Zack: Last year, 2016, was an incredible year for music. Heavyweights like Beyoncé, Kanye West, Frank Ocean, Rihanna, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, and Radiohead all released albums. We got very strong hip-hop albums from Chance the Rapper, YG, Run the Jewels, and ScHoolboy Q. David Bowie released a surprise album two days before his death and A Tribe Called Quest released their first album in nearly two decades to memorialize the legendary Phife Dawg. We even got a Kendrick project that gave a bit of a look into his album-making process (and had some good songs of its own merits). And this long list doesn’t even include the slightly less prominent albums by acts like Anderson .Paak, Sturgill Simpson, Solange, Kaytranada, NxWorries, Bon Iver, Noname, and Denzel Curry that I also really, really enjoyed. And, among that entire long list, my favorite album from 2016 was You Want it Darker by Leonard Cohen. It’s pretty much perfect. Plenty of people have commented about how Blackstar is an album from a man coming to terms with his own mortality. You Want it Darker sounds like an album from a man who is just to weary to think about it much. It’s an album that occurs between the acceptance and the actual death. It can be emotionally exhausting to listen to, but the experience is so worth it that I frequently return to it. Because of how much I absolutely adore that album, I was very excited to give some of his other works a listen. Songs of Leonard Cohen is about as far removed from You Want it Darker as it’s possible to get. Instead of Cohen’s final album, it’s his first, released almost 50 years prior when Cohen was a spry young pup in his early 30s. The weariness is unsurprisingly removed, but the care and precision of the lyrics is not. It’s a very good debut album. I didn’t find the subject matter quite as engaging, since on that front it is mostly just a traditional folk album. But there is clearly so much thought put into every single word in every single line that it is immediately captivating. Songs of Leonard Cohen feels like a really good audiobook is being read to you with a backing guitar.
Favorite Tracks: Master Song; One of Us Cannot Be Wrong; Suzanne
Emily: Several months ago, around when Leonard Cohen passed away, it seemed like his song Hallelujah was everywhere. I listened to a podcast that dissected many cover versions of the song, there was that painfully earnest SNL performance (and this less earnest one a few months later), and the song played over any award show montage that featured Cohen's death. Pairing that song's ubiquity with the fact that I was going through a particularly melancholy time, Hallelujah was stuck in my head for what seemed like weeks on end. I do like the song, particularly the Jeff Buckley cover, but I definitely had too much of it. So I can't say I was exactly excited to listen to a Leonard Cohen album, even though Zack has raved about his final album released last year. Mercifully, Songs of Leonard Cohen is not the album with Hallelujah on it. Several of the songs infuse a similar sense of melancholy and yearning, with simple and plaintive folk melodies that allow the intricate and emotional lyrics to shine through. Even from this early album, it's obvious that Cohen was a master storyteller, which is perhaps enough for me to overcome my Hallelujah fatigue and delve more deeply into his catalogue.
Favorite Tracks: Suzanne; Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye; Master Song
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