While Timothy Finn’s Review: Leonard Cohen at Back to Rockville, the music blog for the Kansas City Star, is a tad uneven in its coverage of The Leonard Cohen November 9, 2009 Kansas City Concert, this thoughtful and engaging post does have its moments and is well worth reading in its entirety. A few choice excerpts follow:
Like some upper-level graduate course, this show came with some prereqiusites: You needed to know the music of Leonard Cohen, and the more intimately the better. You also needed to appreciate his singing voice, which, these days, comes from somewhere between Barry Whites’ and a lighter shade of Darth Vader’s.
Cohen is 75, but he sang with equal sincerity and indifference about love and sodomy, war and transcendence, life and death.
Sharon Robinson on “Boogie Street,” … gave the song an Everything But the Girl vibe.
His audience remained in a suspended state of reverence and glee all night. He repaid them with humility, gratitude and humor. Before “Chelsea Hotel #2,” he told a story about escaping to Miami about 40 years ago: “I was taking a vacation from deep authenticity,” he deadpanned.
I suppose some moments were better than others, but this show was a lot like the Robert Plant/Alison Krauss “Raising Sand” show out at Starlight last year: relentless in how good it was.
He gave us a new song, one that’s (apparently) titled “The Other Blues Song” (or “Feels So Good”). It’s a song about getting over heartache, about feeling better about loving someone less. The crowd applauded several lines that everyone related to, especially: ”I feel like they tore away my blindfold and said, ‘We’re gonna let this prisoner live’ …”
The complete piece by Timothy Finn can be found at Review: Leonard Cohen
Credit Due
The photo atop this post is also from Review: Leonard Cohen and was taken by Chris Oberholtz.
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