Sometimes a legend doesn’t disappoint.
I went to listen to Leonard Cohen at Madison Square Garden last night, the first time I’d seen him live, and nearly forty years (that’s how it is) after I first stumbled— ah the nostalgia— across his early albums, but decades since I stopped paying attention to his new releases. Well, let’s just say that I’ll be making up for that lapse in the next few weeks. The performance—as the New Yorker’s Sasha Frere-Jones notes, concert is not the right word—was extraordinary, not just for the songs-–including those songs–often inventively reworked, or the remarkable backing musicians (a description that doesn’t do begin to them justice) but for the spectacle of Mr. Cohen himself, playing with his own–let’s face it–somewhat dour image, and visibly drawing strength from the audience’s delight as the evening wore on, an elegant, generous, self-deprecating saturnine charmer at 78, still in so love—there’s a thing— with words.
Yes, 78! Hallelujah (so to speak).
Try to catch the tour if you can. Really.