Leonard Cohen’s You Want It Dark­er is a bleak mas­ter­piece. Released just 19 days before his death, the album sounds like a warn­ing from beyond, one Cohen seemed to know we’d nev­er heed. His sym­pa­thy for human fail­ure reached its denoue­ment in the posthu­mous Thanks for the Dance, a project “much less apoc­a­lyp­tic” in tone than its pre­de­ces­sor, writes Thomas Hobbs at NME. Unlike many a posthu­mous album, “this point of dif­fer­ence more than jus­ti­fies the record’s release,” even if the mate­r­i­al can “sound a lit­tle scrap­py” at times.

The posthu­mous album’s exis­tence is also jus­ti­fied by the fact that Cohen want­ed it released. He turned that respon­si­bil­i­ty over to his son, Adam, who also pro­duced You Want It Dark­er and who recruit­ed Beck, Feist, Bryce Dess­ner of the Nation­al, Damien Rice, Richard Reed Par­ry of Arcade Fire, and “long-time Cohen col­lab­o­ra­tors Javier Mas and Jen­nifer Warn­er” to fin­ish Thanks for the Dance.

Many of the songs began as strained vocal read­ings Adam record­ed, then lat­er craft­ed arrange­ments around, as he tells NPR.

I begged him, often “Just record this lyric. Let me sketch some­thing and based on your reac­tion, we’ll adapt.” I was very, very lucky to get him to have these read­ings. Some­times they were read­ings with no metro­nom­ic sig­na­tures, it was just a read­ing of poet­ry. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, on a few occa­sions, that’s all I was left with — just bare musi­cal sketch­es. But they were also so laden with instruc­tion.

Cohen was a lit­er­ary per­fec­tion­ist. “He’s sort of the oppo­site of Dylan, who had this from the hip [song­writ­ing process],” says his son. “My father was much more method­i­cal, he had a chis­el… there were big, big pieces at which he’d been at work for years.” That Cohen would leave work behind for oth­ers to fin­ish, how­ev­er, is ful­ly in keep­ing with his biggest themes: noth­ing is ever per­fect.

In my opin­ion, there’s some­thing about the the­sis of this man’s work, which is about bro­ken­ness. One of the main points of inter­est was this idea of “the bro­ken hal­lelu­jah,” or “the crack in every­thing, that’s how the light gets in.” I think I’m not trans­gress­ing by say­ing one of the posi­tions of what “Hap­pens to the Heart” is bleak, that it breaks. But it’s how one sees one’s own heart break­ing: if you see it as every­one’s heart break­ing, it recon­tex­tu­al­izes it. 

“Hap­pens to the Heart” is also the first posthu­mous film in a “new series of artis­tic respons­es to Leonard Cohen’s posthu­mous album,” curat­ed by Now­ness who “invit­ed a glob­al ros­ter of film­mak­ers and artists to present visu­al inter­pre­ta­tions of Leonard Cohen’s life and lyrics.”

Four of those short films are avail­able on YouTube, and you can watch them here. In addi­tion to “Hap­pens to the Heart,” they include “Mov­ing On,” “Thanks for the Dance,” and “The Hills.” They do not include “The Goal,” but you can stream three dif­fer­ent ver­sions on the Now­ness site. One of these uses “footage from NOWNESS’s exten­sive film archive” in a “visu­al elab­o­ra­tion on the album’s sixth track,” the site notes, “which evolved from a 1998 Cohen poem of the same name” — a quin­tes­sen­tial Cohen lyric filled with wry, mor­bid humor and com­pas­sion for uni­ver­sal human suf­fer­ing.

I can’t leave my house
Or answer the phone
I’m going down again
But I’m not alone

Set­tling at last
Accounts of the soul
This for the trash
That paid in full

As for the fall, it began long ago
Can’t stop the rain
Can’t stop the snow

I sit in my chair
I look at the street
The neigh­bor returns
My smile of defeat

I move with the leaves
I shine with the chrome
I’m almost alive
I’m almost at home

No one to fol­low
And noth­ing to teach
Except that the goal
Falls short of the reach

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Leonard Cohen’s Last Work, The Flame Gets Pub­lished: Dis­cov­er His Final Poems, Draw­ings, Lyrics & More

How Leonard Cohen & David Bowie Faced Death Through Their Art: A Look at Their Final Albums

New Ani­ma­tion Brings to Life a Lost 1974 Inter­view with Leonard Cohen, and Cohen Read­ing His Poem “Two Slept Togeth­er”

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Over the past twen­ty years Radio­head man­aged to achieve some­thing no oth­er rock band ever has: endur­ing out­sider art rock cred­i­bil­i­ty that shield­ed them from the media machin­ery they came to loathe at the end of the mil­len­ni­um, and endur­ing pop­u­lar­i­ty that meant they could drop their last, 2016 LP, A Moon Shaped Pool “with­out doing a sin­gle inter­view and it still topped the charts all over the world,” Rolling Stone writes,” even if Drake and Bey­once kept them stuck at Num­ber Three in Amer­i­ca.” How did they do it?

Twen­ty years ago, New York­er music writer Alex Ross described pop music as “in a state of sus­pense. On the one hand, the Top Forty chart is over­run with dancers, mod­els, actors, and the like; on the oth­er hand, there are signs that pop music is once again becom­ing a safe place for cre­ative musi­cians. The world fame of Radio­head is a case in point.” Do we still see a dichoto­my between “dancers, mod­els, actors” and “cre­ative musi­cians” like Radio­head in pop music? Per­haps it was a false one to begin with.

Despite their ambiva­lence about pop (and halls of fame), Radio­head hasn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly want­ed to be pegged as stan­dard bear­ers of the avant garde either. As drum­mer Phil Sel­way put it in the year they released Amne­sia, the sec­ond of two of the most baf­fling­ly oblique, yet strange­ly dance­able rock albums in pop­u­lar music: “we don’t want peo­ple twid­dling their goa­tees over our stuff. What we do is pure escapism.” Yet after OK Com­put­er, they emerged sound­ing like a band try­ing to escape itself.

They nev­er want­ed to be a col­lec­tion of celebri­ties. They were hap­pi­est in the base­ment, co-cre­at­ing a sound that is cer­tain­ly greater than the sum of its parts but is also very much, Ross writes, the sum of its parts: “Take away any one ele­ment — Selway’s flick­er­ing rhyth­mic grid, for exam­ple, fierce in exe­cu­tion and trip­py in effect — and Radio­head are a dif­fer­ent band.” Even their pro­grammed, elec­tron­ic beats sound like Selway’s play­ing. “The five togeth­er form a sin­gle mind, with its own habits and tics — the Radio­head Com­pos­er.”

After det­o­nat­ing expec­ta­tions that they’d con­tin­ue on as a typ­i­cal are­na rock band, they were free to make music that met no one’s expec­ta­tions but their own. That cre­ative free­dom unleashed in the next two decades a hand­ful of albums solid­i­fy­ing their sta­tus as “Knights Tem­plar of rock and roll” because of their will­ing­ness to change and adapt, while always play­ing to their strengths: their sin­gle-mind­ed­ness when play­ing togeth­er and the refined song­writ­ing of Thom Yorke, show­cased solo in the first episode of their pro­duc­er Nigel Godrich’s “From the Base­ment” series. As men­tioned in anoth­er recent post, the series fea­tured inti­mate live music per­for­mances of bands, with­out a host or audi­ence.

In lat­er episodes, how­ev­er, from 2008 and 2011, respec­tive­ly, fur­ther up, the band played the full albums In Rain­bows and The King of Limbs to per­fec­tion. Under the for­mer video, on their YouTube page, one com­menter jokes, “what a great band. I hope they can get out of the base­ment some­day.” It’s fun­ny because it seems like that’s exact­ly where they’d rather be. See more live per­for­mances from the “From the Base­ment” series here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Inti­mate Live Per­for­mances of Radio­head, Son­ic Youth, the White Stripes, PJ Har­vey & More: No Host, No Audi­ence, Just Pure Live Music

Radio­head Will Stream Con­certs Free Online Until the Pan­dem­ic Comes to an End

Radiohead’s Thom Yorke Per­forms Songs from His New Sound­track for the Hor­ror Film, Sus­piria

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness