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When the air turns cold and the daylight hours diminish, I think of when I became familiar with Leonard Cohen's the Future. One December, my mother, whose love of unconventional, eclectic music I inherited, used Christmas money from my grandparents to expand her CD collection, including the purchase of the Future, an album from which the two best songs of her adored Natural Born Killers soundtrack were taken. I gave the album a few trial listens, as I had always expanded my tastes by waltzing through Mom's tape and CD collection.
The Future, however, was much different from the Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin I picked-up from her. To a high school student whose favorite bands were mostly FM radio staples, Cohen sounded dark, sober and distant. The Future's simplistic arrangements, slow pace and Cohen's gritty, tuneless voice made the Future a failure on the scale that I rated Led Zeppelin IV and Hot Rocks as classics. Yet, the brooding articulateness of the album was something I slowly found to be spell-binding. Lines such as "Things are going to slide/Slide in all directions/Won't be nothing/Nothing you can measure anymore/The blizzard, the blizzard of the world/Has crossed the threshold/And it has overturned/The order of the soul," had both an immediate impact and an abstraction and complexity about them that made the lyrics mysterious and affecting after several listens, even after memorization. Songs of love and of anger I had heard but the precise lyrics of Cohen, speaking of that disappointed feeling of one who loosens-up in celebration and struggles to find a hand to hold ("Closing Time"), of desperate patience ("Waiting for the Miracle") and intellectualized hope ("Deocracy") were fresh, exotic and intriguing to me