On this day in 2014, Leonard Cohen released Popular Problems two days after turning 80
On Sept. 23, 2014, Leonard Cohen was two days past his 80th birthday when Popular Problems arrived. It was his 13th studio album, nine songs produced by Patrick Leonard and released by Columbia Records during a period in which Cohen had returned to concert stages around the world and, with 2012’s Old Ideas, to recording new material.
The timing made Cohen’s age difficult to ignore, although he did not treat the album as an 80th-birthday project. At a New York listening event five days before its release, he called the timing a “happy accident” and said his family generally ignored birthdays. By then, Cohen was also talking publicly about songs still in progress and another album already taking form.
Popular Problems opens with “Slow,” a song that plays with age and pace in Cohen’s familiar dry register. Across the album, he returned to subjects that had run through his work for decades, including religion, war, intimacy and mortality, while blues and gospel influences run through Patrick Leonard’s arrangements.
Leonard had become one of Cohen’s central collaborators during this period. Speaking at a Canadian Consulate event in Los Angeles shortly before the album’s release, Cohen credited him with bringing an abundance of musical ideas to their work together. Cohen continued revising the words and, in some cases, brought material to the sessions that had been developing for years.
“A Street,” for example, had appeared as a poem in The New Yorker in 2009. Cohen said during the 2014 promotional period that he had been working on the piece since shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks. He also described rewriting “Born in Chains” repeatedly over decades as his thinking about its religious ideas changed.
The album followed an unusually active period in Cohen’s later career. He had returned to touring in 2008 and continued performing internationally through 2013. Old Ideas, released in January 2012, had already returned him to the studio-album cycle, and by the time Popular Problems appeared he was continuing to write rather than treating the record as a closing statement.
The response in Canada was immediate. Popular Problems debuted at No. 1 on Nielsen SoundScan’s Canadian Top 200 Albums chart. Music Canada certified it Gold on Oct. 6, less than two weeks after its release, and Platinum on Jan. 19, 2015.
The album then carried Cohen into the 2015 JUNO Awards with four nominations: Album of the Year, Artist of the Year, Adult Alternative Album of the Year and the fan-choice category. At the March ceremony in Hamilton, Popular Problems won Album of the Year. The Weeknd won Artist of the Year, while Bahamas took Adult Alternative Album of the Year.
By then, Cohen’s Canadian career stretched back nearly six decades. Born in Montreal on Sept. 21, 1934, he published his first poetry collection, Let Us Compare Mythologies, in 1956. His novels The Favourite Game and Beautiful Losers appeared before his first Columbia album, Songs of Leonard Cohen, was released in 1967. He entered the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 1991, the same year he was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada, and was promoted to Companion in 2002.
At 80, Cohen was still adding new work to that record. A new studio album had reached No. 1 in Canada and would go on to win the country’s Album of the Year JUNO, while Cohen was already discussing the songs that might follow it.
They did. His 14th studio album, You Want It Darker, was released on Oct. 21, 2016, produced by his son Adam Cohen. Leonard Cohen died on Nov. 7, 2016, at 82.
Another album followed after his death. Adam Cohen and other musicians completed Thanks for the Dance from vocal recordings and musical sketches Leonard Cohen had left behind after asking his son to finish the work.
Popular Problems ends with “You Got Me Singing.” Two years after its Sept. 23, 2014 release, there was still another Leonard Cohen album to come.
