Father Damian Ference has added a new record to his collection: Leonard Cohen's recently released Old Ideas. His review of the album yielded 4.5 out of 5 stars, and he explains why, today on the WOF Blog.
An old friend called the other day to tell me that he bought Leonard Cohen’s new record, Old Ideas. I asked him what he thought. He said, “It sounds a lot like what Johnny Cash was doing on his last albums.” My friend isn’t the religious type, so he didn’t specifically mention the themes of sorrow, suffering, death, healing, redemption, and mercy, but I knew exactly what he was getting at. I told him, “Well, Cohen is pushing eighty, so that’s what’s on his mind.” He agreed.
Mortality has always been a major theme of Cohen’s work, along with God, love, faith, sex, sacrifice, longing, heartache, and hope. And it makes sense that Cohen entitled his latest effort Old Ideas, because he has been writing about these ideas for over fifty years, so there isn’t much new here, except for the fact that now, Cohen seems more comfortable than ever dealing with them. Of course, these ideas are much older than him – these are the ideas that are at the very heart of the human experience – they are the ideas that, once distractions are removed, demand all of our attention...