Here’s a little known fact about the fortunes of Leonard Norman Cohen. Even if former lover and manager Kelley Lynch hadn’t stolen his $5million nest egg while the Canadian icon was off contemplating existence in a mountaintop Buddhist monastery, he’d still have wound up broke.
The financier who was supposed to have been given Cohen’s money to invest turned out to be another Bernie Madoff... and all of his clients lost their shirts in a Ponzi scheme. So, one way or another, the singer would probably have been forced out of retirement.
Which is good news for his admirers, of course. Cohen seems to have enthusiastically accepted his fate, too. Not only has the artistically rejuvenated 80-year-old been exhaustively touring the world, but he’s also been active on the recording front. His 13th studio album, Popular Problems, comes just two years after 2012’s Old Ideas. Clocking in at 36 minutes, these nine songs mainly address conflict, disaster, injustice and the God dilemma.
Musically, he has abandoned the simple – and sometimes cheesy – synths of albums such as I’m Your Man and Dear Heather, replacing them with a much warmer, more organic band sound, ably abetted by long-time backing singers Charlean Carmon and Donna Delory. Vocally, his tobacco-tinged croon has rarely sounded better – or wiser. There’s anger there, too, though it’s diluted with his trademark humour. On dark first cut ‘Almost Like The Blues’, he sings, “There’s torture and there’s killing/ There’s all my bad reviews/ The war, the children missing/ Lord, it’s almost like the blues.”
Cohen has been more open to collaborating recently, and seven of these nine songs were co-written with producer Patrick Leonard (best known for his work with Madonna). ‘A Street’, meanwhile, is a co-write with current squeeze Anjani Thomas: “I see the Ghost of Culture/ with numbers on his wrist/ Salute some new conclusion/ Which all of us have missed.”
‘Born in Chains’, was first started 40 years ago (“I’ve rewritten it many times to accommodate a change in my theological position,” he recently explained): “I was born in chains/ But I was taken out of Egypt/ I was bound to a burden/ But the burden it was raised”).
While he’s not offering any solutions, Cohen fans will be delighted that he’s sharing these poetic and provocative Popular Problems.

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