinking den in Montreal and tried to explain why he liked staying up all night on the piss.
“The first rebellious act that a man can perform is the refusal to sleep,” he enthused. “That’s the real rebellion against life and the regenerative process – I’m going to turn night into day: revel, drink, womanise all night. I’ll show time, death and the regenerative process that, with my mind and will, I can triumph.”
What then to make of the fact that Cohen has decided to open this, his 10th studio album, with a track called ‘No More Roving’? Could it be that, after reaching his three score and ten, the mind and will are finding time, death etc to be more brutal foes than ever?
As always, it’s Len himself who proves most eloquent on the subject: “For the sword outwears the sheath/The soul outwears the breast/The heart must pause to breathe/And love itself have rest.” It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.
Dear Heather is an exhausted record – beaten and yearning for respite, but also receptive to great lapses of nightmarish and dreamlike lucidity.
Mariannne Faithfull once claimed that Cohen had spent the last four decades “quietly seducing the most beautiful women in the world”. On ‘Because Of’, he seems to be waving goodbye to all that – admitting, with a startling image, that the women (ghosts? nurses?) within whose bedrooms he now finds himself, “cover me like a baby that has shivered”; whispering in his ear “look at me Leonard, one last time”.
It’s a notion of melancholic diminishment that has also bled into Cohen’s concept of music. Where once the idea of song stood imperious and towering in its comforting permanence, now – with an unmistakeable nod to Keats – it’s become ethereal and impossible to contain.
‘Nightingale’ deals beautifully with the saddest sentiments: “Fare-Thee-Well my nightingale/I lived but to be near you/Though you are singing somewhere still/I can no longer hear you.” It will break your heart.
However, Dear Heather’s mode is not an exclusively elegiac one. At times there’s scarcely concealed venom at play. ‘To A Teacher’ is a kiss-off song the young Dylan would have been proud of (“Did you confuse Messiah in a mirror/ And rest because he had finally come.”)
It’s also a record that’s deeply troubled by its times. The haunting, gospel ballad ‘On That Day’ has a very specific date in mind. “Some people say it’s what we deserve/For sins against God and for crimes in the world/I wouldn’t know/ I’m just holding the fort/Since that day when they wounded New York.”
The record’s centre-piece ‘Villanelle For Our Time’ is a breath-taking achievement – both a renunciation of the current global predicament and a forceful profession of belief: “This is the faith from which we start – that men shall know commonwealth again.” He sounds meaner than Tom Waits while delivering it. But then, you suspect it’s a credo, so he’s entitled to.
By rights, the album should end with ‘The Faith’ and the line: “Time itself unwinds/ O love aren’t you tired yet?”
It’s unmistakably the sound of cares being put to bed, goodbyes being said. But then, a few seconds later, almost like he’s got nowhere else to go, Cohen comes back, cranking up his band for a touching rattle through the country standard ‘Tennessee Waltz’.
It’s an entirely appropriate finale to a brave, unflinching and absolutely necessary record – the decrepit soak refusing to go to bed; the old poet still trying desperately to turn night into day.