You Want It Darker

2016 was a dark year full of, among other bad omens, the deaths of many icons of the musical community. Among the many musical legends we lost that year was Leonard Cohen, the legendary Canadian singer/songwriter and poet who passed away on November 7th, a day before Trump won the presidency. Cohen's passing was but the latest in a long line of music deaths and it only served to further the notion that 2016 was a terrible year. Before he left us however, Cohen released You Want it Darker, his fourteenth and final studio album. Released just 19 days before his passing, the album gives us Cohen's final musings on life with nine of his most strikingly poetic and darkly prophetic songs delivered by a man not quite ready to go gently into that good night.

Cohen was never one to shy away from the subject of his own mortality. Even in his earlier days, death always seemed a constant companion, haunting his songs and poems like a specter at the feast. This is not surprising given that much of his work was doused in biblical imagery and the mysteries of spirituality. On Cohen's previous two albums, 2012's Old Ideas and 2014's Popular Problems, we heard him grappling with the preliminaries of mortality, especially on tracks like "Going Home," "Darkness," and "Slow," but with You Want it Darker, Cohen makes his final appeal to God, Death, and fate, staring down the abyss with a calm defiance and raising his deep, poetic voice one last time.

Nowhere is this defiance more evident than on the album's opening title track, a scathing indictment to an absentee God which opens with the lines "If you are the dealer / I'm out of the game / If you are the healer / I'm broken and lame." In a few short yet stunning verses, delivered over a chorus of brooding voices chanting like Gregorian monks, Cohen hits upon the essential paradox of an all-powerful and loving being who allows so much needless suffering and misery to take place, even suggesting that maybe He likes it. "A million candles burning / for the help that never came / You want it darker / we kill the flame." Cohen ends each chorus with the same chant, "Hineni, Hineni" (a Hebrew word which translates to "Here I am") before stating "I'm ready, my lord." Despite the charges he's brought to light, Cohen assures whoever may be listening that he's ready to go.

"Treaty," the second track, follows in the tradition of many of Cohen's best songs, namely a song about a love affair that's gone sour. Unlike some of his past lamentations of love lost, this song finds Cohen with a palpable sense of world-weary resignation, most evident in lines like "I wish there was a treaty we could sign / I don't care who takes this bloody hill / I'm angry and I'm tired all the time." Now at the end of the road, Cohen is taking a final inventory of all he once had and all he's lost, but he's not making excuses or assigning blame; he's simply ready to let it all go. This theme of reconciliation and resignation is apparent throughout the album, perhaps nowhere more so than on the track "Leaving the Table," which brilliantly recalls the poker imagery of "You Want it Darker" to show a man who's laying down his cards and walking away from the game, content to leave all these earthly temptations behind once and for all. "I don't need a lover / the wretched beast is tame / I don't need a lover / so blow out the flame."

All this is not to say that love suddenly means nothing to Cohen. In the beautiful "If I Didn't Have Your Love," Cohen expounds upon how wretched his life would be without love, comparing it to a world of bitter winds, dried up seas, and endless nights where no one who's hurt could ever heal. The song stands right up there with his most romantic tunes, further proof of Cohen's knack for romance even in the midst of bleak circumstances. On an album of lyrical brilliance from start to finish, perhaps the most profound song is the penultimate track, "Steer Your Way." In beautifully crafted lines such as "Steer your heart past the truth / you believed in yesterday / such as fundamental goodness / and the wisdom of the way," Cohen helps us navigate our way through the turmoil and ruin of the age with our soul and heart intact. Each verse is like a poetic instruction guide to carrying on in this messy world of ours. Even at the end, Cohen still saw the world for what it is and laid out his prophetic wisdom in a way that shed light on universal truths of human nature.

Though Leonard Cohen the man may no longer be with us, his rare light lives on in the music and poetry he gave us, not to mention the example of his unique life. Cohen's music shows us that even in the cavernous depths of despair and misery, when all seems hopeless and broken and the night seems endless, there is still light to be seen, beauty to be found, and eternal truth to be spoken and it is here, at this intersection, where Leonard Cohen's words and music will exist forever.