My 2012: Leonard Cohen - Old Ideas

Folk Pop, Pop, Singer-Songwriter

You don't want new ideas from Leonard Cohen. You want to sink into that coal-black pit of a voice and contemplate the essentials: lust and loss; failure and redemption; the appalling comedy of existence and its inescapable end. His 12th "manual for living with defeat" answers that longing, while ever so gently ribbing it. "I love to speak with Leonard," he rumbles on opening song Going Home, "he's a sportsman and a shepherd, he's a lazy bastard living in a suit." In other words: don't take everything he says as gospel, even if it's frequently dressed up as such. Perhaps inevitably, it's the debonair sportsman, not the earnest shepherd of lost souls, who has the best tunes on Old Ideas. The Guardian

Final Tour Dates

I love to speak with Leonard
He’s a sportsman and a shepherd
He’s a lazy bastard
Living in a suit

But he does say what I tell him
Even though it isn’t welcome
He just doesn’t have the freedom
To refuse

He will speak these words of wisdom
Like a sage, a man of vision
Though he knows he’s really nothing
But the brief elaboration of a tube...