Leonard Cohen is on a record pace

By ALAN LIGHT
New York Times

Posted: May 23, 2006

Leonard Cohen is not known for being prolific. In a recording career approaching its 40th year, this master of romantic despair has released 11 studio albums.

So his fans might be surprised that less than two years after his last album, "Dear Heather," Cohen is ready to release a new set of his songs.

The new album is "Blue Alert" by Anjani Thomas (Columbia), featuring 10 songs co-written and produced by Cohen, the 71-year-old Montreal-born bard; Thomas, billed on the album simply as Anjani, is his longtime backup singer and current girlfriend.

The project began when Thomas, 46, who first worked with Cohen on his "Various Positions" in 1984, took the lead vocal on the "Dear Heather" track "Undertow." Soon after, she spied a set of lyrics on his desk and asked if she could record them, possibly as a demo for his next album. Pleased with the results, she began poring through Cohen's notebooks and files.

"If there was a line or a verse I liked," she said in a telephone interview from the couple's home in Los Angeles, "we put that aside." And together they worked on turning the scraps into completed songs.

Though Cohen's songs have been covered by artists from Harry Belafonte to Jeff Buckley, he has never written for another voice. He found the prospect refreshing.

"Being what you are is always tricky, but being what you're not is really liberating," he said.

He also said he was delighted to find an outlet for lyrics he wasn't using.

"It always surprises me when something can be used," Cohen said. "There's this gnawing feeling that what you're doing is useless."

"Blue Alert" is a series of what Thomas called "bittersweet love songs," characteristically melancholy meditations on longing and loss, given a jazzier feel by her vocal range, which is considerably broader than Cohen's gravelly near-monotone.

There was another motivation for this project. Last year Cohen filed a lawsuit alleging that his former manager, Kelley Lynch, had defrauded him of millions of dollars he had set aside for his retirement. The singer, who spends much of his time at a Zen monastery outside Los Angeles, realized that he needed to accelerate his work schedule. (In February Cohen won a $9.5 million court judgment against Lynch, though it's unclear when or if he will actually see any of this money.)

"Finances were a huge factor," Thomas said. "It was, like, we've got to make a record, make some money."

By design and by luck, there is currently a flurry of Cohen-related activity. In addition to "Blue Alert" there is "A Book of Longing," a collection of new poems and drawings recently published by HarperCollins. And the documentary "I'm Your Man," featuring artists such as Rufus Wainwright and Nick Cave performing Cohen compositions (and U2 backing up the songwriting legend on one song), opens next month at Film Forum in New York. Cohen added that he was "deep into" his own next album.