2009 Spring Tour - Los Angeles, California; Oakland, California; Indio, California

Tour Reviews and Other Memories from
LEONARD COHEN WORLD TOUR Spring 2009

April 10 & 11
Los Angeles, California
Nokia Theatre LA LIVE

Set List for April 10
Set List for April 11
Los Angeles Times review
Orange County Register review & photos
LAist review
HuffingtonPost review
Bloomberg News review
Popdose review
NME.com review
Billboard review
Fan reports
Youtube

April 13-15
Oakland, California
Paramount Theatre

Set List for April 13
Set List for April 14
Set List for April 15
Mercury News review
San Francisco Bay Guardian review
San Francisco Chronicle review & photos
San Francisco Examiner review
San Francisco Weekly review & photos
Salon review
Fan reports
Youtube

April 17
Indio, California
Coachella Festival

Set List for April 17
Spinner review & photos
Los Angeles Times review
NME review & photo
Mother Jones review & photo
Rolling Stone review
Orange County Register review
LA Weekly reveiw & photo
LiveDaily review
LAist photos
Spin Magazine review
Paste Magazine review
Fan reports
Youtube

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Los Angeles, California

Set List - April 10, 2009

Per Orange County Register

First Set

Dance Me To The End Of Love
The Future
Ain't No Cure For Love
Bird On The Wire
Everybody Knows
In My Secret Life
Who By Fire
Chelsea Hotel
Waiting For The Miracle
Anthem

Second Set

Tower Of Song
Suzanne
Gypsy Wife
The Partisan
Boogie Street
Hallelujah
I'm Your Man
A Thousand Kisses Deep (recitation)
Take This Waltz

Encores

So Long, Marianne
First We Take Manhattan
Famous Blue Raincoat
If It Be Your Will
Democracy
That Don’t Make It Junk
Closing Time
I Tried to Leave You
Whither Thou Goest

Los Angeles, California

Set List - April 11, 2009

Per MrTim from The Leonard Cohen Forum

Los Angeles, California

Review: Leonard Cohen at Nokia Theatre L.A. Live

Los Angeles Times - April 11, 2009 by Ann Powers

"No matter how old you get, if you can keep the desire to be creative, you're keeping the man-child alive," the actor and filmmaker John Cassavetes once said. Cassavetes, who died at age 59, never really got to test out his assertion. Leave it to his spiritual brother, Leonard Cohen, to prove the point. During his carefully staged but spirited three-and-a-half-hour performance Friday at Nokia Theatre at L.A. Live, the 74-year-old poet and chanteur represented for the wintery side of manhood, but his beatific smile revealed the little boy within.

Within the pop world, Cohen has always been an elder statesman; he released his first album in 1967, at age 33, already a published poet and novelist. The fact that he's always projected a certain maturity has helped him as he's become actually old; the transformation doesn't seem as drastic.

Cohen's foggy voice, formed over decades of time spent at what he once called "the little Parthenon of an unopened pack of cigarettes," still has power -- kicking the habit was obviously wise. It's the instrument he's had since the mid-1980s, an epic groan whose deepest rumble he deployed in "My Secret Life," singing about "the wisdom of old," and whose pinched high range he heroically attempted in "So Long, Marianne."

Mostly he used his gift for conversational chant to clearly put forth the lyrics his elated fans knew so well. He also did a little agile dancing and often knelt in the pose of a gospel preacher, though he left the cartwheels (only one, actually) to his young back-up singers, the sisters Charley and Hattie Webb.

His performance, the first he's given locally in more than a decade but a late stop in a long tour meant to remedy the financial blows Cohen suffered from a shifty manager, was far from extemporaneous. A nearly identical show, down to Cohen's banter about antidepressants and spiritual health, can be heard on his new CD, "Leonard Cohen Live in London." Even deep into the evening, when obscurities like "The Gypsy's Wife" and the nearly jam-band worthy blues "I Tried to Leave You" popped up, the versions were not exactly loose. But Cohen found the fleshy particulars within his studied approach.

In this way, Cohen proved very much like Cassavetes, whose curtain-ripping dramas of contemporary heartbreak were often assumed to be improvised but were actually tightly scripted. Similarly, Cohen aimed for what one film scholar once called the "look and feel" of improvisation rather than the real thing. He delivered his well-prepared lines like a poet giving a reading meant to move -- which, of course, is his other role. He even offered the late-period song "A Thousand Kisses Deep" in oracular form, with no musical accompaniment.

The audience, many of whom may have never seen him before, responded warmly to every song, showing special fervor for the most familiar, such as "Hallelujah," and the most anthemic, such as "Democracy" and, of course, "Anthem." That song contains the line that best sums up Cohen's art of earthbound transcendence. He borrowed it from a teaching from writer Jack Kornfield, who, like Cohen, has trained as a Buddhist monk: "There is a crack, a crack in everything. That's where the light comes in."

His nine-piece band, working in a smooth, jazz-influenced cabaret vein, offered the washes of sunshine that offset Cohen's gravelly intonations. Each player showed considerable skill -- especially the string virtuoso Javier Mas on bandurria and laud, and Rafael Gayol, a drummer with a perfectly light touch. Keyboardist Neil Larson was the showiest member, throwing off churchy fills on his Hammond organ; Dino Soldo, on various horns, sometimes veered close to Kenny G and Chris Botti's turf.

Cohen gave his companions room to stand out, introducing every member several times and giving them solos, including two from Sharon Robinson, his longtime songwriting partner and background vocalist. The Webb sisters also performed a version of the psalm-like "If It Be Your Will" that truly conjured seraphim.

At the night's end, the players stood together and offered a small prayer, perhaps in honor of Passover and Good Friday (though it too appears on that live recording from last June, and Cohen has closed tours with it before). "Whither Thou Goest" reiterates the words of the faithful Ruth, the Old Testament standard-bearer for calm consistency. With that goodbye, Cohen reminded us that equanimity can be like a boat on life's sea of troubled water -- and that, demonstrated by himself, it also makes for art that truly endures.

Los Angeles, California

Leonard Cohen makes sublime magic in L.A.

Orange County Register - April 11, 2009 by Ben Wener (Photos: Kelly A. Swift)

A week before his Coachella appearance, the master poet turns in an epic, career-capping performance at Nokia.

He's an internationally renowned songwriter's songwriter, a master wordsmith whose standards have been remade countless times and who last year became the most unusual – albeit richly deserving – inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Yet I don't meet many people who have a clue who Leonard Cohen is, let alone know of the immense influence of his four decades of utterly unique work.

Instead I find myself occasionally having conversations like this one, with my father. It was over breakfast the morning after Cohen's brilliant, epic performance Friday night at Nokia Theatre, the reclusive Canadian poet-philosopher's first of two sold-out shows at the downtown L.A. venue this weekend (in advance of his set next weekend at Coachella) and his first local appearance in 15 years.

"You saw who? Leonard Comb?"

"No, Leonard Cohen."

"What's he play?"

"A little guitar, but mostly he sings. Deep, gravelly voice. You wouldn't forget it if you heard it."

"What's he sing?"

"Uh ... 'Suzanne.' 'Hallelujah.' Nothing you'd know."

"So he's a new guy?"

"No, he's 74 now."

"74?! And he's playing Coachella?!"

And so it goes, always. My friend Helayne, the only person I know as passionate about Cohen as I am, says she finds it impossible to describe to people just what it is the guy does. It's equally hard to explain why music that rarely rises above a murmur and which probably sounds monotonous to the average pop fan can leave us spellbound for days.

Cohen has long been a shadowy figure you have to seek out; the airwaves only bring him to your attention in unexpected ways. Helayne, who like most baby boomers was at least aware of "Suzanne," one of Cohen's earliest signature songs, didn't really get into him until she heard Don Henley cover the biting yet affectionate commentary "Democracy" at Clinton's first inauguration.

Like a lot of Gen-X'ers, I initially noticed his chilling tone and jazz-folk style in movies, for which his noir sound is ideal. First there was the zinger-rich "Everybody Knows" in "Pump up the Volume" (1990). Then came the apocalyptic triptych (including "The Future," inspired by the L.A. riots) that Oliver Stone used to great effect in "Natural Born Killers" in 1994, the same year so many of us first heard Jeff Buckley's heavenly, heartbreaking rendition of one of Cohen's greatest achievements, the oft-revived "Hallelujah."

Later I saw Robert Altman's masterpiece "McCabe & Mrs. Miller" (1971), a frontier Western like no other, with a sparse but resonant score comprised entirely of pieces from the bard's 1967 debut, "Songs of Leonard Cohen." Only then, hearing his tales of "some Joseph looking for a manger" and finding comfort with "Sisters of Mercy," did I begin to instinctively grasp the magnetic pull of Cohen's music: It creeps up on you and lingers. Once it's in your soul, it never leaves.

I mention all of this because I suspect the 14,200 people lucky enough to see Cohen at one of these two Nokia shows likely have similar stories to share – some rooted in the late '60s, others perhaps as recent as this decade. Like Shakespeare or Dickens, Cohen's writing has earmarks of another age yet teems with themes and turns of phrase that only grow more timeless and resonant as the years roll on.

MAGIC AND MEANING

Attending Friday's show, then, felt very much like being admitted to a secret society meeting with others happy to line Cohen's coffers with several Benjamins apiece. (For once, here's a veteran artist who just might need the money: Only four years ago it was reported that legal hassles with an embezzling former manager left him with a mere $150,000. Though he was awarded a $9 million judgment after trial, it's unclear whether he'll ever see a penny of that.)

Boy, did they ever get their money's worth: three hours of songs (including four encores) spanning Cohen's career, from early staples like "So Long, Marianne" and a hauntingly bluesy handling of "Bird on the Wire" to later gems like "Anthem" (one of several selections with biblical underpinnings) and "In My Secret Life" (one of several pieces co-written with longtime collaborator Sharon Robinson, who shares soulful backup duties on this tour with the sublime Webb sisters, Charley and Hattie). (Click here for a complete set list.)

In between those cuts were 24 others – two more than on the just-released "Live in London," a two-disc document of his July 2008 show at the O2 Arena, and including virtually all of his 1988 comeback "I'm Your Man." All of it painted a detailed portrait of Cohen while illuminating his profound way of looking at life and our world. Everything he sings may come conveyed in that recitative, whispery voice of his, but that hides just how many sides there are to Cohen.

There's the lascivious, lapsed gentleman of "Chelsea Hotel #2," an intimately detailed elegy for his love affair with Janis Joplin, his phrases as finessed as Chaucer yet as street-wise as Chandler: "I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel / You were famous, your heart was a legend / You told me again you preferred handsome men / But for me you'd make an exception."

There's the wizened doomsayer of "The Future" (he's seen it, and it's murder) or "Everybody Knows," perfectly embodied in Cohen's typical fashion of black suit, gray shirt, bolo tie, Fedora hat hiding his eyes like a spy except for when he doffs it to give deep bows to the crowd or his exceptional musicians. (Standouts from his uniformly excellent nine-member ensemble: the frantic but liquid fretwork of Javier Mas on the 12-string banduria, the supple soloing of guitarist Bob Metzger, and the subtly dazzling detailing of Neil Larsen on Hammond B-3 organ.)

Bolstered by such nuanced support, Cohen can get so caught up in the moment that at times he'll wiggle on the balls of his feet with his shoulders hunched up, like an elderly Blues Brother, or drop to his knees to underscore a dramatic point. Yet all the while he retains the stoic air of a private detective plucked from another era and plopped into chaotic modern times – more like the character Lemmy Caution lost in Godard's dystopia "Alphaville" than Bogart in "The Big Sleep."

Then there's Cohen the Zen spiritualist, sprinkling in scripture-inspired passages like "Who by Fire" and "If It Be Your Will" and concluding his show with a benediction adapted from the Old Testament, "Whither Thou Goest." But more than all other personae there's Cohen the wry wit, who throughout this performance figuratively laughed in the face of despair and old age from within his secluded "Tower of Song": "My friends are gone and my hair is gray," he sings, "I ache in the places where I used to play."

"It's been a long time since I've been on a stage here," he mentioned in his first spoken address to the crowd. When he last visited, "I was 60 years old at the time – just a kid with a crazy dream.

"Since then," alluding to his bouts with depression, "I've taken a lot of Prozac, Paxil, Zyban, Wellbutrin … and turned to a rigorous and profound study of religion and the philosophies. But cheerfulness kept breaking through." That reminds me of one of my favorite Cohen couplets: "There is a crack in everything / That's how the light gets through."

Here, however, radiant rays of meaning and joy burst through like a flood demolishing a dam. That's what happens when you witness something so magical, so personally fulfilling. His Coachella performance, for me, will be dessert with a warmer filling than Nokia's brittle acoustics can provide. But this main course was unforgettable – all the more so because it's quite likely we Cohen crazies may never feast like this again.

Los Angeles, California

Leonard Cohen @ the Nokia 04/10/09

LAist - April 11, 2009 by Elise Thompson

Leonard Cohen owns the stage at the Nokia Theater. Cohen is dapper in his grey suit, fedora and bolo tie, a look few men can pull off without it being obvious they are trying too hard. Cohen does not fit the suit. The suit fits him. He looks like he would be equally at home in either a smoky bookie joint or at the high rollers table.

It almost seems as if Leonard Cohen was born an old man. Even Cohen joked to the sold-out house, "It's been a long time since I last set foot on stage at the tender young age of sixty." This is a fortunate happenstance for the singer, as he does not have to try to hit the high notes of a younger man. Leonard Cohen has finally grown into his deep, sensuous, whisky-soaked voice. His performance was simultaneously subdued and intense. During particularly moving moments, he fell to his knees like a man used to kneeling, his aged alabaster hands held to his face as if clutching the memory of a cigarette

The concert at the Nokia last night started at 8pm on the dot, leaving a long trail of anxious fans snaking all the way along the courtyard. By the time we entered the theater halfway through "No Cure for Love", we had missed "Dance with Me" and "The Future."

He then worked his way through his classics -- "Bird on a Wire", "My Secret Life", and "Anthem". The arrangement and vocal stylings rarely veered from his recordings. They did not need any tweaking; they were sheer perfection. By the time he finished the first set with "Waiting for the Miracle" he had the audience in the palm of his hand, many of them moved to tears. Three and a half hours later, by the fourth encore, no one appeared to be going anywhere.

For the second set, Cohen returned to the dim, monochromatically lit stage with "Tower of Song." In fact, it could even be described as mood lighting. It was subtle and romantic, sometimes washing over the band with fine sepia tones. It was the first concert I have attended where the Nokia Theater did not attempt to blind the audience with flashing lights aimed straight into our retinas.

The sound was also as crisp and clear as it has been to date. Either Nokia has found the bugs in the system, or the Nokia Theater was meant for the likes of Cohen rather than the likes of the Who. The sound quality enabled the audience to truly appreciate the fine musicianship of Cohen's backing band as they meandered through his delicate Eastern-European-inspired arrangements. Particularly notable was the bandurria player, Javier Mas, whose music was showcased throughout the concert.

From Cohen's finely pressed suit, to the lighting and the sound, every aspect of the show was impeccable. He was also exceedingly generous. Being that he only comes around every 15 years or so, he made sure the rapt audience got their money's worth. He was also generous with the band, introducing them by name twice and allowing each their moment in the sun musically with short solos.

Cohen did something unusual during the set and stepped back twice to allow the backup singers to take center stage. His collaborator and co-writer on a number of tunes, Sharon Robinson, showed her incredible range with "Boogie Street." Cohen used The Webb sisters' angelic harmonies to symbolically become his voice for "If it be Your Will"

If it be your will
That I speak no more
And my voice be still
As it was before
I will speak no more
I shall abide until
I am spoken for

Cohen's songs are woven with themes of judgement and redemption, confession and forgiveness rife with religious symbols. As in the often-covered "Bird on a Wire"

Like a baby stillborn,
Like a beast with his horn
I have torn everyone who reached out for me
But I swear by this song
And by all that I have done wrong
I will make it all up to thee

Other recurring symbols and subjects are dancing, light, gambling, flight, and death. And of course, love. It always comes back to love, sex and infidelity. As he loses himself in the music, one gets the impression that for him, these lyrics are not only words. In some way, for Cohen, these songs are religion. They are therapy. They are sex.

Cohen's religious themes and poetic, old-fashioned phrasing are in strong juxtoposition to his occasionally prurient subjects. When he speaks of naked women, the word "naked" still has power; there is still a sense of stark nakedness. In fact, Cohen's self-assured gunfighter delivery, his persona of part jazzman and part mobster gives his songs about women a sensuality even in their cruelty. He is the stylish and charismatic rogue that all of the women want. He will break your heart, but he will be a gentleman about it.

If he sings of his own cavalier attitute towards love in "I'm Your Man"

Ah, the moons too bright
The chains too tight
The beast wont go to sleep
Ive been running through these promises to you
That I made and I could not keep

He also has experienced the double-edged sword of desperation, as in "Everybody knows"

Everybody knows that you love me baby
Everybody knows that you really do
Everybody knows that you've been faithful
Ah give or take a night or two
Everybody knows you've been discreet
But there were so many people you just had to meet
Without your clothes
And everybody knows

"Everybody Knows" is an example of Cohen at his most pessimistic, but it is not an anomoly. Cohen's music is dark. It delves into the shadowy reaches of the human psyche. He explores our human weaknesses and failings. But no matter how deep the music takes us, there is a ray of hope. The song "Anthem" reveals that even within the flaws one finds purpose:

There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in

Los Angeles, California

Leonard Cohen Works For A Living

HuffingtonPost - April 12, 2009 by RJ Eskow

Who would have guessed that Leonard Cohen was a contender for James Brown's title as The Hardest Working Man in Show Business? Cohen's Friday night appearance at L.A.'s Nokia Theater was a riveting three-hour music marathon, complete with wit, charm, and snippets of poetry that mesmerized the crowd.

This was no victory lap. At 74, Leonard Cohen works for his living. Cohen, emerging from financial trouble, might have tried a solo acoustic tour. Instead he spared no expense to bring a large group of stellar musicians and his own lighting and sound crew with him. That makes sense. Though he made his name in the sixties folk boom, Cohen's sensibility has always been more Jacques Brel than Jack Elliott. Professionalism, elegance, and discipline marked Friday's performance.

The set list was essentially unchanged from previous tour appearances. "The Future" came early, for example, drawing in the darkness that led Trent Reznor to remix it for "Natural Born Killers." So did "Bird On the Wire" and "Who By Fire." "Democracy" and "First We Take Manhattan" came later, as the crowd relaxed into its satisfaction.

Cohen rehearsed his band for an unusually long three months before taking them on the road. It showed. They seamlessly conveyed his internationalist blend of gypsy music, Strauss, and French cabaret. Even the stage patter's been repeated from town to town, but Cohen admirers want to hear what he has to say whether it's rehearsed or not.

And it still works, months into the tour: "I did my last concerts 14 years ago," Cohen will say. "I was 60 years old. Just a crazy kid with a dream ..." Or he'll mutter gravely: "They say hard times might be coming. (pause) Could be worse than Y2K ..." And he alludes to both his Zen Buddhist monkhood and his history of depression, saying that he tried the great philosophies and religions but "cheerfulness kept breaking through."

What about that voice? He may not have chops by any usual standard, but his deep and unadorned delivery was always impossible to ignore. If a corpse could sing it would sound like that. As the back-country folk might say, "it were a plain voice." But that droning plainness could often hypnotize, carrying a song in ways other voices could not.

And it's not plain anymore. His voice has found added depth and resonance, expanding downward to acquire what it has always lacked in breadth. Perhaps Cohen's years as a Zen monk included some okyo chanting, which calls on the singer to ground his voice in the earth beneath his or her feet. Whatever the source, his basso approached the subtonal on some notes, drawing enthusiastic shouts from the audience (especially the females).

There were no surprises, no covers of R&B obscurities or Webb Pierce hits. In fact there were no covers at all, unless you include Cohen's translation of the French Resistance song "La complainte du partisan." Covers aren't part of what he does.

Hats are, though. Cohen and his band wore hats and suits, and the hat has become part of the act. When a man buys his first good hat he's instructed on how to dent and crease it to make it his. Cohen's fedora was well-battered, as if it had been handed down from Fred Astaire via Rocky Marciano. And he brandished it like a scepter, doffing it to honor a soloing musician while bending on one knee.

"I'll wear an old man's mask for you," he injected in "I'm Your Man." And he did. The aging roué, dapper and at times almost frail in his gray suit and hat, is growing into his years like a character from a silent movie. At times he was almost Chaplinesque, at others like a refugee from a John Le Carré novel or a fifties-era Organization Man taking the commuter train from Greenwich. And sometimes the elegant Mr. Cohen looked like the CEO he is, the graying but increasingly-powerful head of an international music combine.

It's all calculated, of course, but most of us don't object to a seduction if the seducer's working hard enough.

The show was extremely generous by any standards, which may be another reflection of that Buddhist practice. Zen monasteries are austere places where monks are expected to work hard, be meticulous in their attention to detail, and never complain. And like any humble Zen priest, Cohen was careful to thank both the audience and his backstage workers with hat in hand.

Then there was the band: Sharon Robinson, cowriter of some of his best recent songs, chaired the vocal section with emotional texture and inner beauty, especially when she took the lead on "Boogie Street." The Webb Sisters provided choral richness and gave an exquisite rendition of one of Cohen's best tunes, "If It Be Your Will." (Usually it's a disappointment when backup singers do the star's material. Not in this case.)

The instrumentalists, all exceptional, were led by bassist Roscoe Beck. Neil Larsen was on keys, with Bob Metzger on guitar and pedal steel, Dino Soldo on winds, and Rafael Goyol on drums and percussion. Spanish instrumentalist Javier Mas gave the band an added dimension on guitar, bandurria, laud, and archilaud (variants of the oud).

The audience reception bordered on ecstatic, although it was hard to track their responses sometimes. A cheer for the line "I'm the little Jew who wrote the Bible" might be a tribute to Cohen. But there was also applause for "I don't trust my inner feelings/inner feelings come and go." That's L.A. for you. Go figure.

The young poet who wrote "Maria/please find me/I am almost thirty" is now almost seventy-five, still on the job and still delivering. Friday's performance was a triumphal return, and the tour shouldn't be missed. He might not be back for another 14 years.

Los Angeles, California

Leonard Cohen’s Money Troubles Benefit Fans of Bleak Baritone

Bloomberg News - April 13, 2009 by Daniel Taub

April 13 (Bloomberg) -- When the songs of promises made but not kept and love that couldn’t hold became too heavy, Leonard Cohen lightened the mood with a sardonic quip.

“Ah they don’t let a woman kill you/ Not in the Tower of Song,” Cohen sang during his April 10 show, the first of two nights he played at Nokia Theatre L.A. Live in downtown Los Angeles. He then added a line not found in the original lyrics: “Everywhere else, they’re fair game.”

It’s not only Cohen’s lyrics that are bittersweet; for fans of the Canadian-born singer, his return to the stage must offer mixed feelings as well. The 74-year-old Cohen has embarked on his first U.S. tour in 15 years partly for financial reasons. A Los Angeles court ruled in 2006 that a former business manager stole from Cohen $9.5 million, money he hasn’t recovered. With tickets close to the Nokia stage selling for almost $100 apiece, Cohen hinted at the reason for his return.

“Thank you for coming, for paying these exorbitant prices, and for keeping my songs alive all these years,” Cohen said in his whisky-tinged baritone.

Some fans at the 7,100-seat Nokia looked young enough to have found their way to Cohen through the late Jeff Buckley, whose version of Cohen’s “Hallelujah” has been used in numerous television shows, or Rufus Wainwright, whose cover was on the “Shrek” soundtrack. Many in the crowd, however, shared Cohen’s silver hair.

Cult Figure

Cohen was born several months before Elvis Presley and seven years before Bob Dylan, and it’s been 42 years since his first album. Despite such a long career, induction last year into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and covers by everyone from Willie Nelson to R.E.M., he remains something of a cult figure.

Cohen has dates scheduled throughout the U.S. and Canada through early June, including shows at New York City’s Radio City Music Hall on May 16 and 17, before he moves on to Germany, Belgium, France and the U.K. in July.

During his sabbatical from the stage, Cohen studied Buddhism at a monastic retreat near Los Angeles. At the Nokia show, he acknowledged both his failure at religion -- “Cheerfulness kept breaking through,” he explained -- and the decade and a half since his last tour.

“I was 60 years old at the time, just a kid with a crazy dream,” he said dryly.

Audience Favorite

Cohen’s 74 years didn’t prevent him from skipping, jogging and dancing on and off stage. Age is less an issue for Cohen than many performers younger than him, as he’s been writing an old man’s lyrics for decades. The line “I ache in the places where I used to play,” from 1988’s “Tower of Song,” is now an audience favorite.

The Nokia show offered few surprises, with a set list not far removed from the shows from his last tour in the mid-1990s, his Beacon Theatre show in New York in February, or his July 2008 appearance at London’s O2 Arena, released last month by Columbia Records on CD and DVD as “Live in London.”

Cohen mostly stuck to the fan favorites, including the early “Bird on the Wire,” “Suzanne” and “So Long, Marianne” and 1988’s “Everybody Knows,” arguably the most cynical song ever written (“Everybody knows the fight was fixed/ The poor stay poor, the rich get rich/ That’s how it goes/ Everybody knows”).

Cohen also provided a healthy dose of despair from 1992’s “The Future,” including the title track and “Democracy,” along with “In My Secret Life” and “Boogie Street” from 2001’s “Ten New Songs,” both co-written by longtime collaborator Sharon Robinson. While those two songs, recorded after Cohen last toured, aren’t as lyrically biting as Cohen’s earlier work, they also don’t sound out of place alongside “Famous Blue Raincoat” and “First We Take Manhattan.”

Saccharine, Gravel

While Cohen’s band approaches the saccharine at times -- Dino Soldo’s saxophone solos verge on being light jazz -- it provides a fine contrast to the gravelly voice of Cohen, whose range has become limited over the years. The fine work of Spanish guitarist Javier Mas and Hammond B3 organist Neil Larsen helped keep the band’s listen-while-you-work tendencies at bay.

Clad in his signature black suit, a bolo tie and a fedora, Cohen exhibited his usual gentlemanliness to his band and back- up singers, introducing each to the audience not once but twice. (Guitarist Bob Metzger was dubbed “the architect of arpeggio,” and drummer Rafael Gayol “the prince of precision.”) Cohen also stepped aside to let Robinson sing “Boogie Street” alone, and gave his other two back-up singers, sisters Charley and Hattie Webb, “If It Be Your Will” to perform as a duet.

Cohen was similarly generous with his audience, offering them 28 songs over three hours and twenty minutes. After dancing off stage following “Closing Time,” a fitting show-ender, Cohen came back one last time.

“I tried to leave you/ I will not deny,” he sang, garnering a last laugh from his fans. The song, from 1974’s “New Skin for the Old Ceremony,” turned out to be an even more appropriate closer. “Goodnight, my darling/ I hope you’re satisfied.”

Rating: *** (Good)

Los Angeles, California

Live Music: Leonard Cohen @ Nokia Theatre, L.A., 4/11/09

Popdose - April 13, 2009 by Jon Cummings

Leonard Cohen has been referencing his own mortality in his lyrics for decades now, and on his current world tour the first such hint arrives about a half hour into the show. Near the end of his 1988 classic “Everybody Knows,” he sings, “Everybody knows it’s coming apart / Take one last look at this sacred heart / Before it blows…” One couldn’t help but sense that Cohen’s mortality – he’s 74, after all – was part of what packed the house on two consecutive nights this weekend at Los Angeles’ Nokia Theatre. It was, perhaps, our last opportunity to watch pop music’s most poetic singer/songwriter do his thing, and we treated the occasion with all the reverence it demanded.

Why, then, was this septuagenarian skipping – literally, skipping – on and off the stage every chance he got? And how on earth does he manage to pull off a show far longer (three hours plus) than we can reasonably expect Bruce Springsteen to go during his L.A. shows later this week?

Cohen’s clearly enjoying his extended return to the public eye, and he’s eager to wring every moment (and every ounce of irony) from his ability to attract such large audiences at his advanced age. Reminding us on Saturday night that it’s been 15 years since his last major tour, he noted, “I was 60 then – just a crazy kid with a dream.”

His humor, like his set list, is well-rehearsed — he’s been using that line for nearly a year now, and the order of songs performed at his L.A. concerts was nearly identical to the track listing on the recently released Live in London CD, which documents a show from last July. Nevertheless, Cohen’s marathon tour — launched in the wake of last year’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and set to continue at least through the end of September — has cemented his place in the pantheon of pop lyricists while reviving his reputation as a live performer. Best of all, it’s a showcase for all the elements of his legendary persona: the genius, the joker, the guru, the rake, the oracle, and (yes) the red-hot lover.

If nothing else, his performances serve as a reminder that we shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the viability of even the most preposterous May/December romance – the kind Robert Redford and Woody Allen’s recent films beg us to believe in. When it’s Leonard Cohen we’re talking about, at least, it’s entirely feasible for a 75-year-old to be the sexiest, most intriguing man in the room.

Granted, it helps that he’s singing sublimely romantic ballads like “Suzanne,” hyper-literary epics like the ubiquitous “Hallelujah,” and deliciously wry come-ons like “I’m Your Man.” But the keys to Cohen’s allure as a performer are his humble, graceful interplay with his musicians and backing singers, and his willingness to match the passion of his lyrics with an intensity that dropped him to his knees on several occasions.

Not that those backing vocalists – Cohen’s longtime collaborator Sharon Robinson, as well as sisters Charley and Hattie Webb — weren’t enough by themselves to make any man’s knees buckle. Subdued yet sultry in their moves, angelic yet ghostly in their harmonies, they expertly provided the distinct, Greek chorus-like counterpoint to Cohen’s musings on songs like “The Future” and “Waiting for the Miracle.” Cohen gave them all numerous turns in the spotlight, most strikingly on the Webb sisters’ gorgeous, harp- and guitar-accompanied rendition of “If It Be Your Will.”

All of the concert’s visual elements – including the passionate, virtuoso playing of multi-instrumentalist Javier Mas – are, of course, missing from the Live in London CD. I’ve spent the last couple weeks studiously avoiding all reviews of (and tracks posted from) that two-disc set – sorry, Ken Shane — and after Saturday night I’m particularly glad I did. For while it adequately showcases the timeless quality of his songs, the recording strips away the sensuality of Cohen’s show – and, in the process, makes him sound at least 10 years older and vaguely decrepit, which he hardly deserves.

As is typical of “live” recordings — quick, name five really good ones! — London also emphasizes the show’s principal flaw, which is the homogeneity of musical director Roscoe Beck’s arrangements. They’re tasteful (to a fault), but they tend to overcomplicate Cohen’s early, folkie songs (”So Long, Marianne,” “Sisters of Mercy”) while taking the edge off the death-disco qualities of “First We Take Manhattan” and “Closing Time.” The resulting sameness is overcome by the staging of the live concert, but creates a chilly monotony on the CD. (Hopefully the DVD version, which I have not seen, offers a more complete and compelling take on the concert.)

I bought and listened to the Live in London CD yesterday, but it will be a long time before I play it again. I’d rather remember the sound and vision that’s lodged in my head from Saturday night – and I’d rather look forward to this coming Friday, when I’ll watch Cohen take the stage again at Coachella. I don’t doubt he’ll find a way to enrapture an audience full of Morrissey and McCartney and Franz Ferdinand fans the same way he held spellbound the devotees who populated this weekend’s gigs.

One other thing worth mentioning: I had never heard a pop singer thank his sound engineer from the stage before, but Cohen’s shoutout to Mark Vreeken was a welcome quirk. Vreeken apparently has done masterful work throughout this tour, creating open soundscapes that allow each instrument plenty of space to be appreciated. I’ve seen only three shows at the 18-month-old Nokia, part of the sparkling L.A. Live complex downtown, but Vreeken’s sound design was by far the best I’ve heard at any facility in the city. Cohen’s kudos were well deserved.

And finally, a fun fact: The keyboard player in Cohen’s touring band is Neil Larsen — who once upon a time was half-namesake of the Larsen-Feiten Band, purveyors (in 1980) of the cheesetastic hit “Who’ll Be the Fool Tonight.”

Los Angeles, California

Good Friday With Leonard Cohen - Hallelujah!

NME.com - April 12, 2009 by Lyndsey Parker

As an intrepid music journalist/fan/geek lucky enough to live in a city where gob-smacking gigs take place almost every night of the week, I see a lot of shows. Sometimes I wonder if I see too many. Like, if at this rate, I will eventually become jaded, and it'll take all four Beatles, with John and George risen from the grave, riding on unicycles with Madonna and David Bowie balanced chickenfight-style on their shoulders, while performing all of the Who's Tommy , to get me excited again.

But then I saw Leonard Cohen play at L.A. Live this past Friday--here was a 75-year-old man, and still one of the coolest dudes on the planet--and I felt utterly inspired. It made me feel like there are many good years of gig-going ahead of me before any jadedness sets in.

But few future concerts I attend will be as remarkable as Leonard's beyond-good Good Friday performance.

Leonard is, like I said, incredibly cool, so he's playing the Coachella Festival next weekend alongside newbies like Late Of The Pier and White Lies. But a truncated set in the scorching desert sun may not be the ideal setting to sincerely see L. Cohen--and let's face it, most of his elder fans have no desire or stamina to deal with all the portaloo lines and beachball-bouncing, bikini-babe spring-breakers. So this weekend Leonard played two sold-out nights at L.A. Live, and Friday was his first. It was also his first time touring North America in 15 years.

And he was worth the wait. He'd be worth suffering through THE smelliest portaloo visit to witness live, really.

This was a truly special evening, not just another L.A. gig. Leonard was true class act, despite his dirty-old-man shtick--few septuagenarians could get away with lines about oral trysts in the Chelsea Hotel or how good it feels to be "treated like meat" by a woman and not come across as, well, creepy and gross. But then again, few men in any age bracket could make jokes about Y2K and seem as witty as Oscar Wilde, or play a tinny Casio keyboard and seem like a musical genius.

But there was just something about that better-with-age husk of a voice; and the genteel way he removed his chapeau every time he bowed or every time one of his band members soloed; and the off-the-charts chemistry between him and his backup singers (longtime collaborator Sharon Robinson and the Webb Sisters, the latter whom were so angelic, one of them even played a harp) as they locked eyes and serenaded each other.

No wonder the man received a countless number of standing ovations (literally--the adoring spectators leapt to their feet the minute Leonard first walked onstage, and after almost every song, and during several band solos, and after some of Leonard's clever bon mots...so much so that I stopped counting after the ninth standing O).

He also played countless encores (it was at least five, maybe six), refusing to leave the stage even after he crooned what everyone naturally assumed what was his logical swan song, "Closing Time." Again, this was inspiring. Here the audience was composed of people half, a third, or even a quarter Leonard's age, all beginning to tire out as the concert reached the three-hour marathon mark. And yet Cohen kept going, and going, and going, seemingly enjoying himself way too much to say goodnight, and seemingly bursting with the energy of a hopped-up-on-Red-Bull tweenage boy. (After every encore, he literally skipped off into the stage wings, like a precocious child.)

"Thank you for keeping my music alive and paying these exorbitant ticket prices," a visibly moved and characteristically well-mannered Leonard told the reverent audience.

No, thank YOU, Mr. Cohen. I'll see you at Coachella.

Sincerely,
L. Parker

Los Angeles, California

Leonard Cohen / April 11, 2009 / Los Angeles (Nokia Theatre)

Billboard - April 15, 2009 by Ayala Ben-Yehuda

Never mind that there were thousands of people Saturday night (April 11) at Los Angeles' Nokia Theatre; Leonard Cohen wanted to confide in each and every one of them. It had been 15 years since his last American tour, he explained to the nearly-packed audience of gray hairs and hipsters at his second consecutive L.A. show. "I was 60 at the time, just a kid with a crazy dream." So what had he been doing all these years? Taking antidepressants (Cohen recited a list of them worthy of one of his poetic verses); and engaging in a "deep study" of religion, he added. "But cheerfulness kept breaking through."

It was the wryly funny, self-deprecating Cohen that got the biggest reaction from an adoring audience, which gave him a standing ovation as soon as he stepped onstage. The 74-year-old more than earned the upfront acclaim, holding forth for three hours in his trademark scratchy baritone, as he regaled fans with intimate stories (both personal and political) of love, lust, faith and freedom.

Wearing a dark suit and hat, with one hand clutching a microphone and the other held close to his face, the slightly hunched poet talked-sang through his four-decade repertoire and occasionally closed his eyes and swayed slightly, as if in prayer.

If Cohen was carried off by the music of his superb backing band, he wasn't alone; his musicians--including musical director and bassist Roscoe Beck, co-writer and vocalist Sharon Robinson and backup singers the Webb Sisters--were virtuosos in their own right. But if there ever was a concert where the words mattered, it was this one, whether they came in the form of fragile beauty ("Bird on a Wire," "Anthem," and a goosebump-inducing recitation of "A Thousand Kisses Deep") or fondly delivered, down-and-dirty gems ("Chelsea Hotel," "I'm Your Man"). And like the memories of lovers that haunt his songs, Cohen kept coming back for encores. "I tried to leave you," he sang, after several near-goodbyes. "This I don't deny/I closed the book on us at least a hundred times/And here's a man still working for your smile."

Los Angeles, California

Blogs and Other Fan Reports

Blog - "And we gone mad can only laugh or cry" - "Leonard Cohen Live 04/11/09 Los Angeles"
Leonard Cohen live was extraordinary, possibly a life changing experience for me, it’s too soon to tell, but it was extremely gratifying...

Blog - "MusicZeitgeist.com" - "Live Review: Leonard Cohen at the Nokia Theatre, April 11"
In what would be the first portion of a career-spanning triptych of nearly 30 songs lasting almost three hours, he managed to squeeze in “Chelsea Hotel No. 2,” “Waiting For The Miracle” and “Anthem” before taking a little break, no doubt to wrestle idle security guards in the alley behind the theatre before returning to the stage...

Blog - "Jewish Current Issues" - "Leonard Cohen at Nokia Live LA -- Forever Young"
It is hard to convey the extraordinary experience of this concert, but it was worth it for the backup singers alone...

Blog - "Sean James" - "Leonard Cohen at the nokia centre"
What an amazing 3 1/2 hour concert from a very generous Man who gave it his all . I was fortunate enough to meet everyone and do their hair during the rehersal for the tour before they left for Europe & Australia...

Discuss the tour and read fan reviews on The Leonard Cohen Forum and in French on the Leonard Cohen Forum (French site).

Oakland, California

Set List - April 13, 2009

Per Mercury News

First Set

Dance Me To The End Of Love
The Future
Ain't No Cure For Love
Bird On The Wire
Everybody Knows
In My Secret Life
Who By Fire
Chelsea Hotel
Waiting For The Miracle
Anthem

Second Set

Tower Of Song
Suzanne
Gypsy Wife
The Partisan
Boogie Street
Hallelujah
I'm Your Man
A Thousand Kisses Deep (recitation)
Take This Waltz

Encores

So Long, Marianne
First We Take Manhattan
Famous Blue Raincoat
If It Be Your Will
Democracy
Lullaby
Closing Time
I Tried to Leave You
Whither Thou Goest

Oakland, California

Set List - April 14, 2009

Per The Leonard Cohen Forum

First Set

Dance Me To The End Of Love
The Future
Ain't No Cure For Love
Bird On The Wire
Everybody Knows
In My Secret Life
Who By Fire
Chelsea Hotel
Waiting For The Miracle
Anthem

Second Set

Tower Of Song
Suzanne
Gypsy Wife
The Partisan
Boogie Street
Hallelujah
I'm Your Man
A Thousand Kisses Deep (recitation)
Take This Waltz

Encores

So Long, Marianne
First We Take Manhattan
Famous Blue Raincoat
If It Be Your Will
Democracy
That Don't Make It Junk
Closing Time
I Tried to Leave You
Whither Thou Goest

Oakland, California

Set List - April 15, 2009

Per gb14772 on The Leonard Cohen Forum

Oakland, California

Review: Leonard Cohen in concert

Mercury News - April 14, 2009 by Jim Harrington

Talk about going from one extreme to another.

Leonard Cohen had gone some 15 years without taking the stage in the Bay Area. Then, on Monday night at the Paramount Theatre in Oakland, the master songwriter basically wouldn’t leave the stage.

During his first gig in this three-night stand, set to conclude on Wednesday, the 74-year-old Canadian delivered a Herculean performance that stretched well over three hours. The main set alone was a good two hours, but then he kept coming back – again and again – to perform a total of four multi-song encores that combined to last more than an hour.

He might have even came back for a fifth, long after the crowd had left and the clean-up crew had swept the floor, given that Cohen acted throughout the night like there was nothing he’d rather do than perform live.

Cohen, no doubt, is glad to finally be back on tour. And his fans, which waited for what seemed like an eternity for the occasion, were tickled to see him under the bright lights.

There were some truly magical moments during this sold-out concert, ones that led this critic to scribble mainly cliches in the notebook – sophomoric descriptions like “religious experience” – in a futile attempt to try and capture the beauty of what was unfolding. Most of those occurrences happened during the show’s first two hours, before the old saying “too much of a good thing” came into play.

Cohen couldn’t wait to get things started, literally running onstage to join his nine-piece band, which included three female backing vocalists, just after 8 p.m. He wore a dapper suit and fedora hat, looking like he stepped straight off one of his album covers, and immediately wrapped his canyon-deep baritone around the opener “Dance Me to the End of Love.”

The reluctant superstar, who disappeared from the scene for five years in the ‘90s to study Buddhism high atop a mountain, is a noted perfectionist when it comes to songwriting. He’s said to spend weeks laboring over a single line, and even years working on just one song, before he feels it’s ready for public consumption. He obviously sets the same high standard for his live performances, and there were times on Monday _ such as during “Everybody Knows,” “Bird on a Wire” and “Who by Fire” – when it felt like we were hearing, for lack of a better term, perfect renditions.

The set list closely followed, though didn’t completely mimic, what’s found on Cohen’s great new two-disc concert set, “Leonard Cohen: Live in London.” The biggest difference was that Cohen was much chattier in “London” than he was in Oakland. That ranked as a huge disappointment: Cohen is such an enigma that the chance to hear him talk about his songs, or simply discuss anything that was on his mind after all these years in hiding, was one of the main reasons why fans were willing to pay as much as $250 per ticket to see the concert.

The pace of the show was quite leisurely, with Cohen delivering roughly five songs every half hour, and Cohen was his usually well-enunciated self, two things that combined to give the crowd ample time to digest his lyrics, which work on so many different levels.

The second set started off quite strong, and offered up such distinct highlights as “Tower of Song,” “Hallelujah” and “I’m Your Man.” A bit later, however, Cohen had run out of A-list material and the whole affair began to lag.

Many fans won’t even consider the concept of Cohen having a B-list of songs, just like the Bruce Springsteen faithful refuses to agree that there is such a thing as a mediocre Boss show. Yet, clearly, not every one of the pop-poet’s tunes measure up to, say, “Suzanne” or “Hallelujah.”

That was quite evident during all the encores as Cohen hit the crowd with such second-stringers as “Democracy” and “I Tried to Leave You.” As a result, the last hour of the show simply didn’t measure up to its first 120 minutes.

Taken as a whole, however, the show just further underscored what fans already know: Leonard Cohen is one of the greatest singer-songwriters in the history of popular music.

Oakland, California

Leonard Cohen skips, sings, outlasts his audience at the Paramount

San Francisco Bay Guardian - April 14, 2009 by Kimberly Chun

O to be as spry and energetic at 74: Leonard Cohen launched his three-performance stand at the Paramount Theatre in Oakland last night, April 13, with an approximately three-hour concert that had the audience chuckling with amazement when the singer-songwriter came back for a fourth encore. "I tried to leave you," he moaned.

Cohen had the crowd in his clenched fist throughout multiple standing ovations and a set that fundamentally mirrored that of his recent Live in London DVD and CD. And he put up a good fight, alternating between standing with his knees slightly bent, hands grasping mic and chord, in a boxer's posture, and kneeling as if a humble mendicant - the latter his favorite way to open an emotionally intense song.

The songwriter received bursts of appreciative applause for lines like, "You told me again you preferred handsome men / but for me you would make an exception," and, "You fixed yourself, you said, "Well never mind, / we are ugly but we have the music," from "Chelsea Hotel No. 2," a song about written about his affair with Janis Joplin. So long ago, yet still so vivid. This beautiful loser has morphed into a wiry, elegant slip of a man, skipping gracefully off the stage after each encore then back. From afar, Cohen resembles less William Burroughs, a Blues Brother, or a Bogart-esque "Tough Jew" like Bugsy Siegel than a smiling Stuart Little-like gent, revealing a snowy white pate beneath the fedora and a fiercely ingenuous grin. There's a hard-won innocence to the performer, though he was less chatty and more focused than on the recent Live in London. Likewise backup vocalists the Webb sisters chose to chartwheel rather than do-si-do to that key reworked phrase, "All the lousy little poets / coming round / tryin' to sound like Charlie Manson / and the white girls dancin'" in the charred apocalyptic ode "The Future."

Though Cohen's voice couldn't quite hit the high notes of "Hallelujah"'s chorus, he gave his fans their money's worth - and then some. You could almost hear a thousand-plus hearts throbbing as he offered the spoken word "A Thousand Kisses Deep." My only complaint: the generally tame musical setting for his lyrics. His band was excellent - particularly banduria player Javier Mas, who Cohen regularly knelt to as if in musical prayer, and pedal steel player and guitarist Bob Metzger. And the arrangements for some songs like "Bird on the Wire" and "Hallelujah," which included a soulful organ solo by keyboardist Neil Larsen, were notably lovely.

But I longed for Cohen to be backed by musicians that would really cut loose. The flatly straightforward approach of tunes like "First We Take Manhattan" rang with the ho-hum vanilla flavors of smooth jazz: bowing to the lyrics, such arrangements content themselves with simply being serviceable, to the song's ultimate detriment. I suspect I'm in the minority here - and perhaps that sense of musical derring-do is what separates the folk section-relegated Cohen from the rock-sorted Bob Dylan or Lou Reed. But a gal can dream, can't she - about those verses, basking in the heat generated by Grinderman, Destroyer, or some incarnation of Masada?

Oakland, California

Music review: Leonard Cohen's graceful gift

San Francisco Chronicle - April 14, 2009 by Joel Selvin (Photos: Lea Suzuki/The Chronicle, Michael Loccisano/Getty Images)

Leonard Cohen dashed onto the stage, a gray-haired old man in a dark suit, tie and fedora. He spent the next hour immersed in music before he spoke a word to the capacity crowd Monday at Oakland's Paramount Theatre.

He noted that it had been 14 or 15 years since he had last performed. "I was maybe 60 years old," he said. "Just a crazy kid with a dream."

In the 16 years since Leonard Cohen, 74, last appeared in the Bay Area at the medium-size Warfield theater, he has become widely recognized as one of the great songwriters of his generation, and he was greeted by the adoring crowd at the Paramount like the literary lion and musical giant he has always been. People were wiping tears of joy from their eyes at the warm, profound beauty of his songs.

Tickets to the first two concerts sold out almost immediately. A third show has been added for Wednesday, and tickets to the sold-out shows were fetching big bucks on the Internet. Leonard Cohen was not always such a big deal. His own recordings usually attracted a modest cult following, but since the 1994 recording of Cohen's "Hallelujah" by the late Jeff Buckley, he seems to have achieved an elevated status - subject of tribute albums, documentary movies, "American Idol" covers and the sort of lavish encomiums and accolades usually reserved for the dead or dying.

At the Paramount, he looked to be in excellent health. Cohen was a humble, generous host whose bass voice glowed with golden tones when he dropped into his bottom register, whose best songs were as good as songs get, whose wit was exceeded only by his grace and dignity. He laces wry ripostes and puntastic wordplay into lyrics cut like jewelry, all delivered with laconic ease and mulish sure-footedness.

Cohen is not an entertainer. He wouldn't be returning to the stage at this point in his life if his ex-manager hadn't stolen his life savings. He is a Buddhist monk who sings and likes to stitch little gags into his songs. The crowd waited expectantly for key lines - for instance, "We are ugly but we have the music" from "Chelsea Hotel," the song he wrote about his one-night stand with Janis Joplin, a story now part of his legend, common knowledge to the audience - and they exploded with knowing cheers. Cohen, who was once a somewhat esoteric figure on the music scene's peripheries, has ascended into the pop pantheon.

He treated the audience to a luxurious two-hour tour through some of the many high points of his career - from ample selections from his 1988 masterpiece album, "I'm Your Man," to "Suzanne" and "So Long Marianne" from his earliest albums. He dusted off the little-noted "The Gypsy's Wife" and "Who by Fire." The now even more chilling "The Future" has never sounded the same since 9/11. He let the supple, elegant musicianship of his band wash over his songs. Cohen sang quietly, gently, deeply, and he made every word count.

Javier Mas of Barcelona added Mediterranean flavor on bandurria and other exotic stringed instruments. Bassist Roscoe Beck and guitarist Bob Metzger are veteran Cohen accompanists. His sometime songwriting collaborator, Sharon Robinson, was magnificent on her own "Boogie Street" - Cohen watching intently, hat in hand - and she was more than capably flanked in the female background choir by vocalists Hattie and Charley Webb, two charming young British ladies who count gymnastics among their performing skills.

At the heart of all this wonderful music is Cohen's unflappable humanity. The dark humor and irony are layered over a basically reassuring view of life and humankind. Everything's cracked, Cohen tells us; that's how the light gets in.

He may not have wanted to do this in the first place, but he is game and great, and these Leonard Cohen performances - this well-deserved victory lap by this world-champion words and music man - are a precious gift to all who see them.

Oakland, California

Hallelujah for Leonard Cohen

San Francisco Examiner - April 15, 2009 by Leslie Katz

Rarely is an evening of pop music so sublime.

But Canadian songwriting great Leonard Cohen’s highly anticipated, three-hour-plus set at Oakland’s Paramount Theatre on Monday night was a thoroughly satisfying experience for longtime fans as well as newcomers who simply wanted to find out why Cohen ranks with Bob Dylan and Lennon and McCartney — why so many musical greats revere him, and so many sing his songs.

In delightful spirit and backed by amazing musicians, the charming, spry 74-year-old decked out in a hat and suit showed exactly why in his first of three Bay Area concerts this week, the first here in some 15 years.

Cohen, a poet and novelist before becoming a musician when he was in his 30s, writes songs filled with nuggets of beauty, humor and wisdom that touch the soul, heart and brain.

From the opener “Dance Me to the End of Love” to the closing prayer “Whither Thou Goest,” Cohen’s lyrics enchanted in this four-encore appearance, which offered a set list similar to that on his most recent recording, “Leonard Cohen: Live in London.”

The sound was perfect. The audience could hear every word and rasp of his distinctive, deep, noncommercial vocals, as well as those of backup singers Sharon Robinson — Cohen’s songwriting partner — and sisters Charley and Hattie Webb, who did cartwheels during “The Future” when Cohen changed the line “white men dancing” to “white girls dancing.”

The poetry was nonstop, from lyrical gems such as “There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in” from “Anthem” to “We are ugly, but we have the music” from “Chelsea Hotel No. 2” to “Everybody wants a box of chocolates and a long stem rose” from “Everybody Knows.”

The top-notch band included Dino Soldo on wind instruments and saxophone, Rafael Gayol on drums, Javier Mas on strings, Bob Metzger on guitar, Neil Larsen on keyboards and musical director Roscoe Beck on bass, in an evening of styles touching on folk, blues, classical and jazz — all in a good way.

Sadly, Cohen didn’t talk much between tunes in the impeccably staged performance, but about a third of the way through the set, he did say, “Fifteen years ago, I was just a kid with a crazy dream; I plunged into the study of religion and philosophy, but cheerfulness kept breaking through.”

Yet that insight was enough from a master who thrillingly praises “Hallelujah” to the “Tower of Song.”

Oakland, California

Last Night: Leonard Cohen at the Paramout Theatre

San Francisco Weekly - April 16, 2009 by Jennifer Maerz/Steven Gdula (Photos: Gretchen Robinette)

Better than: Most performers one quarter of his age.

Given the circumstances surrounding his current tour, no one would've blamed Leonard Cohen if he'd only played a 90-minute set Wednesday night at the Paramount Theatre before bidding the audience adieu. Cohen, who was forced last year to take his show - and his soon-to-be 75-year-old self - around the world after bad business dealings left him nearly broke, is so respected as both a poet and a composer that he gets a standing ovation for simply showing up. So considering the motivation for the tour, not to mention his senior status and his decade and a half absence from the stage, Cohen's fans would've appreciated just one hour of his time and talent last night. Instead? He gave them nearly three.

Spry and energetic, Cohen ran onto the stage as if hurriedly making up for those 15 years he'd been away from it. Whether with his hat in hand, or crooning down on one knee, he played the poet-supplicant for the course of over an hour through songs "Dance Me To The End Of Love," "Anthem," and "In My Secret Life." In humbled lyrics that often seemed to apologize that all he could offer were words, Cohen deferred to the power that his lover, his god, his peers, and his audience held over him. Only in "Chelsea Hotel," a song that he has since admitted was "mean" in its portrayal of Janis Joplin, did he seem cocksure and cavalier.

The second set opened with "Tower Of Song" and was marked by a more confident, even swaggering Cohen than the first. Through both sets his voice was remarkable and strong; round and robust in its lowest register and clear and unstrained in its highest reaches. As expected, his band's performance was superbly nuanced and exquisitely mixed with tones of Klezmer, Left Bank café, waltzes, and folk.

Cohen's character and career are rarely mentioned now without a reference to his study of Buddhism, but the singer/ songwriter of last night's performance was more like the questioning psalmist of the Bible. More plaintive than pensive, even at this stage of his career, his most prophetic statement came in "Anthem," when he sang, "There's a crack in everything/ that's how the light gets in."

Awareness of that light could be the reason Cohen gave such a heartfelt goodbye to his fans, blessing and thanking them for allowing him in.

Critic's Notebook

Personal Bias: "Hallelujah" reduces me to a five tissue sob every time I hear it.

Random Detail: Celeb pair of the night - Sean Penn with Jello Biafra.

Can't help but wonder: if anybody bought one of the $125 Unified Heart Touring heart-insignia leather tote bags?

By the way: The Fox Theater, where Franz Ferdinand also played last night, was all but deserted when the Cohen show finally let out. Better rest up kids, Leonard's going to school your asses at Coachella.

Oakland, California

Leonard Cohen's perfect offering

Salon - April 17, 2009 by Gary Kamiya

For the people fortunate enough to see Leonard Cohen on his current national tour, as I did Monday night at Oakland, Calif.'s Paramount Theater, the world is a bigger, deeper, older, more bitter and radiant place. Every Cohen performance is an epic event. And in his three-hour-plus performance, part of his first tour in 15 years, the great songwriter, poet and novelist once again used his powerful body of work to create, for one night, a theater of his life, a public confession so intimate, complex, combative and profound that it felt as much like prayer as performance. At the end of the evening, as the audience floated out, still transported to whatever unknown inner place his words and music had carried them, you could almost feel a palpable sense of collective gratitude that such artistry still exists in a weary world -- that Leonard Cohen is still around.

Forty years. Like many members of the graying but impressively age-varied audience, that's how long I've been listening to Cohen. That fact in itself gave the evening a sense of momentousness, even fatality. It was a shock when Cohen strolled out onto the stage, still hip, still the epitome of a certain kind of sexy Euro-Canadian-Buddhist intellectual style, but now an old man. What happened to that handsome young blade who blasted onto the scene with the ice-cold "The Stranger Song" and the miraculously gentle "Sisters of Mercy"? The golden boy whose romantic life was captured in envy-producing photos in the first songbook I ever bought, the Leonard Cohen Songbook, hanging out with a mysterious blond woman on a Greek island and being quoted as asking, at a post-performance party at the Berkeley Marriott, "Hey, this is California -- where are the 13-year-old girls?" He got old, and we got old with him. If Leonard Cohen, the slashing youth who threw down the gauntlet to himself and us with the terrifying album "Songs of Love and Hate," who wrote the brilliantly audacious novel "Beautiful Losers," whose obsession with love and sex and betrayal and forgiveness and God and women, always women, served as a disquieting soundtrack for so many of our romantic lives, can be 74 years old, then it's no use denying it -- we must all be on that same one-way train. You can't watch somebody you've been following for that long without seeing yourself. The window is also a mirror.

For those of us still hiding from the revenges planned by the whirligig of time, it can be hard to look. This is the fourth or fifth time I've seen Cohen perform. The first time was sometime in the 1970s -- it's been so long I don't remember exactly. The last was on his mid-'90s tour, during the remarkable career renaissance spurred by his superb 1988 album, "I'm Your Man." In a stock line he uses in every show, but which surely brings down the house every time, Cohen noted that the last time he performed was 14 or 15 years ago, then deadpanned, "I was 60 years old. Just a crazy kid with a dream." In those 14 years, Cohen went from being a brilliantly sardonic middle-aged man ("Now my friends are gone and my hair is gray/ I ache in the places where I used to play") to a brilliantly sardonic old man. In his black suit and fedora, he looks like a cross between an aging hipster and a retired Jewish haberdasher, with a little John Updike thrown in. It's a cool look, and Cohen is trim and spry (in a delightful touch, he skipped off the stage at end of each set), but there's no hiding the fact that the golden boy is gone and won't come back.

But, of course, Cohen knows this, and talks about it, and plays with it, and interrogates it. At one point in his second set, he said that he'd been working out, and slyly opened his suit jacket to reveal his (flat) stomach. "But it's too late," he said. And then, after a beat: "It's always been too late." Old age, like everything else for Cohen, is a curiosity to be investigated. It's inescapable, and yet in a certain sense it can be overcome. During his memorable version of "I'm Your Man," which like all of his unabashed love songs falls like a redemptive rain after the caustic romantic pessimism of much of his other work, he made one of his characteristic, intriguing tweaks to his lyrics: following the line, "If you want another kind of lover," he changed the original "I'll wear a mask for you" to "I'll wear an old man's mask for you." Cohen's point seemed to be that his old age is real, but it is also a mask, and that beneath it, the same youthful fire of passion and devotion burns. In fact, maybe it burns higher and hotter, as he gets closer to what he calls "closing time." It certainly felt like that Monday night.

Cohen undertook this tour for financial reasons after his former manager allegedly swindled $10 million from him, leaving him almost nothing. (Cohen was awarded $9 million by a Canadian court in a civil suit.) But he held nothing back, throwing himself wholeheartedly into his music. In his generosity and dignity, Cohen reminded me of another old man who lost everything, and who earned the nation's respect by going on a grueling around-the-world lecture tour to pay off his debts -- Mark Twain.

Cohen's shows on this tour seem to be almost identical, from the set lists down to his jokes and his introductions of the musicians. (Most of the material on his excellent new album, "Leonard Cohen Live in London," including his stage patter, is virtually identical to the Paramount show.) But that doesn't really matter. It's a flawless, beautifully conceived and realized show, and it doesn't require performative spontaneity. You're getting Leonard Cohen, still at the height of his powers (OK, I miss the five or six notes he lost on the top end of his baritone range two decades ago), and if he doesn't want to show the audience any more of himself than he has already revealed in some of the most naked songs ever written, that's his prerogative. He may say the same things at every show, but his words possess such gravitas and sincerity that they're like a simple suit of clothes. Why change them?

Besides, Cohen somehow manages to create the sense every time he performs that he is engaged in a life-or-death struggle. He famously once told an interviewer that he approaches a performance like a matador entering the ring, and has enigmatically called himself a "soldier" (his touring band was once called "the Army"). And that sense of inner struggle -- with the angel, the devil, or just himself -- was the skeleton beneath the skin of Monday's sold-out show.

Accompanied by his superb 10-piece band, Cohen opened with the haunting 1984 ballad "Dance Me to the End of Love," which he said was inspired by knowing that in certain death camps, the Germans forced a string quartet to play while their fellow prisoners were being killed and burned. Cohen has explored the theme of love as an all-consuming flame, both destructive and creative, from the outset of his career -- a painting of St. Bernadette in flames appears on the back cover of his first album -- and that tortured ambiguity flickered throughout the evening. "If he was fire, then she must be wood," Cohen sang in "Joan of Arc," but the old ladies' man himself has always been dry wood, burning up, consumed by the same flame, dying endlessly. Cohen is a battered philosopher of eros, and the beauty and horror of much of his poetry derives from his alternately exhausted and triumphant response to the demigod of sex.

But Cohen has turned outward more in recent decades. His second offering of the night was "The Future," perhaps his bleakest political song, with its Yeatsian vision of a dystopian world in which "things are going to slide in all directions ... I've seen the future, baby, it is murder." Then came the unabashed, down-on-his-knees love song "There Ain't No Cure for Love" from "I'm Your Man," followed by the classic "Bird on a Wire" from his second album, "Songs From a Room." As is his wont, Cohen made a small but key change to one of the lyrics. The original line goes "If I have been untrue/ I hope you know it was never to you." He changed it to "I thought a lover had to be some kind of liar," relentlessly erasing the sentimentality from his earlier work.

That implacable self-questioning was manifest in Cohen's intense onstage demeanor. As he sang, he would sometimes stand still, holding the microphone close, with eyes closed and a tortured expression, seeming to be searching for the meanings behind his own words, the lies behind the truth. Frequently he dropped to his knees, as if to implore his muse or honor his fellow musicians. Once or twice a wild surmise seemed to shoot through his eyes as he looked up over the crowd into the darkness, a look of nameless wonder.

Then came one of the evening's highlights, the gloriously mordant "Everybody Knows," with its perfect commingling of Cohen's political and sexual obsessions. ("Everybody knows the scene is dead, but there's gonna be a meter on your bed that will disclose what everybody knows.") On this tune, as throughout, the Barcelona-born string maestro Javier Mas, who plays 12-string guitar, oud and bandurria, stood out. One of the musical highlights was watching Cohen, playing his familiar fast arpeggios on guitar, intently leaning over and watching Mas take off on one of his virtuoso Middle Eastern-inflected runs.

Mention must also be made of the astonishingly fine trio of backing vocalists. Sharon Robinson, one of the three, is not really a "backing vocalist" -- she is a major and formidable talent in her own right who co-wrote the songs on Cohen's strong 2001 release "Ten New Songs" and produced the album. Her soulful, expressive voice was highlighted on her own "Boogie Street." The other two vocalists, Charlie and Hattie Webb, lived up to Cohen's description of them as "the sublime Webb sisters." Their voices are not only astonishingly pure in tone and true in pitch, but they blend perfectly. On "I Tried to Leave You," they sang a beautiful, complex two-part harmony unlike any I've ever heard before. Best of all, these three muses gave Cohen the opportunity to wander over to them and whisper, "Sing it, angels." A Leonard Cohen concert in which he does not speak that line to the beautiful women who invariably seem to be on stage with him is a fraud.

The long, rich show included some old standbys like his breakout song "Suzanne," with its transcendent vision of a disquieting Jesus who "sank beneath your wisdom like a stone," and "Chelsea Hotel," with its indelible image of Janis Joplin "giving me head on the unmade bed while the limousines wait in the street." But Cohen dipped more into his newer work, performing widely celebrated songs like "Hallelujah," "Tower of Song" and "Democracy." (It's funny to think of a 20-year-old song like "Tower of Song" as being "newer," but that's what happens when your career lasts for four decades.) Standouts included a soaring version of Cohen's musical setting of the great Lorca poem "Take This Waltz," a triumphant version of "I'm Your Man" and a tune he's done forever, his goose-bump-raising version of the stirring French resistance song "The Partisan." He also did a wonderful spoken version of "A Thousand Kisses Deep."

Speaking of spoken words, there's the little matter of Cohen's voice. First, it was never as terrible as some of his critics said. No, he wasn't always on pitch, but he was coming from the European cabaret tradition, where expression and intelligence matter more than pipes. Who would want to hear Mariah Carey sing "Put the lather on your face, now you're Santa Claus/and you've got a gift for everyone who will give you their applause" from the savage "Dress Rehearsal Rag," a song in which Cohen berates himself for being too cowardly to kill himself? He could always sing just well enough to get by. His sudden drop into a strange, breathy basso profundo in "I'm Your Man" was somewhat disconcerting, and obviously diminished the melodic appeal of his voice, but he still got style points for delivery. Basically, the same thing held for his performance in Oakland. Actually, after the intermission, his voice had warmed up enough that he was hitting some of the higher baritone notes that he didn't even attempt in the first set.

A Cohen performance is exhilarating and moving, but it can also be exhausting. Part of this is simply because he is a real poet, not a pop imitation. He uses language precisely, extravagantly, experimentally. Listening to poetry is harder than listening to doggerel. But mostly, a Cohen show is exhausting because of his dark sensibility. One of Cohen's stock jokes on the tour is that he found himself drawn to religion (he was a practicing Buddhist monk for years at a monastery near Los Angeles) but "cheerfulness kept breaking out." However, cheerfulness is not the first thing you'd associate with Cohen. He gets to it eventually, but it's not a straight shot.

"Looks like freedom but it feels like death/ It's something in between, I guess," Cohen sings in "Closing Time." That knife edge, that balancing act between the intolerable and the redemptive, is where Cohen lives, both in his work and in his performances. He is a fearless explorer of darknesses of all kinds, mostly erotic and romantic, but also, and increasingly, political and spiritual. For Cohen, without darkness there is no light -- a credo summed up in his song "Anthem," with its exquisite chorus "Ring the bells that still can ring/ Forget your perfect offering/ There is a crack in everything/ That's how the light gets in." This unflinching dialectic, which is found in some forms of Buddhism and Judaism as well as in the "negative theology" of Christian mystics like Meister Eckhart, informs all of Cohen's work. In its rejection of facile optimism, it represents the diametrical opposite of the Dionysian self-assurance we associate with performers. Watching Cohen, you're sometimes haunted by a fear that he may fall and not be able to get back up.

This coiled tension makes his performances uniquely self-critical, almost self-canceling. You could almost say he performs against himself. Maybe that's where his matador image derives: He's both the bull and the swordsman. At times, as Cohen was listening intently to his own words being sung back at him by the chorus, you could imagine him shaking his head and saying, "Actually, none of that is true."

Cohen is a peculiar hybrid: a writer who is also a star, a natural questioner whose medium, the popular song, forces him toward answers. He's an anti-romantic romantic, an inveterate ladies' man who finds himself left alone in a place wrecked "by the winds of change and the weeds of sex." But in the end, no matter what, Cohen always pops back up, affirming something larger and nobler than himself. And the thing that buoys him is the idea of grace. Cohen does not necessarily believe that such a thing exists as an objective entity. But he does seem to believe you can create it -- in fact, that you have to create it. As he writes in "Marianne," "I forget to pray for the angels, and then the angels forget to pray for us."

Cohen saved two of his most famous songs, "First We Take Manhattan" and "Famous Blue Raincoat," for the end. After his gravelly bass voice caressed the great opening line of "Manhattan" -- "They sentenced me to 20 years of boredom/ For trying to change the system from within" -- the band rocked the tune. "Famous Blue Raincoat" is probably the most beautiful melody Cohen ever wrote and one of his most haunting songs, with its enigmatic references to a friend's romantic betrayal and its heartbreakingly compassionate line "And thanks/ for the trouble you took from her eyes/ I thought it was there for good/ So I never tried." The mostly flawless band slightly overplayed behind Cohen on this classic, which deserves no instrumental adornment whatsoever, but it remained one of the evening's highlights.

As an old fan who still reserves a special place in his heart for the old songs, the number that really got to me was "Marianne." As Cohen and the backup singers broke into that famous chorus -- "Now so long, Marianne, it's time that we began/ to laugh and cry and cry and laugh/ about it all again" -- I found myself carried back 30 years. I remembered all the times I played that song and all those other great songs on the guitar. I remembered when Leonard Cohen was one of my idols, in the days when I was innocent enough to have idols. I remembered all the long-lost women I associated with that song. And remembering it all, hearing it here and knowing it was gone forever, something cracked open, and the tears came.

After Cohen's last encore, as the applause poured down upon him, he doffed his hat and bowed his head, and when he raised it again an incandescent smile, an expression of pure joy and appreciation, suffused his worn, sensual, intelligent face. As he smiled, the years seemed to fall away, not just for Cohen but for everyone whose life has been enriched by his artistic journey, whether they followed it for 40 years or one. Those of us who grew up with Leonard Cohen saw an old man on Monday night, and in his age we saw our own rapidly approaching fate. But we also saw something else. We saw an artist still alive and kicking, still asking troublesome questions of the world and telling beautiful stories about it. That was a fragment to be shored against our coming ruin.

"Thank for you for keeping my songs alive all these years," Cohen said at the end of the show. The fact that his songs still live on is inspiring. But it isn't just his artistic achievement that matters, but the humility, the discipline, and, yes, the grace that lies behind it. For what Cohen offered to us was not just his artistry, but his life -- a life played for keeps, an examined life, an artist's life. Not everyone can write "Famous Blue Raincoat," but every one of us can try to live a deeper life. Every one of us can ring the bells that still can ring.

Oakland, California

Blogs, Photos and Other Fan Reports

Blog - "Refs UnBrendans" - "Tidbittery, late sunday night edition"
What an amazing concert it was, what an amazing performer at the young age of 74. What a privilege it was to see him skip about the stage, strike his signature poses, lead his versatile, pitch-perfect band and sing some of the deepest and most thoughtful lyrics ever committed to paper...

Blog & Photos - "The Color Awesome" - "Review: Leonard Cohen at The Paramount Theater"
Cohen possesses the quality that I value most in a performer - Presence. Not presence in the sense of a bigger-than-life room filling personality, but presence in the spiritual sense. When he performs, he is clearly completely in the moment, heart open and accepting. That coupled with Cohen’s lyrical honestly (he’s always been one to take on the big subjects, love, loss, spirituality, death, betrayal, redemption) packs a real wollop...

Photos by TheColorAwesome - Leonard Cohen @ The Paramount

Photos - Leonard Cohen Concert, Oakland. April 15, 2009. Photos by JRR

Blog - "Blog o’ Gnosis" - "Riding In Your Slipstream"
I have never seen someone sing with such passion and emptiness. He is like a reed through which the song blows, and yet he is present in every slow syllable of its passing. When it has fully passed, he takes a deep bow and returns to stillness, just himself, surrounded by the exquisite musicians that share the stage with him. Though he was obviously the master, they all stayed with him on the journey through each song, and every part was played with such precision and care that it took my breath away...

Blog - "Beautiful Horizons" - "Bird on a wire"
Incredibly moving, brilliant performance with a wonderful ensemble. The veteran wordslinger is a wonder - at 75. If you get a chance to catch any show in his current tour, jump!...

Blog - "New and Used Records" - "Concert Review: Leonard Cohen at the Paramount, Oakland, CA 4/15/09"
There are few greater moments in music than having the opportunity to hear some of the greatest lyrics ever composed straight from the songwriter's mouth...

Blog - "The Sea Within" - "it was the hat, afterall"
Last night, I saw Leonard Cohen live. This was probably one of the best concerts I had ever been to...

Blog - "Susan Browne" - "LEONARD COHEN, THAT'S HOW THE LIGHT GETS IN"
I saw Leonard Cohen last night, master of duende. Out of all the celebrities in the world, I'd love to hang out drinking wine with Leonard. My husband and the friends we shared the evening with agreed. One of the best nights of our lives...

Discuss the tour and read fan reviews on The Leonard Cohen Forum and in French on the Leonard Cohen Forum (French site).

Indio, California

Set List - April 17, 2009

Per friscogrl on The Leonard Cohen Forum

Dance Me To The End Of Love
The Future
Ain't No Cure For Love
Bird On The Wire
Everybody Knows
Who By Fire
First We Take Manhattan
Hallelujah
I'm Your Man
Democracy

Indio, California

Leonard Cohen Dazzles the Coachella Desert

Spinner - April 18, 2009 by Benjy Eisen (Photos: REUTERS/Mario Anzuoni (UNITED STATES ENTERTAINMENT) and Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images)

Seeing Leonard Cohen in the desert one wonders if they're just seeing a messianic mirage. In fact, his set on Friday night at Coachella was not unlike going to church -- a notion driven home by the fact that the notoriously chatty crowd remained absolutely silent during Cohen's one-hour set except for 'Hallelujah,' during which everyone threw their arms in the air and sang in unison. A cathartic moment during a set full of them as Cohen sang one essential hit after another, including 'Bird on a Wire,' 'I'm Your Man' and 'Everybody Knows.'

Cohen, 74, looked frail but didn't act that way as he delivered every verse with the same diction and conviction as the "ladies man" he was in the '60s. He referred to the audience as "friends," thanking them repeatedly and taking his hat off between songs in gesture of respect. Well, our hats off to you, Mr. Cohen.

Indio, California

Coachella 2009: Two lions in winter -- Leonard Cohen and Morrissey

Los Angeles Times - April 18, 2009 by Margaret Wappler

Tonight, Coachella has brought us two wise men who know how to reach the heavenly center of sorrow and the sorrowful center of heaven. Leonard Cohen courted a dedicated crowd at the Outdoor Theater just past sunset, followed by an ever-dapper, if put-upon, Morrissey on the Main Stage. Both encountered the problem of sound bleeding in from other areas of the field but approached it in different ways. More importantly, both aired their versions of aged grace.

Leonard Cohen has pared down his multi-hour show that recently aired at L.A. Live into a relatively lean hour of almost nonstop "hits," if Cohen can be said to possess such worldly possessions. Stepping into his crowd felt like stepping into a foreign country, intimate and already bonded by their fierce adoration of their patron saint. "Dance Me to the End of Love" set the tone, followed by a slow but hard-bitten "Bird on a Wire"; the Webb sisters' sugar-water-sweet backup harmonies coated Cohen's grizzly incantations.

The ghost of the Chelsea Hotel certainly had his grip on the crowd, but bothersome sound bleed-in stole some of the magic. The sound for his set should have been turned up, but Cohen didn't seem to notice or mind one way or another, his Buddhist spirit lost in the gloaming of his songs. "Everybody Knows" received a spooky Spanish guitar intro; "First We Take Manhattan" was goosed up with organ-like keys. But the real ethereal beauty of his show was "Hallelujah" -- for every chorus, gold lights bathed the audience members, who lifted their hands to receive the power. It was good to see Cohen persevere and recapture his full grandeur...

Indio, California

Leonard Cohen delivers triumphant set at Coachella Festival

NME - April 18, 2009

Leonard Cohen tipped his hat to the audience as he took the Outdoor Stage at the Coachella Festival today (April 17) to give one of his first US performances in 15 years.

The legendary singer-songwriter began his very first song on his knees, winning over the huge crowd with his affecting baritone and earnest delivery.

He was joined on stage by a full band as well as three female backup singers.

Despite delivering the songs at fairly low volume, the crowd paid rapt attention to his every word as he sang classic songs including 'Dance Me To The End Of Love', 'Everybody Knows' and 'Hallelujah', clapping and cheering loudly in all the right places.

Cohen said hardly a word throughout his triumphant set, aside from politely thanking the crowd for their "kind attention".

Indio, California

Coachella 2009 Wrapup - Friday

Mother Jones - April 18, 2009 by Party Ben

...As the sun goes behind the mountains, a huge crowd has assembled at the side stage to see 74-year-old singer Leonard Cohen. I know he's a legend and has unquestionable hipster cachet, but this is crazy:—scrappy-looking kids with punk haircuts are shoving past me to get better spots. Cohen emerges onto the stage with his nicely-dressed band, himself in a black suit, white shirt, cheeky bolo tie, and a little fedora, which he doffs for the crowd. The band starts up, quietly, but the other stages have gone silent out of respect, and the sound is clear as a bell. Cohen drops on one knee to sing the opening bars of "Dance Me to the End of Love." His voice starts off a little wobbly, and at one point he seems to fumble a line, but in the chorus he dives for the low notes with gusto, his rich basso making the girls scream. As he continues, his confidence only seems to grow, and he picks rhythms in the repeating choruses that intertwine with the backup singers, surprising counterpoints to the straightforward melody already established. He's on his knees again, and back up again, and I realize I can't do that now, and I'm half this guy's age. "I need to see you naked," he sings, and the crowd screams louder...

Indio, California

Paul McCartney Pays Tribute to Lost Beatles, Plus Cohen and Morrissey Impress at Coachella

Rolling Stone - April 18, 2009 by Steve Appleford

...Leonard Cohen’s early evening set was one of Friday’s most anticipated events, with a huge crowd spread across the field and chants of “Leonard! Leonard!”for the esteemed 74-year-old singer-songwriter, currently performing his first U.S. concerts in 15 years. He jogged to the stage and tipped his fedora with a smile before kneeling beside acoustic guitarist Javier Mas to sing “Dance Me to the End of Love” in a deep, romantic growl. The sound of Cohen’s band was elegant and rich, with unrushed soloing and cascading melody within “Ain’t No Cure for Love” and the bleak “Everybody Knows"...

Indio, California

Coachella ‘09: Leonard Cohen stuns with ‘Hallelujah’ … Moz sickened by meat … Franz Ferdinand, Silversun Pickups rock

Orange County Register - April 18, 2009 by Ben Wener

...My personal high, however, I suspect is an encounter held in equally high regard by thousands more. The incredible version of “Hallelujah,” with which Leonard Cohen stunned the already rapt crowd before him, is a Coachella moment like no other. Along with McCartney’s performance in total, it will undoubtedly turn up in best-ever talk for years to come.

Running late and long -– and so what? -– Cohen mesmerized the international assemblage at the Outdoor Theatre as the last rays of sunlight dipped behind the crest line, leaving the sky hazy purple and all those statuesque palm trees illuminated. He played plenty else -– “Dance Me to the End of Love” and “The Future” to open again, that bluesy “Bird on a Wire,” biting takes on “Everybody Knows” and “First We Take Manhattan,” “I’m Your Man” and “Democracy” pulling into the finish line.

It was a rare sight to behold, people hanging on his every word as far back as the snack stands, when not even Conor or M. Ward drew half as big an audience. I consider Cohen’s Nokia opener last week to be among the very greatest concert-going experiences of my life, and I worried that the elements here would work against him; the setting could easily be too cacophonous for the intense quietude of his poetry.

Silly me. The guy had ’em eating out of the palm of his hand.

What an unusual, amazing development that 10 years on, the greatest moments at the coolest, hippest festival on the planet would come from two of the oldest men still making music today. (As to the question of whether Cohen is the oldest ever at Coachella: I think Willie Nelson was the same age, 74, when he was here.) ...

Indio, California

Coachella: On Leonard Cohen, "Hallelujah," and Sunset

LA Weekly - April 18, 2009 by Randall Roberts (Photos: Timothy Norris)

It's always amazing to me when lyrics and other sounds beget tears, when a thought in someone's head transmitted from his neurons to his vocal chords (which propel sound waves through the open desert air) land on the thousands of eardrums awaiting the message, whatever it may be, with hope and openness. That thought vibrates in heads, sends a stereo feed to the brain via billions more neurons. They wend through our heads until aligned into some sort of mysterious order: "It goes like this/The fourth, the fifth/The minor fall, the major lift," our baffled brains composing "Hallelujah."

Next thing you know, our eyes start to get foggy. "Your faith was strong but you needed proof/You saw her bathing on the roof/Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you" as the transmitted Leonard Cohen message drifts across the Coachella pitch. Eyes now watery. "She tied you to a kitchen chair/She broke your throne, and she cut your hair/And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah." The sting of salt overtakes you. That graceful melody. The eyelids can't contain the rising water, the dam's about to burst. The thin line between joy and sorrow is breached, and the tear rolls down your cheek. "Hallelujah ... Hallelujah ... Hallelujah ... Hallelujah."

Coachella, 8:15 p.m. We're within inches of the perfect distance from the moon, and Leonard Cohen, having already spoke of seeing The Future (it's murder), of stuff that "Everybody Knows" (such as: "Everybody got this broken feeling/Like their father or their dog just died"), has started playing his breakout hit of Christmas 2008, "Hallelujah," which has rumbled in the collective unconscious for fifteen years, ever since Jeff Buckley crafted a perfect interpretation on Grace. Since then, the song, less known to casual Cohen fans than "Bird on a Wire," "Suzanne," and "Famous Blue Raincoat," has emerged as a classic. Rufus Wainwright did another perfect rendition that drew out the melody and grace.

Last night Cohen's tattered vocal cords and smoke-stained throat delivered "Hallelujah" as only the creator of the song could. The singer, who wrote the song 25 years ago, phrased it with a casual consideration, each line a sentence to be accepted, each a foundation that the next stanza builds atop, going up and up into the heavens like a polo-field Tower of Babel. The difference is, by the end of the song, we were all standing at the top of the Tower singing "hallelujah" with the creator.

Tears falling to the ground. A couple next to me weeping, a sniffle in the profound silence that this respectful audience has offered the man in the perfect black suit and the perfect fedora:

I did my best, it wasn't much
I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch
I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool you
And even though
It all went wrong
I'll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah

Sunset. The light fading, and the people repeating over and over, "hallelujah." The Lord of Song, if there is such a thing, better be listening. You can maybe see it in the sky. In the soft breeze that carries Cohen's thoughts into our heads, builds a tunnel to our tear ducts, and sets the act in motion. Pure beauty. Hallelujah.

Indio, California

Live Review: Coachella, Day 1

LiveDaily - April 18, 2009 by Jim Harrington

...McCartney will turn 67 in June, but he was not the most senior of citizens to provide a sensational set on this night. A few hours earlier, Leonard Cohen [ tickets ], 74, turned in a thrilling hour-long gig that included such numbers as "Dance Me to the End of Love," "Ain't No Cure for Love," "Bird on a Wire" and "Everybody Knows."

Cohen isn't in McCartney's league when it comes to record sales--not by a long shot--but he was just as big a drawing card for many concert-goers at this year's Coachella. That's because he's widely considered to be one of the greatest songwriters of all time--on par, in many eyes, with Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson and, yes, even McCartney--and he rarely tours. His current North American trek is his first in some 15 years.

There was something incongruent about seeing this polished pop poet, dressed as always in a sharp suit with a fedora hat covering his white hair, perform an open-air set in the middle of the desert, against a backdrop of tall palm trees. Yet, it definitely worked, thanks to his husky one-of-a-kind baritone voice, superb band and a songbook that just seems to get better, and more moving, as the years progress...

Indio, California

Photos by Joey Maloney/LAist.com

LAist - April 18, 2009

Indio, California

The Best & Worst from Coachella -- Day 1

Spin Magazine - April 18, 2009

Leonard Cohen, Franz Ferdinand, Paul McCartney, and more -- SPIN recaps all the mayhem in the California desert.

THE BEST:

Best Set: Leonard Cohen
How fitting that Leonard Cohen's performance of "Hallelujah," his most famous song, would still come as a glorious shock. After all, that's what the melody does: It seeps into your heart and lies dormant -- then erupts as pure emotion. The set was tenderly elegant (brocade rugs and red velvet chairs!), but nothing could distract from Cohen, 75 and beaming, tipping his fedora to a misty-eyed crowd of all ages and roaming the stage like Sinatra, depthless baritone still in terrific form. Artists one-third his age couldn't have culled the ferocity of "First We Take Manhattan" or the heartrending, unadorned lament of "Everybody Knows." And still, when the keys kicked up the first strains of "Hallelujah," those ascending notes led a seismic reaction -- offstage, as an ecstatic audience sang every word back in hymnal, and onstage, where Cohen removed his hat and peered out into audience with reverent, brimming tears. -- Stacey Anderson

Indio, California

Coachella 2009, Friday: Leonard Cohen, Paul McCartney, M. Ward, Morrissey, The Hold Steady and more

Paste Magazine - April 20, 2009 by Travis Woods

Leonard Cohen (7:45 p.m., Outdoor Theatre)
In what soon coalesced into the finest performance of the day, legendary singer Leonard Cohen began his marathon set with "Dance Me to the End of Love," a track filled with layered, cascading waves of lovely background vocals and gypsy folk, his weathered baritone providing a solemn soundtrack as the sun-bloodied sky behind him dramatically slipped into an darkness. Considering who was on stage, it was a fitting visual metaphor for the stark contrast between the day's eclectic selection of rock and Cohen's brand of poetic, moving folk. Backed by an adept nine-piece band, Cohen gently but authoritatively flowed from one song to the next, easily straddling an oeuvre that spans over 40 years, deftly revisiting late-period winners (such as the propulsive, throat-scratched doom of 1993's "The Future") just as easily as he resurrected his devastating earlier work (most notably, the wistful sorrow of "Bird on a Wire"). By the time his age-ravaged voice led all through a floodlit singalong of the cold and broken "Hallelujah," Cohen had single-handedly guided his audience through what may have been the most emotionally cathartic performance of the entire weekend.

Indio, California

Blogs, Photos and Other Fan Reports

Blog - "Flicker - kirstiecat" - "Leonard Cohen"
Leonard Cohen was the reason why I flew to Coachella this year...

Blog - "P.S. A Column On Things" - "Neal Vitale: Day One In The Desert"
I was worried that the soft rock arrangements and Cohen's croak would be offputting. But I shouldn't have been - he turned in a magical, enchanting set. Cohen radiated warmth, humility, and engagement, and the crowd loved him...

Photos By Audree - Coachella 2009 Festival Photo Gallery: Leonard Cohen

Blog - "Tales from the Lake Shore" - "The Coachella Non-Wrap-Up"
I expected greatness, but given my high expectations, I felt like there was a strong possibility I would be let down. Could any performer live up to the expectations I had for this particular set? Leonard Cohen could...

Blog - "Buzz Bands" - "Coachella: An hour with Leonard Cohen"
[W]hen Cohen and his nine-piece ensemble started playing on Friday, it was as if the entire desert breathed a sigh of relief...

Discuss the tour and read fan reviews on The Leonard Cohen Forum and in French on the Leonard Cohen Forum (French site).

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