The Future

by

Leonard Cohen

Edit

When the air turns cold and the daylight hours diminish, I think of when I became familiar with Leonard Cohen's the Future. One December, my mother, whose love of unconventional, eclectic music I inherited, used Christmas money from my grandparents to expand her CD collection, including the purchase of the Future, an album from which the two best songs of her adored Natural Born Killers soundtrack were taken. I gave the album a few trial listens, as I had always expanded my tastes by waltzing through Mom's tape and CD collection.

The Future, however, was much different from the Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin I picked-up from her. To a high school student whose favorite bands were mostly FM radio staples, Cohen sounded dark, sober and distant. The Future's simplistic arrangements, slow pace and Cohen's gritty, tuneless voice made the Future a failure on the scale that I rated Led Zeppelin IV and Hot Rocks as classics. Yet, the brooding articulateness of the album was something I slowly found to be spell-binding. Lines such as "Things are going to slide/Slide in all directions/Won't be nothing/Nothing you can measure anymore/The blizzard, the blizzard of the world/Has crossed the threshold/And it has overturned/The order of the soul," had both an immediate impact and an abstraction and complexity about them that made the lyrics mysterious and affecting after several listens, even after memorization. Songs of love and of anger I had heard but the precise lyrics of Cohen, speaking of that disappointed feeling of one who loosens-up in celebration and struggles to find a hand to hold ("Closing Time"), of desperate patience ("Waiting for the Miracle") and intellectualized hope ("Deocracy") were fresh, exotic and intriguing to me. Even the slow-paced music began to engage me, with its sleekness, craftiness and exact appropriateness to the song. All in all, to a high school student whose favorite bands were mostly FM radio staples, Cohen was somebody bizarre and astonishing.

He was a musical persona more multifaceted and more vibrant than any other I had known, a writer of consciously futile protest mantras; a desperate romantic always embraced by love to the point of entanglement, a witty old man (three times my age) sitting lonesome at the edge of a bar waiting for someone to pour his wisdom and wry observations into. This was the person I saw as a listened to the Future, relentlessly - with headphones on the bus, driving to my part-time job, alone in my room - always surrounded by cold air, falling snow and the sense of wonderment only a poet can provide. The Future was my introduction to a more cerebral, more mature side of popular music. Even today, after absorbing the Velvet Underground and Nico, Astral Weeks and Blood On the Tracks, I have yet to hear an album that stimulates me in the way the Future does. I am thankful that I discovered Leonard Cohen's best album during that lush, white Pennsylvania winter at the age in which every new discovery in music seemed supernatural.

I heard one of the tracts in a class on mediation and thought I would try the entire CD. Leonard Cohen is an acquired taste. I am in the early stages of this process. Much of his work sounds the same to my novice ear, a man in a raspy voice talking poetry. Its also pretty dark. Not like your mother making you eat liver because its good for you,...maybe more like when you first learned to drink coffee black. Many "adults" I respect are wild about this artist so I have faith that his style is something I will appreciate if only on a very limited occasional basis.