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Leonard Cohen's final concert: Revisit his 2013 Auckland concert

Cohen performed for the last time in Auckland, New Zealand on Dec. 21, 2013

Back in 2012, Leonard Cohen announced plans for a world tour in support of his album Old Ideas . As one of pop’s greatest singer-songwriters for more than four decades, this would be one of his most ambitious productions yet: 125 dates that spanned three continents, with each individual concert featuring a three-hour setlist of his greatest hits. Cohen turned in his final performance on December 21, 2013 in Auckland, New Zealand — a concert that would end up being his last. EW is looking back on the momentous occasion following Thursday’s news of Cohen’s death .

That night, Cohen’s setlist featured his greatest hits “So Long, Marianne,” “Suzanne,” and “Hallelujah,” and he capped the concert with an encore of the Drifters’ “Save The Last Dance For Me.” Check out footage below.

After Cohen wrapped up his Old Ideas Tour , the artist kept a largely low profile. And though he released his fourteenth studio album You Want It Darker in November, his health had begun to fail in recent months. Cohen’s son Adam, who had produced his father’s final album, told Rolling Stone , “Among many other things, he had multiple fractures of the spine. He has a lot of hard miles on him.”

But during Cohen’s final live performance, the late great appeared exuberant, according to footage and recaps of the show. “Tonight, and especially tonight, we’re going to give you everything we’ve got,” he told the crowd, according to the New Zealand publication Stuff . And when he bid farewell for the evening, he told the crowd, “Drive carefully home and don’t catch a cold. May you be surrounded by friends and family all the days of your life … or god bless you in your solitude.”

See fan-shot footage and clips from his final show in Auckland.

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Flashback: Leonard Cohen Plays Final Encore at Last Concert

By Andy Greene

Andy Greene

In December of 2013, Leonard Cohen ‘s “Grand Tour” touched down in New Zealand for a run of four concerts. The last stop was in Auckland at the Vector Arena, which was his 69th show of the year and his 387th since returning to the road in the summer of 2008 after a very long absence. The shows lasted for at least three hours, which meant at minimum he spent 1,110 hours performing concerts as a septuagenarian.

Like many shows on the final legs of the tour, he wrapped up with “I Tried to Leave You” and a cover of “Save the Last Dance for Me.” It might seem odd to see one of the great songwriters in history playing a Drifters song, but he truly made it his own and it was the perfect way to sum up the night. “Friends, I want to thank you for the wonderful hospitality you’ve showed us tonight,” he said near the end of the last show. “I want to thank you not just for tonight, but for all the years you’ve paid attention to my songs. I really appreciate it.”

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When the song ended, Cohen removed his hat, took a big bow and walked offstage with an enormous smile on his face. He hasn’t played a single show since that night, even in support of his stellar 2014 LP Popular Problems and this year’s Can’t Forget: A Souvenir of the Grand Tour , which was his fourth document of the 2008-2013 trek. That might seem like overkill, but it was a spectacular tour that justified such treatment.

Fans continued to hope he had one last tour in him, but as his health failed in the final years of his life he focused all his creative energy on recording new music. “They say that life is a beautiful play with a terrible third act,” his son Adam Cohen told Rolling Stone weeks before his father died. “If that’s the case, it must not apply to Leonard Cohen . Right now, at the end of his career, perhaps at the end of his life, he’s at the summit of his powers.”

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Watch Footage From Leonard Cohen’s Last Concert

Though legendary poet, songwriter, and artist Leonard Cohen  died yesterday at age 82,  his massive catalogue of music and poetry will live on. Because Cohen supposedly never intended to tour behind his latest album, You Want It Darker,  which came out last month, his last live show was December 21, 2013 in Auckland, New Zealand, as part of his world tour backing his record Old Ideas . Watch Leonard Cohen’s last performance in concert below, featuring hits such as “So Long, Marianne,” “Suzanne,” “Hallelujah,” and an encore of the Drifters’ “Save the Last Dance for Me.”

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Leonard Cohen’s Grand Tour and His Brilliant Final Act

By Stacey Anderson

Pity the man who doesn’t travel with his own Persian rug. That was the first sign of Leonard Cohen at Coachella 2009—a deep red relic, unfurled carefully on a dusty side stage, then fussed over and rearranged by burly stagehands like waiters setting a banquet. Only a few hundred of us were on the field to witness the proceedings—most attendees had been snared by the tractor beams of the nearby dance tents, or were hopping blithely to Franz Ferdinand on the mainstage—and we were not a decorous crowd, with dirt streaking our sunburns and mouths lolling open.

When Cohen took the stage—ambling over, head cocked, as if intrigued into diversion by his own band—he stood squarely on this carpet, peering down at us. He seemed astonished to see even this meager, motley assortment. To the seamy guitar sway of “Dance Me to the Edge of Love,” he paced the rug’s perimeter, tipping his fedora flirtatiously to the backup singers. For “Bird on the Wire,” he gazed serenely over our heads, past the palm trees into some distant repose. To the doleful organ wisps of “Hallelujah,” he kneeled, eyes clenched shut as his baritone approached a quaking roar. To his penitent posture, we sang every word back; when his eyes opened, they were full of tears.

Cohen performs June 18, 2013 in Paris, France. (Photo by David Wolff/Patrick/Redferns/Getty Images)

Two months before Coachella, Cohen had played his first American show in 15 years, at the Beacon Theater in New York. The spring before, he’d launched a European and Canadian tour that wended through Spain, Greece, England, Norway, his native Montreal , and more. The performances felt like bequeathments from a visiting dignitary, serene and warm—Cohen finally seemed unfazed onstage, with no quivers of his epic past stage fright in sight—they had desperate origins. In 2005, Cohen’s longtime manager Kelley Lynch was discovered to have embezzled over $5 million from the artist’s retirement account, leaving the then-71-year-old with just $150,000 ; Lynch had also surreptitiously sold many of Cohen’s publishing rights in the 1990s. To take Lynch to court, and extend its increasingly messy and humiliating proceedings , Cohen had to mortgage his house. The tour was Cohen’s only option to replenish the coffers, and it became a marathon—the juggernaut was extended into 2010, and dubbed “The Grand Tour” by fans and press (Cohen warmed to the title , too). All told, he performed 387 shows between 2008 and 2013.

It felt strange during this trek, and wildly unjust, to know that Leonard Cohen was in this difficult position. In his music, he found questions beautiful—the real ones worth asking, about love and faith and purpose—yet he seemed preternaturally wise to the answers, and was patiently conversing with us as we straggled behind his pace. By this point in his life, he seemed above such mundane concerns, and even disinterested in music; he had steadily distanced himself from the business, even becoming ordained as a monk in 1996 . But his certain reluctance for the tour was absent onstage; his performances were spry and generous, an about-face from his early reputation as a sullen performer; now he skipped across arena stages in a suit, intoning every marbled word of “Famous Blue Raincoat” and “Suzanne” with zeal. His sets lasted two-and-a-half hours on average, punctuated by half-hour intermissions in which misty-eyed audiences gathered their bags, then were shocked as intercom announcements implored them to stay. Two albums, Live in London and Songs From the Road , captured their applause, far and away more rapturous than on his previous tours. Seeing Cohen was an event again, and an understood privilege.

The great surprise was that this tour, this assumed valediction, begat an amazing last leg in Cohen’s career. The financial mess didn’t degrade his autumn years; it revitalized them. In 2012, he returned to the studio for the first time since 2004’s uneven Dear Heather ; releasing Old Ideas , an album sharp and cathartic in its familiar melding of spiritual rumination, mordant wit, and elegant carnality. His shrugging nasal delivery of the ’60s, once the embodiment of the era’s casual bohemia, had deepened into a sobering thrum. Popular Problems , keenly experimental with nods to his country roots, arrived next. He published a pensive new book of poetry, Book of Longing . He opened his arms and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award fell in. His steady hand on the tiller had taken him somewhere beautiful.

Last month’s glorious new album * You Want It Darker *­ was prefaced by Cohen’s unsentimental admission of being “ ready to die .” Not least for that, it was heard by many (including myself ) as his last testament. Today, we know that was in a sense true; its perfect twining of religious open-heartedness and winking fatalism was a deliberate, curated parting statement akin to David Bowie ’s Blackstar **. It’s very hard to imagine any of this happening, with such intense vivacity and grace, without the Grand Tour reigniting his passion. It was just like Cohen to turn misfortune into poetry.

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Footage surfaces of Leonard Cohen's last ever performance in New Zealand almost three years ago

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Leonard Cohen performs on the Pyramid stage during day three of the Glastonbury Festival. Photo / Getty

Leonard Cohen died in Los Angeles on Monday aged 82, leaving a highly influential legacy and a body of work spanning almost 50 years.

He was known as a tireless performer, touring internationally since the 1970s while also recording many albums and writing novels and poetry.

Footage has recently surfaced of his last ever concert, which took place at the Vector Arena in Auckland, New Zealand in December 2013.

The final moments of the performance will likely be poignant to fans of the Canadian singer, who is perhaps best known for 1984's Hallelujah.

Looking somewhat frail, he closed the set with an encore featuring 1974's I Tried To Leave You and a cover of The Drifters' Save The Last Dance For Me.

Leonard humbly addressed the crowd: 'Friends, I want to thank you for the wonderful hospitality you've showed us tonight.

'I want to thank you not just for tonight, but for all the years you've paid attention to my songs. I really appreciate it.'

When the last song finished, the legendary musician waved off his signature fedora hat, took a bow and walked offstage as his band applauded.

This would be Leonard's swan song. He did not perform again before his death.

In September 2014 - nine months later - Leonard issued a brief statement, saying there would be 'no tours in the foreseeable future'.

Just days before his passing earlier this week, the Quebec-born singer confessed he was 'ready to die' and had made preparations for his death.

A statement on Facebook by record label Sony Music Canada said the world has lost 'one of music's most revered and prolific visionaries'.

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A 7th anniversary commemoration of leonard cohen’s final concert – auckland: dec 21, 2013.

Seven Years Ago: Leonard Cohen’s Final Stage Performance

At the last Leonard Cohen concert, the Dec 21, 2013 Auckland show, Leonard and his band performed 27 songs, beginning, as always, Dance Me to the End of Love and ending with Save The Last Dance For Me. 1

Stage Setlist 2

While the final song, Save The Last Dance For Me, has garnered the most attention, several of the performances in this concert, including The Future and First We Take Manhattan , were especially strong. An audio recording of the entire show can be found at Leonard Cohen ‘s Last Concert .

A Note On “The Last Leonard Cohen Concert”

This concert was indeed the last Leonard Cohen show, but on Dec 21, 2013, it was by no means certain that it would be Leonard Cohen’s final public performance. There were, in fact, hints of another tour.  The following conversation between Leonard and me took place during our Aug 6, 2014 visit :

At one point, Leonard responded to a comment I made about the wonders of his doing concerts lasting more than three hours with “We’ll have to do that again.”

Being the intrepid blogger I am, I prompted “So, there’s going to be another tour?”

Without hesitation, Leonard Cohen leaned forward, flashed his grandest smile, and immediately replied in a firm, clear voice, “Maybe.”

Not satisfied with that equivocation, I pushed forward with “Is that a definite maybe?”

Leonard smiled again, answering “A tour is a definite maybe.”

I countered with “Well, you have to do something. Your retirements haven’t been very successful.”

Leonard came back with “Or maybe I’ll write a book.”

That conversational thread ended with my offer to ghostwrite his autobiography. 3

In an interview during the 2014 NAMM meeting, Roscoe Beck spoke of his plans for 2014, including working on Leonard Cohen’s new CD, co-producing a new Jennifer Warnes CD, and “maybe a little more touring with Leonard at the end of the year.”

More evidence arises from Robert Kory’s statement that, even in his final decline, Cohen would talk about wanting to get back onstage: “He kept saying, ‘Maybe we can do just a couple more concerts.’” 4

These striking photos and the image atop this post were taken by Steve Peters (aka Birminghamfan)

“We just want to send you home with this old song”  – Save The Last Dance For Me

The concert ended poignantly with Save The Last Dance For Me, a song made famous by The Drifters in 1960 (see “Save The Last Dance For Me,” Doc Pomus, & Leonard Cohen ).

The finale included Leonard summoning the Unified Heart Touring Company crew to the stage.

Finale – Unified Heart Touring Company Joins Leonard Cohen On Stage Auckland: Dec 21, 2013 Video by kiwisaner

You can dance every dance with the guy Who gives you the eye, let him hold you tight You can smile every smile for the man Who held your hand ‘neath the pale moon light But don’t forget who’s takin’ you home And in whose arms you’re gonna be So darlin’ save the last dance for me

Leonard Cohen – Save The Last Dance For Me Auckland: Dec 21, 2013 Video by Wirebirds aka Henry Tengelsen

Contributed by Maarten Massa

Band Day Sheet

_______________________________

Set Two 12 Tower of Song 13 Suzanne 14 Chelsea Hotel #2 15 The Partisan 16 Alexandra Leaving 17 I’m Your Man 18 A Thousand Kisses Deep (poem) 19 Hallelujah 20 Take This Waltz

• Contributed by Maarten Massa [ ↩ ]
• From Calling On Leonard Cohen & Kezban: The Cat, The Cane, The Conversation [ ↩ ]
• From Remembering Leonard Cohen: Close Friends, Collaborators & Critics on How He Changed Music Forever by Sasha Frere-Jones (Billboard: November 17, 2016) [ ↩ ]

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2 thoughts on “ a 7th anniversary commemoration of leonard cohen’s final concert – auckland: dec 21, 2013 ”.

Thank you for sharing this remarkable performance.

Awesome to see final concert in my old hometown 🎸🎤💜

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A Last Dance for Leonard Cohen

The musician and poet released “You Want It Darker” 19 days before his death in 2016. His son, Adam, finished more songs from those sessions for a posthumous album.

By Lindsay Zoladz

The last time Leonard Cohen appeared in public was in mid-October 2016 at a Los Angeles news conference for his 14th studio album, “You Want It Darker,” just a few weeks before his death . Behind him hung a Canadian flag and beside him sat his son, Adam, a musician who had served as producer on the stirring LP. At one point Cohen, stooped and frail but sharp as ever in an impeccably tailored black suit, treated the audience to a recitation from a piece still in progress. He drew a breath, and then in that inimitable baritone, he began:

Listen to the hummingbird Whose wings you cannot see Listen to the hummingbird Don’t listen to me

The audience applauded, and Cohen — who retreated at the height of his fame to live for five years in a Buddhist monastery — demurred with a characteristically self-abnegating joke: “I would say the hummingbird deserves the royalties on that one.” The interviewer asked if the song would appear on his next album. Said the ailing, 82-year-old Cohen, “God willing.”

It seems to have been his will. “Listen to the Hummingbird” is the final track on Cohen’s posthumous new album, “Thanks for the Dance,” which will be released on Friday. The raw audio of that passage from the news conference was tracked down by Adam Cohen and the engineer Michael Chaves, who mixed out the buzzing tone of the room’s halogen lights and composed around it a gentle, unobtrusive piano melody. Adam had already done the same for many of the other vocal takes and half-finished songs his father left behind.

The vocals that make up the other eight songs on “Thanks for the Dance” were all recorded during the “You Want It Darker” sessions , though Adam does not believe they should be considered “discarded songs or B sides.”

“They’re a continuation,” he said on the phone one recent morning from his home in Los Angeles. “Had we had more time and had he been more robust, we would have gotten to them.” He said he and his father had discussed finishing the songs. “The conversations were about what instrumentation and what feelings he wanted the completed work to evoke — sadly, the fact that I would be completing them without him was given.”

Though the last decade of Cohen’s life was remarkably productive and full of pleasant surprises — a trio of well-received records; a long, triumphant world tour that often found him performing for more than three hours a night — by the time of these final recordings he was unwell, suffering from leukemia and compression fractures of the spine. His decision to have his son produce these sessions, during which he often had to use an orthopedic medical chair, was partially about his own comfort: “He didn’t want some stranger in his living room,” Adam said. Still, he approached the work with his signature discipline. “Most of the time, even in acute pain, he would muster the energy to put on a suit and a fedora.”

In the last days of his life, the ever-meticulous Cohen was determined to bring his final poems and songs up to his exacting standards; “it was what he was staying alive to do,” Adam wrote in the foreword to “The Flame,” a book collecting this work that was published in 2018. He would sometimes send “do not disturb” emails to loved ones, in an effort to eke out precious writing time.

What is remarkable about “The Flame,” “You Want It Darker” and now “Thanks for the Dance” is the clarity and self-awareness with which Cohen wrestles with his own impending death. “I’m leaving the table, I’m out of the game,” he sang with a low, deliberate finality on the 2016 record.

But there is a playfulness to “Thanks for the Dance” that sets it apart from the previous album. Leslie Feist, who contributed backing vocals on “Dance,” called it “profound and very light” in an email. “Like everyone else, I thought we’d heard the last of Leonard Cohen, but no,” she said. “Here was this life-force clarity, this twinkle in his eye.”

In his final creative period, Cohen continued to look to younger artists for inspiration, and was particularly impressed by the lyricism he heard in rappers like Kendrick Lamar. “I remember him once trying to soothe his pain while we were working with medical marijuana, and him putting on FKA twigs and ranting for a good 45 minutes about what a genius she was,” Adam said.

That liveliness permeates the record. The spry opening track “Happens to the Heart” follows the classic Cohen tradition of undercutting the classically romantic with modern banalities (“There was a mist of summer kisses/Where I tried to double-park”), while the wistfully sensual “Night of Santiago” finds an aged man reflecting back on a vivid memory of passion. One of the most elegiac songs, “Moving On,” is a tribute to his former lover and muse Marianne Ihlen ; Adam said his father recorded the vocal take heard on the album in late May 2016, just after he learned that Ihlen had died.

“There’s this trajectory for a lot of musicians to make their most important work when they’re young,” said Beck, a longtime Cohen fan who also contributed to “Thanks for the Dance . ” “When you see an artist who’s able to transcend that, to still be able to deepen with age, it’s really inspiring. As a performer it gives you hope that there’s still a place to go.”

Adam said his father “was very conscious to be writing from the rung of life at which he found himself.”

“He was not trying to be a nostalgia act, like so many of his contemporaries,” he added. “He wasn’t going backwards. He would say to me, ‘I am taking the inner life very seriously.’ And I think that’s why it resonates so deeply to us. It wasn’t an act. This was a devotional investigation into wherever he found himself.”

After Cohen died on Nov. 7, 2016, after a fall in the night , Adam could not bring himself to listen to the unfinished songs. But around seven months later, he “got a tiny bit of courage” and opened up the sessions.

One of the first people he asked to help was Javier Mas, the renowned Spanish laud player and guitarist who had accompanied Cohen on tour since 2008. Their bond was deep: Cohen was known to take off his hat and bow at Mas’s feet while he soloed; the guitarist had taught himself English partly by translating the singer’s lyrics.

“It was very special because I had the voice of Leonard on the headphones, so present,” Mas said in a phone interview from Zurich. “After many years of playing with him, you learn the way he likes things to be done. So we tried to honor him.”

On the road, Cohen had often spoken reverentially to Mas about an old Spanish guitar he had back home, and how its cedar fragrance was still as strong as the day he’d acquired it some 40 years before. “You know that wood never dies,” Cohen once said . These sessions gave Mas his first opportunity to play his departed friend’s guitar. Between takes, Adam would sometimes see Mas sticking his nose near its sound hole and inhaling deeply.

“Thanks for the Dance” also features contributions from the National’s Bryce Dessner, Cohen’s former collaborator Jennifer Warnes and the producer Daniel Lanois, everyone blending into the mix in the finished product. “There’s that Jewish tradition of bringing a tiny rock or stone to a grave site,” Adam said. “I felt like every person was there to just humbly deposit their little rock near the engraving of his name.”

It’s a fitting tribute for Cohen, for whom the song always reigned supreme. “With Leonard I learned so many interesting things,” Mas said. “The way he treats the people he’s working with, and the way he treats his work and the song — he’s only worried about the song. Not about himself, not about fame.”

The most moving one on the new record is the title track. Cohen had written an earlier version of it for his former partner Anjani Thomas’s 2006 album “Blue Alert.” Her voice was softly alluring, but his version is transformative. “One-two-three/One-two-three-one,” he counts off in a sprightly croak. You can hear in the delivery an exhaustion, a heaviness of the body. But somehow in the movements of that golden voice, he’s still dancing.

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Leonard Cohen Concert Setlists & Tour Dates

• Leonard Cohen ( Canadian singer-songwriter and poet )
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Leonard Cohen at Vector Arena, Auckland, New Zealand

• Dance Me to the End of Love
• Bird on the Wire
• Everybody Knows
• Who by Fire
• Come Healing
• Waiting for the Miracle
• Lover Lover Lover
• Tower of Song
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Leonard Cohen at TSB Bank Arena, Wellington, New Zealand

Leonard cohen at cbs canterbury arena, christchurch, new zealand, leonard cohen at adelaide entertainment centre, adelaide, australia, leonard cohen at palais theatre, melbourne, australia, leonard cohen at a day on the green geelong 2013 #3, leonard cohen at win entertainment centre, wollongong, australia, leonard cohen at concert hall, sydney opera house, sydney, australia, leonard cohen at brisbane entertainment centre, brisbane, australia.

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• Bird on the Wire ( 651 )
• Suzanne ( 591 )
• Dance Me to the End of Love ( 540 )
• So Long, Marianne ( 529 )
• Who by Fire ( 524 )

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Leonard Cohen Kicks Off (Maybe) His Final Tour With Uncommon Flair

You could hear at least four different languages spoken at the Bass Concert Hall in Austin on Wednesday night, which is unusual for Texas. So is an appearance from Leonard Cohen, though, and the 78-year-old singer’s two-night stand were his only dates within 900 miles, so fans who wanted the chance to catch what even Cohen himself acknowledged at the start of the show may be his final tour (“I hope that sometime we meet again,” he said, “But if not, I promise that we’re going to give you everything we’ve got tonight.”) had to make the trip.

They had to, because this was a special performance. The set, which included a 20-minute intermission and ran for three and a half hours, was vital and full of energy. Cohen sprinted to the mic at the beginning of the evening, and skipped offstage at the end, and in between, delivered a reminder of everything that has made him the icon and legend that he is. From the easy swag of a man born five years before Hitler invaded Poland (he was impeccably dapper in his charcoal suit and matching fedora) to the voice that sounds unchanged in its imperfection since it became weighted with gravel on 1984’s Various Positions, Cohen delivered on the promise that he made at the start of the set.

But really, what would you expect? Leonard Cohen is unique among the remaining icons of the ‘60s. Like Dylan and Neil Young, he can fill a room the size of Bass, or Madison Square Garden, or the Barclays Center (where he’ll conclude this tour in December), but he’s different from them in fundamental ways, and those are reflected in both his stage show and the way he’s managed his career. He’s seven years older than Dylan, eleven older than Young, and his music career started late (his debut, Songs Of Leonard Cohen, was released when he was 33). This is significant, because no part of Cohen’s persona is rooted in him as the upstart young rebel. Which makes watching him onstage as an old man feel comfortable in ways that watching, say, Mick Jagger, isn’t; Cohen has been a grand wise man of rock and roll at least since he peeled the banana on the cover of 1987’s I’m Your Man, so there’s no cognitive dissonance -- or just plain sadness -- in seeing him so aged. If anything, it’s just added another layer to his work.

On Wednesday night, when Cohen sang “Give me Christ or give me Hiroshima” during “The Future,” it was a command from someone who remembers the latter; a line like “Take one last look at this sacred heart/ Before it goes” from the mid-set highpoint “Everybody Knows” carries some obvious weight from a man who’s nearly 80; during “Famous Blue Raincoat,” which he sang as part of the encore, the pause between the lines “that night that you planned to go clear” and “did you ever go clear?” contained a gravity that’s not present in the 1971 recording – it’s like he’s been waiting 40 years to ask that question now. It’s hard not to imagine that Cohen, who began his career as a poet, and occasionally spoke bits of poetry in throughout his set, isn’t keenly aware of the power of his words to change with that context, and something he delights in.

Because one thing is for certain: something delights Cohen about playing music still, and that’s the key to what makes this tour so essential. The Leonard Cohen model is what we want from most of our aging legends, really – his discography (12 albums in 45 years) contains no slips into irrelevance or self-imitation, and his career is free of blatant cash-grabs. Even the titles he’s chosen for his most recent albums reflect the fact that he’s aware that he’s adding to a substantial body of work -- you don’t call new records Ten New Songs or Old Ideas unless you’re wryly aware of your legacy.

It’s not fair to expect that every other artist will engage his or her senior years with the same grace, flair, and elegance that Leonard Cohen has (in truth, those are attributes that he possessed in uncommon abundance even in his youth), but the fact that he is still here, still performing, still offering up three and a half hours of music a night, and still fundamentally in possession of everything that made him important in the first place makes the Old Ideas tour absolutely essential.

Leonard Cohen plays Austin again tonight, November 1. Check out the rest of his tour dates here .

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How Leonard Cohen’s Son Finished His Father’s Final (Breathtaking) Record

By Corey Seymour

In October of 2016 Leonard Cohen released You Want It Darker , the final album of his lifetime. If Bowie had Blackstar , Cohen had this—a seemingly prophetic peacemaking with his final bow. Nineteen days later, Cohen died—he’d been suffering from leukemia along with compression fractures of his spine—and his haunting, reverberating voice, along with his poetic lyricism was, seemingly, extinguished.

All of which makes today’s release of a new—yes, new—Leonard Cohen record all the more improbable, and all the more of a cause for celebration. The nine songs on Thanks for the Dance are “not the dregs—the discarded B sides, the junk drawer leftovers,” said Cohen’s son Adam the other night at a private listening session and record-release party at a townhouse in SoHo. “No, this is vital, beautiful, stirring work.”

Cohen, you see, didn’t work off-the-cuff; he didn’t do improv. The songs you hear on his 14 studio albums were meticulously written, rewritten, refined, and rewritten again—sometimes over a period of decades. And as he stared down the end of his life, he didn’t intend for this new batch of songs—then in various states of completion, with some of them semi-finished, while others with only Cohen’s vocal take recorded—to go unheard.

“In the making of You Want It Darker , a theme emerged—mortality, God,” said Adam. “It was a goodbye—but that’s not the way it started. My father was working on many, many songs simultaneously, and we’d begun many of them. And they weren’t discarded because they weren’t to his taste; they were discarded because they didn’t belong to this theme that was emerging.” After You Want It Darker was released, father laid down a mandate to son: “Please, complete the task; finish what we started.”

And so it was that, seven months after Cohen passed away, Adam said he “finally got the courage to go into my little backyard studio and fire up the rig, and there was his voice...and suddenly I found myself in his company again—I found myself sitting with my dad and resuming these conversations.”

In short order, a roster of artists—including Leslie Feist; Richard Reed Parry from Arcade Fire; longtime Cohen collaborator Jennifer Warnes; Bryce Dessner from The National; and legendary producer, guitarist, and songwriter Daniel Lanois—was assembled to flesh out the songs. It should be noted here that the intention wasn’t to interpret Cohen’s songs for a new audience or a new generation, nor was it to showcase the unique capabilities of this stellar lineup of musicians. “No one was saying, ‘This is my opportunity to shine on a Leonard Cohen record,’” Adam said. “It reminded me of the Jewish tradition of bringing a rock to the tombstone—each one of them, one by one, was bringing their little contribution, their gesture of honor.” (There’s a short video documenting the making of the record that’s also out today.)

By Alexandra Macon

By Talia Abbas

By Leah Faye Cooper

The intention—clearly felt by all—was to finish Cohen’s unfinished songs, as much as possible, in the very same way that Cohen himself might have done. Warnes’s vocals will be instantly recognizable to the Cohen fan, as will the guitar work of Javier Mas, who played with Cohen for eight years and flew in from Spain to record these new songs—but if other musical motifs, from instrumentation to chord changes, sound as if they were directed by Cohen himself, well...perhaps they were.

“One of the only advantages that I have over far more accomplished record makers,” Adam said, “is that I really knew what my father liked and what he disliked—and so oftentimes when we would try something, it was so evident when it didn’t work. He would say, ‘No, no, no—turn that down.’ And we would follow his instructions.”

Earlier, when his father was still alive but frail and in great pain (but still, let it be known, dressing in a suit and tie as he had for the entirety of his life), Adam and recording engineer Michael Travis had set up a microphone and a laptop on Cohen’s dining room table. “We saw him delivering these incredible vocals with relative ease, one after another, and I remember saying to him, ‘Dad—how are you doing this?’ And he said, ‘I’m locked in this little apartment—I can’t go anywhere, so I have nothing but time to study how each syllable falls.’”

That study paid off: As Adam and crew set about finishing his father’s work, those vocals served as a kind of North Star. “There was so much information in those vocals,” Adam said. “The position, the intention, the narratorship, the command of language, the charting of emotion through the delivery. It was almost thespian-like, and it dictated a lot.”

“There was nothing more important to him than the work. He said to me at the very end, ‘Adam, I have tried everything—I’ve tried Buddhism, Christianity, Scientology, antidepressants, acid, speed, women—there’s nothing I haven’t tried, and the only thing I understand now is that the solace was only going to come from one thing in this life, and that’s blackening a page in a work.’ And [Michael and I] realized that he was going to pass the moment he stopped working. It was what he was living for.”

There’s one final Leonard Cohen recording that we heard at the listening session—what turned out to be the last thing Cohen and his son ever recorded. It’s a spoken-word piece, a kind of benediction, recorded at the end of the You Want It Darker sessions, and when it was played at the end of the rest of Thanks for the Dance the other night, a wave of quiet emotion permeated the high-ceilinged room. And while it would be beyond foolish to try to paraphrase it, suffice to say it’s a kind of well-wishing to the listener—that they may be happy, fulfilled, surrounded by loved ones (or, alternately, at peace in solitude). It’s not on the new record, and it will likely never be released.

“When he did it,” Adam said, “I literally got choked up. I had tears in my eyes, and I said, ‘Dad, that’s so powerful.’ And he looked at me and he said, ‘You sop.’ And then he said, ‘No fucking way I’m putting that on the record.’”

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Most Legendary Concerts of All Time

T here are concerts and music performances you remember for the weekend or until the next music festival rolls around. But there are a handful of concerts that you'll remember your entire life, sharing memories of the experience with your children and even grandchildren. Woodstock, anyone?

These are the most legendary concerts — from contemporary artists like Daft Punk and Beyonce to the musicians we remember fondly like Prince and John Lennon — guaranteed to spark stories for generations to come.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 25th Anniversary Concert

Location:  Madison Square Garden in New York

Date:  Oct. 29-30, 2009

Attendance numbers:  19,500

Why the concert was so legendary: Held over two nights in New York City, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 25th Anniversary Concert was packed to the gills with celebrities — from U2 to Aretha Franklin — and offered up wild set designs that are still referenced to this day. “If this is just miniconcerts of greatest hits, I’m bored,” the event’s co-producer Robbie Robertson told Rolling Stone magazine in a statement. 

Need we say more?

Daft Punk Alive Tour

Location:  Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio, California

Date:  April 29, 2006

Attendance numbers:  40,000

Why the concert was so legendary: Described by The Times as a “memorable sensory spectacle, both dazzling and deafening,” the Daft Punk Alive Tour was the first time the band hit the road since 1997. 

It was supposed to be a one-off at Coachella, but the band ended up making its way across the U.S., Europe, Japan and Australia.

Tom Petty’s Final Show

Location:  Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, California

Date:  Sept. 25, 2017

Attendance numbers:  49,000

Why the concert was so legendary: “I wanna thank you for 40 years of a really great time,” Tom Petty told the Los Angeles crowd after he and his band, the Heartbreakers, finished a three-night event at the Hollywood Bowl. 

Little did the crowd know, just a week later, Petty would die of a heart attack.

Green Day at Woodstock ’94

Location:  Woodstock 25th Anniversary Concert in Saugerties, New York

Date:  Aug. 14, 1994

Attendance numbers:  Entire festival numbers were estimated to be 550,000 

Why the concert was so legendary: Green Day played at Woodstock ’94, a three-day music festival to commemorate the original Woodstock music festival of 1969. Keep in mind this was a mere six months after releasing their debut album, but that’s not the entire reason the band’s performance was so memorable.

Lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong convinced the crowd to start a mud fight during their set — and it made it all the way onto the stage, soaking both Billie Joe and bassist Mike Dirnt.

Leonard Cohen ‘Old Ideas’ World Tour

Location : Vector Arena in Auckland, New Zealand

Date:  Dec. 21, 2013

Attendance numbers:  N/A

Why the concert was so legendary: Although Leonard Cohen’s “Old Ideas” World Tour spanned an impressive five years in total, it’s his final show in Auckland, New Zealand, that stands out for most fans. The Dec. 21, 2013, event was the artist and poet’s last live show before he passed away, which he ended by doffing his hat, taking a deep bow.  

“I want to thank you,” he told the crowd. “Not just for tonight but for all the years you’ve paid attention to my songs.” 

For more legendary concerts, check out FamilyMinded.