Leonard Cohen
You Want It Darker

Aging is not dying.

Aging while dying inside is the end.

Old dear Leonard, you know life well. You took it, friend-enemy, locked it in the back of a provincial bistro, stripped it of its clothes, sat in a corner and offered it a drink, watching all the faces and hours pass by. And with your eyes, you drank, drank... you drawn the most intense things: love, fear, pain, solitude, sex, spirituality, hope, anguish. And you crafted it, your other life, with your words, described, but transformed, overturned, with a total sensitivity, that is not of a man, not of a woman, you extracted the nectar from the poison you collected along the way, and you served it to us, in a cup of orange tea, along a desolate river, where, however, her eyes shine, she whom you loved intensely, with pure platonic love, ascended in the sky of all those who hope for a world in which Jesus returns as a sailor, and flowers no longer grow in the trash.

But the trash is everywhere, old Leonard, and you know it.

You had a gentle voice, with a masculine timbre, but feminine in the way you expressed it, when you were young.

You had a yellowed photo, on your first album, with eyes of absolute melancholy, lost, bewildered.

Now you scrape and rasp all the black stone you’ve swallowed over the years, from that cavern voice.

There are women, there is God, there is a whole road, since you started playing your guitar, your way, learned in five lessons from a flamenco teacher who killed himself a few days later.

Aging, I was saying, does not mean ending. You start everything over in this album, it’s the most full of life album I've ever listened to, which only a dying man, like you, could compose. There’s no sadness of someone about to leave, aware of it, there’s the usual intense direct gaze with which you’ve always looked at things, with a grin of irony and kindness, and now with this gaze you call death. You look back and thank, thank for all you've had, stitch back together the intertwined necklaces of pearls and mud, wear your Borsalino and even put on your sunglasses, maybe because it’s too bright there.

Songs with a startling melodic line, in their essentiality and purity, embraced and highlighted by the female choirs you’ve always loved to include, but now they are more distant voices, less carnal, colder. Among them, there is the echo of silence, which you’ve always loved, our brother. Because music, in essence, is an echo of silence that welcomes us. Matter and antimatter.

This album is a soft song to a life that is fading but remains, and in its last imposing strength, asks to come out once more, and it’s the last time, from your lips. A farewell that only you could make, to a world that misses you dearly, to those who still are part of the world, or believe to be. Monk teetering between flesh and sky, mad wanderer on the wires of the absolute, tightrope walker of the soul suspended between the ethereal and hell, you took the best things of both, chewed the bile part for us, and told us: my dear ones, I sing myself to you, and I am you.

You used to write at least ten versions of a verse, to then choose the truest one.

A farewell is not a committee unless it brings to the surface what we were at the beginning, the truest part of us, which is born defenseless and then we try to protect it over the years, so that the wounds do not become too many: you’ve always opened them, your wounds, ours, because in the end, blood is the purest thing we have.

Hallelujah, Hallelujah