Album Review : Leonard Cohen - Dear Heather (2004)
In 2002, Sony BMG released The Essential Leonard Cohen, a thirty-one songs collection that contains more or less every Leonard Cohen song that you need to hear. At least every song he’s remembered by. He became an icon then and couldn’t do wrong anymore. His legacy was established. If you hated Leonard Cohen, you were a philistine. If his later work if tragically overlooked because of this collection, it’s a good thing when it comes to Dear Heather.
I know Death of a Ladies Man is widely considered to be Leonard Cohen’s worst album, but I think Dear Heather is slightly worse. The former is more weird than unlistenable, partly because it is Phil Spector’s perception of who Leonard Cohen is and not Cohen himself writing and creating the material. Dear Heather is… uh, uninspired? For lack of a better word. It’s not boring of stupid. It just kind of purposelessly floats into your eardrums and out.
There are very little memorable songs on it. The Letters was my favorite and the one most often remembered from Dear Heather. It’s a very old school song written on a bare harpsichord melody. Cohen and his long-time collaborator Sharon Robinson passionately sing about unanswered letters and tragedy falling on deaf ears. It is successful because Cohen only gives one side of the story on it, giving his words inherent drama that he never needs to justify.
The barest songs on Dear Heather are the most listenable because it leaves Leonard Cohen the breathing room to do what he does best. Undertow is one of these songs that manage to make saxophone not corny. His collaborator (and I think lover by then) Anjani Thomas wonderfully takes the lead on it. Nightingale is cute, but very unlike what Cohen usually does. It almost sounds like a cover of some weird, obscure hippy band. It reeks of patchouli oil a little.
Beyond the three songs named above, Dear Heather is… kind of hopelessly bland? There are four songs he didn’t write, including a live cover of Tennessee Waltz and an Anglo version of Un Canadien Errant, a song no one really liked except Cohen himself. Villanelle For Our Time is more of a poem than an actual song. Dear Heather is not the only album that feels like this, but it is the one most guilty of feeling like a mid-afternoon jam session.
It sounds like a bunch of friends having fun together and not giving a flying fuck whether the material is good or not… and most often it is not. Unfortunately.
Don’t get me wrong, Death of a Ladies Man is not great. But there’s a reason why we remember it forty years after the fact and that Dear Heather fell into oblivion not even two decades after its release. I could still sing melodies from the former. But I can’t do it with this one and I’ve gave it a dozen of spins since last week. I love Leonard Cohen. I wouldn’t have reviewed eleven albums of his if I didn’t. But Dear Heather is not good. It’s his worst release.
6.2/10
