“But wait — there’s more!” can be a good news/bad news thing when it comes to posthumous album releases. No one, or almost no one, likes the idea of scraps from a late artist’s cutting room floor s…
“But wait — there’s more!” can be a good news/bad news thing when it comes to posthumous album releases. No one, or almost no one, likes the idea of scraps from a late artist’s cutting room floor slowly being dribbled out over time, as happened with Tupac Shakur, who somehow released more studio albums in death than life. And then, with singers who die less suddenly, there is the ideal — and usually myth — of intentionally leaving a musical last will and testament.
“If it be your will,” indeed — even if it’s Cohen’s producer son, Adam, giving God a significant assist. He’s said his father asked him to take vocal recordings made during or after the “Dark” sessions and bring them to fruition.
Even though Adam Cohen brought in a few celebrity guests like Daniel Lanois, Beck and the National’s Bryce Dessner to contribute to the playing or backup vocals, you won’t notice them — except perhaps for old cohort Jennifer Warnes, who, along with Feist, recognizably helps sing Cohen home at the end of the lilting, waltz-time title track. In feel, it’s enough of a piece with the last album that you could confer sequel status and dub it “You Want It Darker.
That guitar is most pronounced in the erotic reverie “The Night of Santiago,” with its south-of-the-border flare. Cohen recalls an affair with a mixture of enthusiasm and rue in a song that begins, wryly, “She said she was a maiden / That wasn’t what I heard” and ends with him recounting a woman’s many lies, only to empathetically tell the listener, “You were born to judge the world / Forgive me but I wasn’t.” That combination of lacerating insight and gentle clemency permeates the album.
Cohen’s sense of deadpan comedy hardly abandoned him at the end: “I was selling holy trinkets / I was dressing kind of sharp / Had a pussy in the kitchen / And a panther in the yard,” he sings in “Happens to the Heart,” the song here likeliest to be elevated to his pantheon of classics. As for the impending inevitable: “It failed, my little fire / But it’s bright, the dying spark.
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