Staff Blog
Leonard Cohen, May 12, Academy of Music
posted by sam adams
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Your faith was strong but you needed proof.
“It’s been 14 or 15 years since I stood on this stage. I was 60 years old — just a kid with a crazy dream,” Leonard Cohen joked with the Academy of Music crowd. That’s right: joked. From the moment he danced (danced!) onstage, Cohen belied the sober and even dour image he built up over four decades of self-styled rock poetry. I’ve always found it hard to take Cohen as seriously as he took himself, especially since so many of his songs sounded as if they were designed to get women to sleep with him. But notwithstanding its three-hour-plus running time, Tuesday’s show was blessedly free of pretense. From the opening bars of “Dance Me to the End of Love,” where he dropped to one knee in front of guitarist Javier Mas, he was more inclined to plead than to pontificate, posing questions rather than selling answers.
It’s no secret that Cohen’s return to touring was prompted by the theft of most of his fortune by his former manager, but there was no whiff of cash-in. The tickets may have started north of $100, but Cohen seemed determined to earn every penny, guiding his exceptional six-piece band through just about every song anyone could care to hear. By the time he wrapped up the third encore with “Whither Thou Goest,” one imagines even the most devout Cohen acolyte was well and truly sated.
Cohen handed off a few songs to his backing vocalists — collaborator Sharon Robinson took the lead on “Boogie Street,” and Charley and Hattie Webb did the honors on “If It Be Your Will” — but the 74-year-old Cohen never left the stage, and his energy never flagged. With a literal spring in his step, he danced softly around the stage, his hands pulled up near the brim of his trademark fedora (also mandatory attire for his stage crew). “I tried all the religions,” he told the crowd, also rattling off a long list of antidepressants. “But the cheerfulness kept breaking through.”
Levity isn’t a trait one associates with Cohen, but the attentive crowd pulled out the tongue-in-cheek asides from songs like “Waiting for the Miracle,” where he quipped, “I haven’t been this happy since the end of World War II.” The opening bars of “I Tried to Leave You” wouldn’t normally call for a laugh, but when Cohen used to open his third encore, the crowd erupted. By then he had tried many times, although his inability to leave the stage could hardly be called a failure.
Set 1:
Dance Me to The End of Love
The Future
Ain’t No Cure For Love
Bird on the Wire
Everybody Knows
In My Secret Life
Who By Fire
Chelsea Hotel No. 2
Waiting for the Miracle
Anthem
Set 2:
Tower of Song
Suzanne
Sisters of Mercy
Take This Waltz
Boogie Street
Hallelujah
I’m Your Man
A Thousand Kisses Deep (spoken)
Democracy
Encore 1:
So Long Marianne
First We Take Manhattan
Encore 2:
Famous Blue Raincoat
If It Be Your Will
Closing Time
Encore 3:
I Tried to Leave You
Whither Thou Goest
Anyone familiar with Leonard associates him with levity — it’s built into his songs from the past thirty years. The questions have always been in the lyrics. To write, with surprise, that he posed questions rather than sold answers is a sign that you weren’t very well acquainted with his work previous to this concert. Fans have always known this.