Leonard Cohen spent decades making fans wait five, six, sometimes nine years between studio albums. Then, at 80, he delivered Popular Problems just two years after Old Ideas in 2012 — a pace that felt almost reckless for a man who treated silence as a compositional tool. The album landed in September 2014 on Columbia Records, his thirteenth studio record and the second-to-last entry in a discography that had already outlived most of its contemporaries. Twelve years on, the speed of that turnaround still feels like the strangest detail in the room.
Release dates and chart success
The release schedule itself was a small logistical puzzle. France and Ireland, with their Friday street dates, had the record on shelves by September 19. Most of the rest of the world followed on September 22, while Russian sources logged September 23. Within days, Popular Problems sat at the top of the Canadian chart — Cohen's home country giving him the kind of immediate commercial response that had rarely been the point of his work.
Patrick Leonard produced the record and co-wrote nearly every song, with only 'A Street' and 'Born in Chains' falling outside that partnership. The production relationship gave Cohen a faster, leaner workflow than his usual method of long gestation. Most of the material was genuinely new, written and arranged close to the sessions. But two tracks carried histories that stretched back further than almost anything else in his catalog.
Decades in the making
'Born in Chains' had been wandering through Cohen's life for decades. An early version surfaced in 1985 during a soundcheck in Europe, never officially recorded, with lyrics that would later migrate to 'I Can't Forget' from 1988's I'm Your Man. For years he called the piece 'Taken Out of Egypt' and recited it onstage in 1988. By 2005, in the documentary Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man, he was humming a melody that would eventually anchor the finished song.
The 2010 live version of 'Born in Chains' sounded nothing like the studio take that appeared on Popular Problems. Different arrangement, different vocal approach — almost a different song wearing the same title. 'My Oh My' had also flickered into existence during a 2010 soundcheck. Cohen was not so much writing new material as finally committing to tape ideas that had been circling him for a quarter century.
Poems turned into songs
'A Street' followed a similarly patient path. Cohen recited the text in 2006 while promoting Book of Longing, his poetry collection. The New Yorker printed the poem in its March 2, 2009 issue. It also appeared under the title 'Party's Over' in an Everyman's Library edition. By the time it became a song on Popular Problems, the words had already lived three separate public lives.
The critical response was immediate and unusually warm. The AllMusic reviewer called it Cohen's strongest work since The Future in 1992 — a gap of 22 years that put the compliment in perspective. The same review noted that at 80, Cohen still had force and energy to spare. For an artist whose late period was often framed as autumnal, Popular Problems sounded more like a second wind than a farewell.
For an artist whose late period was often framed as autumnal, Popular Problems sounded more like a second wind than a farewell.
Cohen's recording history made the 2014 album feel almost confrontational. Old Ideas had arrived in 2012 after years of touring and financial resurrection. Popular Problems followed with a confidence that suggested the songs had simply been waiting for the right producer and the right moment to exist. The fact that some of them had been waiting since 1985 only sharpened that impression.
The strange beauty of Popular Problems is the way it collapses time. A melody hummed in a 2005 documentary, a poem printed in The New Yorker in 2009, a soundcheck fragment from 2010 — all of it lands on the same record in 2014, pressed by Columbia and shipped to stores across three different release dates. Twelve years later, that compression still feels like the album's real subject: not age, but the long, patient arc of a song finding its final shape.