Leonard Cohen: Around the world in 80 years

Leonard Cohen celebrates his milestone birthday by releasing a new album today, writes Ed Power

HE IS a riddle wrapped in an enigma beneath a battered fedora. This week, as Leonard Cohen contemplates being 80 (yesterday was his birthday), he releases his 13th studio album, Popular Problems. For an artist of such vintage, it is a remarkably rounded, compelling work — a worthwhile addition to one of the most storied canons in pop.

Relayed in Cohen’s subterranean croon, the lyrics are obsessed with mortality. Cohen is vividly aware that, in his ninth decade, life does not have many more surprises, but his attitude is humour and laconic resignation. He doesn’t so much laugh in the face of death as shrug good naturedly: ‘What’s the point’, he seems to say, ‘of binding yourself in knots? What happens happens’.