The New Yorker Streams Song From Leonard Cohen’s New Album

It’s actually a perfect fit: The New Yorker and Leonard Cohen; a venerable magazine with a long-standing interest in poetry, and a songwriter who was a published poet long before he wrote his first song. Starting today, The New Yorker streams the opening song from Cohen’s forthcoming album, “Old Ideas.”

Leonard Cohen's new album, "Old Ideas," is due Jan. 31 on Columbia.

The song, “Going Home,” is a subtly playful meditation on inevitability: of aging, of duty and, to get all abstract about it, a lightening of being. Cohen purrs out the lyrics in a voice grown deeper and richer, and you can almost see the hint of a smile flickering about the corners of his mouth when he sings, “I’d love to speak to Leonard/He’s a sportsman and a shepherd/He’s a lazy bastard living in a suit.”

In addition to streaming the song here, The New Yorker is publishing the lyrics as a poem in its Jan. 23 issue (on newsstands today, a press release informs us).

“Old Ideas,” Cohen’s 12th studio album in a career stretching to 1967, is due Jan. 31 on Columbia. Listen here to “Show Me the Place,” another song from the album.