Thanks for the Dance

This is a thrilling conclusion to an incredible, peerless career, and it just so happens to be one of the greatest posthumous albums of all time.

The result is this beautiful posthumous collection. His songwriter son Adam has assembled a stellar cast of musicians, such as Daniel Lanois, Jennifer Warnes and Spanish guitarist Javier Mas, to do justice to the unfinished home recordings.

Leonard Cohen is back with a posthumous album as great as any from the late period of his considerable canon. And that is very great indeed.

“Thanks for the Dance” isn’t really so much a last will and testament, then, as a hell of a heaven-bound balance sheet.

A transcendental eloquence comes out in this unique artefact. What we have is a series of sketches, providing a fitting closing statement to his legacy as a series of ideas strewn together, much like his life beginning as a poet. ... Thanks For The Dance stands out as an emblem of the artist’s life work. Dancing between satire, melancholy and tenderness, his final words stand out as the mark of a worldview drawn from a life lived in the shadow of his own genius.

Each of the nine songs and poems that comprise Thanks for the Dance is a self-contained, coherent piece of art that perfectly fits in the Cohen canon, making it a worthwhile listening experience and a poignant farewell from one of music’s greatest and most eloquent writers.

Cohen’s voice is at the centre of all the songs – present and passionate, the unmistakable deep rasp even better matching his searching weariness the older he got. And it’s all here, that never-duplicated mix of sex and death, the sacred and the profane.

Gathered from scraps of the You Want It Darker sessions and cobbled together with contributions from Beck, Feist, Bryce Dessner of the National, and more, it’s a worthy postscript to Cohen’s farewell, another clear-eyed look at the inevitability of death.

Thanks for the Dance is a surprise, a sort of séance as shiva, a magnificent parting shot that’s also that exceptionally rare thing — a posthumous work as alive, challenging, and essential as anything issued in the artist’s lifetime.

For this project Ben Cohen has taken the vocal outtakes and sketches and has crafted wonderfully rich and vibrant music around them. Is it what Leonard would have wanted? We’ll never know, but it doesn’t sound out of place in his rich canon of work, which is the important thing. Long-term fans will revel in another chance to lap up his wisdom and that captivated audiences for almost 50 years.

Thanks for the Dance might not seem to be a major statement at first glance, but it's a missive that carries startling power, and it's clearly not built from scraps and leftovers, but assembled with a love that's equal to the knowledge Cohen put into it. This adds more documentation to the wholly unexpected and satisfying final act of a truly great songwriter, and it deserves your attention.

A fitting culmination of the run that began with Old Ideas in 2012. [Jan 2020, p.88]

It’s a beautiful, fitting send off to one of music’s finest lyricists and an excellent postscript to an incredible career.

More than half a century since Cohen proved himself to be someone worth listening to. Thanks for the Dance, Cohen’s fifteenth and potentially final studio album, shows that little has changed in that regard. Whether he’s singing about sex or death, or whatever else, Cohen’s voice remains indispensable.

Posthumous albums tend to sound cobbled together, compromised, missing that vital spark, but this loving father-son dialogue has produced a worthy epilogue to one of music's greatest songbooks. [Jan 2020, p.115]

Thanks for the Dance is a fitting goodbye to a figure who, whether they've been in your life for one day, one year or a lifetime, made a tremendous impact on their craft. A beautiful reprise to a song of love or hate. The pleasure was all ours, Leonard.

Although the fear was that Adam would be spreading his father’s legacy too thin, each track has the weight of a completed thought, not a sketch bulked out.

Thankfully this album doesn’t fall into the trap of posthumous records that feel like they’re shamelessly re-animating a corpse and therefore should have been left on the cutting room floor. Instead, this collection of tender songs finds Cohen at his most calm and reflective.

There is really not much to separate this from the late-period, post-millennial albums that Cohen started churning out to ease financial issues, and those records maintained an imposingly high standard.

Thanks For The Dance has the intimacy that characterised Songs Of Leonard Cohen and Songs From A Room half a century ago, only rarely making the listener conscious of the resources at Adam Cohen's command. [Jan 2020, p.14]

While there's nothing radically off-blueprint in the finished article, it's obvious that every note has been pored over with love and respect. [Jan 2019, p.88]

It’s still hard to truly get Leonard Cohen right, and Thanks for the Dance sadly sounds like an easy approximation of his sound.

The reverence is understandable, but you’re left wondering if it stymied bolder invention.