Leonard Cohen – ‘I’m Your Man’
“I’m just paying my rent every day in the tower of song,” Leonard Cohen sings in the final lyric of I’m Your Man. While maintaining the tone of a tireless worker and his reputation as an over-editing perfectionist, the Cohen met on his eighth album is a confident and assured one, solid in his worth and belonging.
The finale track, ‘Tower Of Song’, perfectly summarises the album. On one hand, Cohen allows himself to indulge in a moment of self-gratification. In the imagined world of this song, he’s neighbours with Hank Williams, painting a picture of a kind of tower block of the greats. But while this late-period Cohen never suggests that he doesn’t deserve to be housed here, he’s working away all the same. Slaving away for cultural iconography, Cohen sings, “They tied me to this table right here in the tower of song,” suggesting that even if he wanted to stop working, he simply couldn’t.
With that conclusive song in mind, standing as Cohen’s current philosophy on his working life, I’m Your Man feels like his rent payment, offering up these eight songs as tax to stay relevant. But in 1988, the currency is changing. In an increasingly different landscape, the times are moving further and further away from the optimism of the 1960s. The folk scene that birthed Cohen and the kind of flouncy hippie lifestyle he used to live on Hydra is no longer what it used to be.
Cohen could just cash in more of the same, but it wouldn’t be worth its weight anymore. Seven albums in, I’m Your Man sounds like a turning point as Cohen embraces modernity with open arms. The album’s opener, ‘First We Take Manhattan’, throws the listener right in. Finding a very different landscape to the free love New York of the 1960s on ‘Chelsea Hotel No.2’, Cohen looks at the city with a villainous eye instead. Singing about a plot to take over the city, set to a video game-styled musical backing, the track navigates the Cold War era and the lingering threat of terrorism head-on with a kind of cinematic or theatrical approach.
Musically, from track one and onwards, I’m Your Man is an incredibly different Cohen album. The sudden modernisation as the singer gets heavy-handed with the use of synths and drum machines could be jarring and distracting if the lyrics didn’t remain so distinctly his. Even on a political song like ‘First We Take Manhattan’, there is the same nonchalant, off-the-cuff tone that has run through all of Cohen’s work, both musical and written.
Meanwhile, on ‘Ain’t No Cure For Love’, a song with such an overblown romantic instrumentation of horns and classic rock guitars, Cohen’s dry humour adds a level of silliness. Singing, “All the rocket ships are climbing through the sky / The holy books are open wide / The doctors working day and night / But they’ll never ever find that cure for love,” the lyrics are so purposefully blunt, only Cohen could get away with it and even get a little smile from his listener.
The same tone is maintained on the title track, ‘I’m Your Man’, where Cohen humorously shape-shifts to whatever the object of his desire wants from him. He sings, “And if you want another kind of love / I’ll wear a mask for you,” Cohen’s distinctive tone and lyrical voice ensure that even while the instrumentals change and modernise, his fans will feel familiar here.
Alongside his blunt approach, Cohen’s poetry maintains. On ‘Take This Waltz’, especially, he dedicates an entire track to ‘Pequeño vals vienés’, his favourite poem by the Spanish writer Federico García Lorca. Elsewhere, the high-drama performance of ‘Everybody Knows’ sounds and feels more like a poetry recital than a song, with its chugging rhyme scheme and repeated motifs. Much like his past albums, there’s the distinct feeling that these songs were written down, pen to paper, long before they were ever put on tape. Even while leaning further into the sounds of the decade on a mission for more commercial success, Cohen’s identity as a poet and a writer first holds steady.
As a short album of only eight tracks, there is almost not enough time to consider highlights and lowlights. However, ‘Jazz Police’ and ‘I Can’t Forget’ are forgettable. Paling in comparison to the hits surrounding them on either side, neither track delivers anything particularly notable except especially overblown instrumentation on the prior. Leaning too far into modernism and falling off the cliff into campy, overly trendy sounds that age too quickly, ‘Jazz Police’ doesn’t live up to the legend’s standards.
But the singer tried. As the album draws to a close and ‘Tower Of Song’ comes in, Cohen’s position as a studious and dedicated worker comes to fruition. Striving to be better and never getting lazy with his practice, I’m Your Man speaks perfectly to that drive as the 1960s folk star refuses to rest on his laurels but continues paying his due, or paying his rent, in the music world.
