By the ‘90s, Leonard Cohen foresaw bad things coming. He spelled it out in “The Future,” one of 17 tracks gathered for Hallelujah & Songs from his Albums. “The Future’s” lightly rocking tempo belied the apocalyptic vision of a world directionless and on fire. “Give me back the Berlin Wall,” says the narrator, nostalgic for certainty, even bad certainty. “It’s over, it ain’t going any further. You feel the devil’s riding crop, get ready for the future.” Will the arts save us? “All the lousy little poets coming round trying to sound like Charlie Manson,” he scoffs. And yet, a ray of hope: “Love’s the only engine of survival.”
The “Hallelujah” of the album’s title seems meant as a selling point for novices as well as fans who want everything—the version opening the album is previously unreleased, recorded during one of his epilogue tours in the years before his death in 2016. “Hallelujah” was his unexpected late career triumph, a song that had languished in relative obscurity until covered by Jeff Buckley. The fans have heard the other 16 tracks many times before, yet it’s still a pleasure to hear someone else’s mix tape. Songs from his Albums is a curated litany of songs, flowing one through the other as they roughly chronicle the journey that began with the enigmatic love song “Suzanne” (1967) and ended with memories of love, “Thanks for the Dance” (released posthumously in 2019).
Cohen emerged in the ‘60s as a troubadour, a poet with an acoustic guitar, yet he was restless. Songs from his Albums skips his ridiculous LP with Phil Spector, but doubles down on his later discovery of the marvels of cheap electric keyboards. Somehow the tick-tock drum tones and tinny synthesizers on “Dance Me to the End of Love” and “I’m Your Man” only deepen the pathos, his voice sunken deep in cantorial registers on melodies from some sad café of long ago.
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He continued to seek new musical formats for his poetry. The half-spoken, nearly whispered “In My Secret Life” is robed in quiet soul; “Show Me the Place” hovers like an old-time spiritual. His words continued to wrestle with finding the spiritual in the physical; they were like psalms written in the present tense.
