The man who wrote Ten New Songs had spent five years meditating, sweeping floors, and cooking at a Zen center on Mount Baldy near Los Angeles. That was Leonard Cohen, the Canadian singer and poet whose tenth studio album appeared in 2001 as a collaboration so quiet it barely announced itself. His previous record, The Future, had come out nine years earlier, and in between Cohen had done something almost unthinkable for a star: he disappeared into silence, living at the Mt. Baldy center under his Zen teacher Joshu Sasaki. Leonard Cohen released Ten New Songs on October 9, 2001.
Sharon Robinson's expanded role
How does a songwriter come back from that? Cohen did not return alone. In June 1999 he came home to his Los Angeles duplex to live with his daughter and began working with Sharon Robinson. Robinson had already co-written two of his strongest songs, "Everybody Knows" and "Waiting for the Miracle." But on Ten New Songs she did far more than co-write. She produced, arranged, wrote the music, programmed synthesizers and drum machines, and sang throughout the record.
The division of labor was stark and strange. Cohen handed Robinson his lyrics, and she built music around them. Then he insisted she sing every song together with him, including several lead parts. Robinson found it ironic: a man whose voice made women lose their minds, as she put it, wanted to hide it. The recording stayed almost fully isolated at their home studios in Los Angeles. Engineer Leanne Ungar was there, but most of the work happened in a converted three-car garage attached to Robinson's house.
A digital sound for a comeback
The sound that emerged was unlike Cohen's earlier folk records. Ten New Songs was the first Cohen album recorded entirely digitally, and the music felt calm, built mostly on synthesizers and drum machines. Cohen said he wanted a relaxed pulse that invited you into the groove. Instead of the turbulent arrangements of I'm Your Man or The Future, the new songs moved with a soft, patient rhythm. The lyrics themselves were more peaceful than the biting work of his past.
That shift made sense. During the tours for I'm Your Man and The Future Cohen had been deeply unhappy, drinking three bottles of wine a night on the road according to his biographer Anthony Reynolds. The Zen years and his return home had not made him a preacher, though. When asked in 2001, he said he was not looking for a new religion or dogma. What he found instead was a different way to make a record: give the words away, let someone else shape them, and sing together.
The first single was "In My Secret Life," a slow, shimmering track that set the album's midnight tone. Rolling Stone's Stephen Chian called Ten New Songs possibly Cohen's most exquisite ode to the midnight hour. Uncut felt it was worth the wait, and Playboy noted that at 67 the songwriter's pessimism had softened into something like reconciliation, every song touched by a Zen serenity. Critics were not unanimous, but the record broadly repeated the success of I'm Your Man and The Future.
The charts told a scattered story. In the United States the album only reached 143 on the Billboard 200. Yet in Canada it climbed to 4 and went platinum, while Poland, Norway, and Denmark each sent it to number one. That split captured the album's odd position: a low-key digital comeback from a man many Americans had forgotten, and a major event for listeners elsewhere who had never stopped waiting for him. Ten New Songs did not announce Leonard Cohen's return; it simply resumed his conversation, at a gentler volume and with a new voice beside his own.
Ten New Songs did not announce Leonard Cohen's return; it simply resumed his conversation, at a gentler volume and with a new voice beside his own.