The two-disc retrospective The Essential Leonard Cohen traces the Canadian bard's musical maturity from poet and novelist who sang a little, to multidimensional artist whose oracular vocals and increasingly rich arrangements are every bit as compelling as his verse. Even when Cohen came to prominence through the 1960s songcraft of "Suzanne" and "Bird on a Wire", the "folksinger" tag never ...
Manufacturer: Columbia Records
Led Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant and bluegrass crooner Alison Krauss may not be the likeliest of musical combinations. But on this welcome collaboration album, they work beautifully together, wringing a kind of magic from other people's songs. The key to the album is its versatility. Between them, Krauss and Plant can handle a vast repertoire on their own, and here they take on the lot, from ...
Manufacturer: Decca
Manufacturer: Mercury
Various Positions was Leonard Cohen's first album of the 1980s, yet was in keeping with the rest of his albums in two important respects: one, it sounded absolutely nothing like anything else anyone else was doing; two, it was a compelling reason for anyone else dealing in songs of love and its loss to wonder why they were bothering. As a lyricist, Cohen has few, if any, peers--he has never ...
Manufacturer: Sony
Even the production, laden with synthesized strings and cooing female choruses, is wry on I'm Your Man, a definitive Leonard Cohen album. Though still touched with the tragic ("Take This Waltz," based on a Garcia Lorca poem), the album often achieves its high points by combining Cohen's world-weariness with black-humoured evocations of social and romantic ills and artistic quandaries. "I ...
Manufacturer: Columbia
Joni Mitchell would go on from this 1971 recording to make more popular, more ambitious and more challenging albums, but she's never made a better one. Working with minimal accompaniment (Stephen Stills and James Taylor are two of the four sidemen), the Canadian songbird summoned an involving song cycle of romance found and lost. Though Blue is an uncommonly intimate representation, it's ...
Manufacturer: Reprise
Manufacturer: Rhino
For the nine years prior to the release of Ten New Songs the legendary songwriter Leonard Cohen was mostly in a Zen monastery, obsessively rewriting and polishing the oblique, lapidary lyrics for this austere collection. Ten New Songs is arguably Sharon Robinson's record as much as Cohen's--she co-wrote all the songs, plays most of the instruments (primarily a synth that seems to ...
The ethical questions surrounding this final album in the American Recordings series are as unavoidable as they are, ultimately, peripheral. While the vocal tracks were recorded in the months just prior to Johnny Cash's passing in September 2003, the arrangements weren't undertaken until two years later. And though producer Rick Rubin had become a trusted friend, the Man in Black wasn't ...
Manufacturer: Mercury Records Ltd (London)
Manufacturer: Bella Union
