Few songwriters take more care with a turn of phrase than Leonard Cohen. The Canadian singer and poet sometimes takes years—and in a few cases, decades—to complete songs, though his pace has quickened amid a late-career boom. His stunning new one, You Want It Darker, is his third since 2012, but just his 14th studio album overall, starting with 1967’s Songs of Leonard Cohen. But the results are usually worth waiting for: Cohen writes with depth, passion, and especially in his later years, dry wit. He switches with ease from sacred to secular, sometimes in one breath to the next, on story songs about lust, longing, and spirituality.
As he has gotten older, Cohen’s lyrics have turned increasingly toward themes of mortality. The 82-year-old’s last three albums are, in many ways, a coming to terms with his advancing age and the ever-nearer prospect of finding out what, if anything, comes next. But while his focus on the end is more pronounced (like a recent New Yorker profile quoting Cohen as saying he’s “ready to die,” though he did backtrack slightly), it’s not new. Cohen has been writing dignified songs about death since he was a young man. “Seems So Long Ago, Nancy,” off 1969’s Songs From a Room, is about the suicide of a friend from his native Montreal. And the subjects of “A Bunch of Lonesome Heroes,” from the same album, are eager to tell their stories before they “turn into gold.”
Some of Cohen’s best songs about death, though, are more oblique, or wrapped up in layers of metaphor to the extent that sussing out themes of mortality requires some guesswork. In other words, they aren’t all clearly deathbed confessions, a la 1984’s “The Captain.” Here, then, are eight of Leonard Cohen’s most elegant songs that are probably about death.
“You Want It Darker”
Cohen has spent much of his past three albums questioning God, almost as if he’s racing the clock to fully reconcile his deep-seated spirituality with all the senseless suffering in the world. The title track from his latest is a particularly pointed critique that draws on scripture and religious iconography. Cohen sounds disapproving when he intones the title phrase at the end of each verse. And in the refrain when he rumbles, “I’m ready, my Lord,” it’s part challenge, part reproach to a divine being who could allow, if not inflict, so much death and misery while skipping over one who is more willing to go instead.
Key lyrics:“Magnified, sanctified, be thy holy name / Vilified, crucified, in the human frame / A million candles burning for the help that never came / You want it darker”
“Going Home”
This time, on the opener to 2012’s Old Ideas, it’s God talking about Cohen. The lyrics are wry and affectionate—the singer is “a lazy bastard, living in a suit”—but also firm. The eternal beckons, but not until the singer completes the tasks that the Lord has laid out for him: “He only has permission / To do my instant bidding which is to / Say what I have told him to repeat.”
Key lyrics:“Going home without my sorrow / Going home sometime tomorrow / Going home to where it's better / Than before/ Going home without my burden / Going home behind the curtain / Going home without the costume / That I wore”
“Night Comes On”
Like most of Cohen’s songs, this one from 1984’s Various Positions is about a number of big topics: fear, innocence, fragile hope, love lost and found and lost again. There’s also an undercurrent of mortality, as Cohen’s narrator visits his mother’s grave seeking counsel, recounts his father’s parting advice following a fatal wound, and muses on the often fleeting nature of physical intimacy. In other words, Cohen basically sums up the entire human experience in a song that isn’t quite five minutes long. This guy.
Key lyrics:“I went down to the place / Where I knew she lay waiting / Under the marble and the snow/ I said, ‘Mother I’m frightened/ The thunder and the lightning/ I'll never come through this alone”
“Hunter’s Lullaby”
A deep cut from Various Positions, “Hunter’s Lullaby” is actually a little terrifying: a father goes charging off into the forest in futile pursuit of “the beast he’ll never bind,” leaving his wife and child to fend for themselves. Cohen might as well have taken inspiration from one of the more dire stories in Grimm’s Fairy Tales. While the song could be a metaphor for a man willing to skip out on the people who most depend on him, Cohen hints at a finality from which there will be no coming back.
Key lyrics:“Your father's gone a-hunting / And he's lost his lucky charm / And he's lost the guardian heart / That keeps the hunter from the harm”
“Chelsea Hotel No. 2”
This favorite off 1974’s New Skin for the Old Ceremony is mostly about a brief fling Cohen had with Janis Joplin at New York’s most famous boheme boarding house, for which the song was named. But some of the lyrics suggest that Cohen wrote the song after Joplin’s death in 1970, and that perhaps her passing affected him more than he would have liked to admit. (Cohen has since expressed regret for making it clear whom he was singing about, calling it “an indiscretion for which I’m very sorry” in a 1994 interview with the BBC.)
Key lyrics:“I don't mean to suggest / That I loved you the best / I can't keep track of each fallen robin / I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel / That's all, I don't think of you that often”
“Stranger Song”
This tune off his debut is, in some ways, a bookend to “You Want It Darker.” They share a few lyrical reference points, as well as a general sense of foreboding. With imagery involving card games, trains, and shelter, Cohen’s stranger here is like a character from the Old West, the inscrutable figure who shows up in town ahead of some looming cataclysm. Often in literature and poetry, the stranger turns out to be death, the Biblical rider on the pale horse, which is entirely possible here, too.
Key lyrics:“You tell him to come in sit down / But something makes you turn around / The door is open you can't close your shelter / You try the handle of the road / It opens do not be afraid/ It's you my love, you who are the stranger”
“Everybody Knows”
Jaunty synth-strings and a pulsing bassline give this song, off Cohen’s 1988 synthpop album I’m Your Man, a deceptively upbeat feel that’s at odds with his bemused but ultimately pessimistic lyrics. He reels off a list of the things that everybody knows: the dice are loaded, the ship is sinking, lovers cheat, the end is coming—we’re all screwed, basically, and then we die. So, how’s your day going?
Key lyrics:“Everybody knows it's coming apart / Take one last look at this Sacred Heart / Before it blows / And everybody knows”
“Born in Chains”
The title of this highlight from 2014’s Popular Problems gives this one away: for the better part of human history, those born into slavery found freedom only in death. As he often does, Cohen draws on his Jewish heritage by referencing the Israelites’ flight from servitude in Egypt and scriptural exhortations to praise the name of the Lord; the song, in turn, has the feeling of a benediction.
Key lyrics:“I fled to the edge / Of the Mighty Sea of Sorrow / Pursued by the riders / Of a cruel and dark regime / But the waters parted / And my soul crossed over / Out of Egypt / Out of Pharaoh's dream”