Ten New Songs | ||||
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Studio album by | ||||
Released | October 9, 2001 | |||
Recorded | late 1999 – mid 2001 mixed at Still Life Studios, [1] Los Angeles; Small Mercies studio, [2] Hollywood | |||
Genre | Contemporary folk, soft rock | |||
Length | 52:41 | |||
Label | Columbia | |||
Producer | Sharon Robinson | |||
Leonard Cohen chronology | ||||
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Ten New Songs is Leonard Cohen's tenth studio album, released in 2001. His first album in 9 years, Ten New Songs was co-written and produced by Sharon Robinson in Cohen's and Robinson's home studios in Los Angeles. The album peaked at No. 143 on the Billboard 200, No. 4 in Canada (where it went platinum), No. 1 in Poland [3] (where it went platinum) and No. 1 in Norway.
After successfully touring behind the award-winning album The Future , Cohen was awarded a Governor General's Performance Arts Award for his contribution to Canadian music in 1993 and was the subject of an hour-long CBC Radio retrospective called The Gospel According to Leonard Cohen. Cohen also published a collection of poems and songs called Stranger Music and released his second live album Cohen Live in 1994.
That same year, Cohen unexpectedly retreated to the Mt. Baldy Zen Center near Los Angeles to spend time with his Zen Master Joshu Sasaki, or Roshi, a sabbatical that would last five years. In 2001 the singer explained to Mojo 's Sylvie Simmons, "Well, I was always going off the deep end, so it was no radical departure. When I finished my tour in '93 I was approaching the age of 60 and my old friend and teacher Roshi was approaching the age of 90, and I thought it would be the right moment to spend some more time with him...I wasn't looking for a new religion or another list of dogma."
Cohen has stated in numerous interviews that throughout the success of the I'm Your Man and The Future tours, he remained desperately unhappy; in the book Leonard Cohen: A Remarkable Life, biographer Anthony Reynolds quotes the singer: "I'd been drinking three bottles of wine a night on the tour and one of the things I was looking for was a rest...I didn't know what else to do."
Interest in Cohen only grew, however, with a tribute album called Tower of Song being released in 1995. According to Ira Nadel's 1996 Cohen memoir Various Positions: A Life of Leonard Cohen, Cohen flirted with the idea of recording an album of 14 short songs during this period, but eventually scrapped the project. (One song, "Never Any Good," would turn up on the 1997 release More Best of Leonard Cohen .) In June 1999, Cohen returned to his L.A. duplex to live with his daughter and began collaborating with Sharon Robinson (co-writer of "Everybody Knows" and "Waiting for the Miracle") on what would become Ten New Songs.
Robinson produced, co-arranged, co-wrote and sang on Ten New Songs, making it a true collaboration. Cohen gave Robinson some lyrics he had written and she built the music around them. Cohen was so impressed with Robinson's demos that she ended up singing all the songs with him, including several leads. "At his insistence", Robinson clarified to Mojo's Sylvie Simmons. "It's ironic, isn't it, that the man who's got this voice that women swoon over just wants to hide it away?" The album was recorded by Robinson and Cohen in near isolation, with Leanne Ungar engineering and Bob Metzger adding guitar to the LP's first single, "In My Secret Life". In 2010, Robinson spoke about the recording with Cohen biographer Anthony Reynolds:
Robinson also divulged to Reynolds that most of the album was recorded in her three-car garage that was adjoined to her house (which she had converted to a studio) and that she would take the raw audio on a portable hard drive to Cohen's converted studio above his garage.
The album was Cohen's first to be recorded completely digitally. "There's a sense of relaxation in the tunes that comes through", Cohen told Nick Patton Walsh of The Observer in 2001. "There's a kind of pulse, an invitation to get into it - a groove."
Several of the tracks on Ten New Songs existed in some form or another long before they appeared on the album; Cohen first revealed he was working on a new song called "My Secret Life" in 1988, [4] and, in 1995, Melinda Newman of Billboard reported that two tracks, "My Secret Life" and "A Thousand Kisses Deep", were "close to completion... I’d like to have a very intimate kind of record, of a very different nature than actual songs."
"In My Secret Life", a song that wound up being an ode to unrequited love, became the album's first single with an accompanying music video that was filmed in Montreal at Habitat 67. Other songs, such as "Alexandra Leaving" (based on "The God Abandons Antony", also translated as "The God Forsakes Antony", a poem by Constantine P. Cavafy, published in 1911) and "You Have Loved Enough", imply departures of some sort or another.
Ten New Songs was remastered and reissued on vinyl by the Netherlands label Music On Vinyl [5] in 2009. [6]
Aggregate scores | |
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Source | Rating |
Metacritic | 76/100 [7] |
Review scores | |
Source | Rating |
AllMusic | [8] |
Blender | [9] |
Entertainment Weekly | A− [10] |
The Guardian | [11] |
NME | 7/10 [12] |
Pitchfork | 8.0/10 [13] |
Q | [14] |
The Rolling Stone Album Guide | [15] |
Uncut | [16] |
The Village Voice | A− [17] |
In the October 2001 Rolling Stone review of the album, Steven Chean stated, "Ten New Songs manages to sustain loss's fragile beauty like never before and might just be the Cohen's most exquisite ode yet to the midnight hour." [18] Uncut deemed it "worth the wait." Playboy opined: "Although the tones of these odes and meditations is mournful, at the age of 67 Cohen's pessimism about the human condition is tempered with reconciliation. He'll never be cheerful, but a Zen-like serenity pervades every song."
Eric Burdon, Katie Melua, Till Brönner and Edo Zanki have recorded cover version's of "In My Secret Life". Luciana Souza recorded a version of "Here It Is" on her album The New Bossa Nova. Jonathan Richman recorded a version of "Here It Is" for his 2008 album Because Her Beauty Is Raw & Wild.
"A Thousand Kisses Deep" was used in the movie The Good Thief , the 2010 French movie Le bruit des glaçons , and in Season 3 of the TV Series Veronica Mars . It was also covered by Chris Botti in his album of the same name in 2003, and by Till Brönner and Dieter Ilg on their album Nightfall in 2018.
"That Don't Make It Junk" was covered live by Widespread Panic three times in 2011. [19] "Alexandra Leaving" was covered by Canadian singer Patricia O'Callaghan on her fifth solo album, Matador: The Songs of Leonard Cohen, in late 2011. It has also been covered by Anne Hills and Allan Olsen. "The Land of Plenty" was used in the 2004 movie Land of Plenty directed by Wim Wenders. German punk singer Nina Hagen covered "By the Rivers Dark" with German lyrics by Ton Steine Scherben-member Misha B. Schoeneberg as "Am dunklen Fluss" for the 2014 cover collection Poem - Leonard Cohen in deutscher Sprache. Molly Johnson covered "Boogie Street" on her 2018 album Meaning to Tell Ya. [20]
All tracks are written by Leonard Cohen and Sharon Robinson
No. | Title | Length |
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1. | "In My Secret Life" | 4:55 |
2. | "A Thousand Kisses Deep" | 6:29 |
3. | "That Don't Make It Junk" | 4:28 |
4. | "Here It Is" | 4:18 |
5. | "Love Itself" | 5:26 |
6. | "By the Rivers Dark" | 5:20 |
7. | "Alexandra Leaving" (based on "The God Abandons Antony", a poem by Constantine P. Cavafy) | 5:25 |
8. | "You Have Loved Enough" | 5:41 |
9. | "Boogie Street" | 6:04 |
10. | "The Land of Plenty" | 4:35 |
Total length: | 52:41 |
Weekly charts
| Year-end charts
|
Region | Certification | Certified units/sales |
---|---|---|
Denmark (IFPI Danmark) [43] | Platinum | 50,000^ |
Canada (Music Canada) [44] | Gold | 50,000^ |
France (SNEP) [45] | Gold | 100,000* |
Hungary (MAHASZ) [46] | Gold | |
Ireland (IRMA) [47] | Gold | 7,500^ |
Norway (IFPI Norway) [48] | Platinum | 50,000* |
Poland (ZPAV) [49] | Platinum | 100,000* |
Spain (PROMUSICAE) [50] | Gold | 50,000^ |
Sweden (GLF) [51] | Gold | 40,000^ |
Switzerland (IFPI Switzerland) [52] | Gold | 20,000^ |
United Kingdom (BPI) [53] | Gold | 100,000‡ |
* Sales figures based on certification alone. |
One Wild Night Live 1985–2001 is the first live album by the American rock band Bon Jovi, released on May 22, 2001. The album includes live covers of Neil Young's "Rockin' in the Free World" and performance of the Boomtown Rats' "I Don't Like Mondays", with a guest appearance by their lead singer Bob Geldof. The album charted at number 20 on the US Billboard 200 chart.
The Future is the ninth studio album by the Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, released in 1992. Almost an hour in length, it was Cohen's longest album up to that date. Both the fall of the Berlin Wall and the 1992 Los Angeles riots took place while Cohen was writing and recording the album, which expressed his sense of the world's turbulence. The album was recorded with a large cast of musicians and engineers in several different studios; the credits list almost 30 female singers. The album built on the success of Cohen's previous album, I'm Your Man, and garnered overwhelmingly positive reviews. The Future made the Top 40 in the UK album charts, went double platinum in Canada, and sold a quarter of a million copies in the U.S., which had previously been unenthusiastic about Cohen's albums.
Dear Heather is the 11th studio album by Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, released by Columbia Records in 2004. It was dedicated "in memory of Jack McClelland 1922-2004."
I'm Your Man is the eighth studio album by Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, released on February 2, 1988, by Columbia Records. The album marked Cohen's further move to a more modern sound, with many songs having a synthesizer-oriented production. It soon became the most successful studio album which Cohen had released in the US, and it reached number one in several European countries, transforming Cohen into a best-selling artist.
Various Positions is the seventh studio album by Leonard Cohen, released in December 1984. It marked not only his turn to a modern sound and use of synthesizers, but also, after the harmonies and backing vocals from Jennifer Warnes on the previous Recent Songs (1979), an even greater contribution from Warnes, who is credited with Cohen as vocalist on all of the tracks.
Whoa, Nelly! is the debut studio album by Canadian singer-songwriter Nelly Furtado, released in North America on October 24, 2000 by DreamWorks Records. Recording sessions for the album took place from 1999 to 2000. It peaked at number twenty-four on the US Billboard 200 chart, and received critical acclaim. It produced four singles: "I'm Like a Bird", "Turn Off the Light", "Shit on the Radio ", and "Hey, Man!". The album spent seventy-eight weeks on the Billboard 200, and hit double-platinum status in the US in January 2002.
"Hallelujah" is a song written by Canadian singer Leonard Cohen, originally released on his album Various Positions (1984). Achieving little initial success, the song found greater popular acclaim through a new version recorded by John Cale in 1991. Cale's version inspired a 1994 recording by Jeff Buckley that in 2004 was ranked number 259 on Rolling Stone's "the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time".
Riding with the King is a collaborative album by B.B. King and Eric Clapton that was released in 2000. It was their first collaborative album and won the 2001 Grammy Award for Best Traditional Blues Album. The album reached number one on Billboard's Top Blues Albums and was certified 2× Platinum in the United States. Riding with the King was also released on a DVD-Audio in higher resolution and with a 5.1 surround sound mix in 2000.
American rock band Bon Jovi has released 16 studio albums, three live albums, five compilation albums, five EPs, 66 singles, 14 video albums, and 71 music videos. Bon Jovi has sold over 130 million records worldwide, making them one of the best-selling bands of all time. As of 2018, the band has sold 21.8 million albums in the US Nielsen SoundScan era. Billboard ranked Bon Jovi as the 45th Greatest Artist of all time, achieving 6 No. 1 albums on the Billboard 200 & 4 No. 1 hits on the Billboard Hot 100. According to Recording Industry Association of America, Bon Jovi has sold 34.5 million albums in the United States.
Irish boy band Westlife have released twelve studio albums, sixteen video albums, one live album, three karaoke albums, thirty-eight singles, twenty-one promotional singles, nine compilation albums and fifty-four music videos. Formed on 3 July 1998, the group was made up of singers Nicky Byrne, Kian Egan, Mark Feehily, Shane Filan, and Brian McFadden. The band was signed under Simon Cowell, Clive Davis, and Jordan Jay and under record labels' BMG, S Records, Arista Records, Sony BMG, Syco Music, Sony Music Entertainment and RCA Records from 1998 to 2012 and currently on Universal Music Group and Virgin EMI Records from 2018. The last four members remained active until their last live concert performance in the Europe's third largest stadium Croke Park on 23 June 2012 and have reunited on 3 October 2018 for new music and tour. Based on the British Phonographic Industry certifications, the group have sold more than 32 million records and videos in the United Kingdom alone across their 20-year career–8.8 million singles, 12.5 million albums and 1.5 million videos. Their biggest selling album is their first Greatest Hits compilation, followed by Coast to Coast, with seven of their albums selling one million copies or more. Their biggest selling video is "Where Dreams Come True", which has sold 240,000 copies to date.
The Essential Leonard Cohen is a career-spanning collection of Leonard Cohen songs released in 2002. It is part of Sony's The Essential series.
More Best of Leonard Cohen is a collection of Leonard Cohen songs released in 1997.
Leonard Cohen was a Canadian singer-songwriter and poet who was active in music from 1967 until his death in 2016. Cohen released 14 studio albums and eight live albums during the course of a recording career lasting almost 50 years, throughout which he remained an active poet. His entire catalogue is available on Columbia Records. His 1967 debut Songs of Leonard Cohen earned an RIAA gold record; he followed up with three more highly acclaimed albums: Songs from a Room (1969), Songs of Love and Hate (1971) and New Skin for the Old Ceremony (1974), before allowing Phil Spector to produce Death of a Ladies' Man for Warner Bros. Records in 1977. Cohen returned to Columbia in 1979 for Recent Songs, but the label declined to release his next album, Various Positions (1984) in the US, leaving it to American shops to import it from CBS Canada. In 1988, Columbia got behind Cohen again and gave full support to I'm Your Man, which brought his career to new heights, and Cohen followed it with 1992's The Future.
The Promise is the fifth studio album by the classical crossover group, Il Divo. The Promise was released globally on 10 November 2008, except in the US and Canada, where it was released 17 November, Ireland and Mexico where it was released on 7 November, and Japan, on 26 November. The album reached the No.1 spot in the UK on 16 November. The album was produced by Steve Mac. It was announced on 10 September, that it will be named The Promise, although the track listing was at this time not yet disclosed. In early messages to people who are members of the band's official site's mailing list, it revealed to them that 'Il Divo return with their richest and most diverse album to date.' It also revealed that the album would have twelve songs. Cover songs confirmed at this time were: Frankie Goes To Hollywood's "The Power of Love"; 'a haunting and beautiful interpretation of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah"'; the smouldering intensity of Lara Fabian's "Adagio"; and the fourth confirmed song then was ABBA's "The Winner Takes It All".
Live in London is a (double) live album by Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen. It was released on CD by Columbia/Sony March 31, 2009, is his 18th album, and his first live release since Field Commander Cohen: Tour of 1979 in 2001. A DVD of the performance was simultaneously released by Columbia/Sony.
Songs from the Road is a live album by Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen. Released on September 14, 2010, it is his twentieth album.
Old Ideas is the twelfth studio album by Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, released in January 2012. It is Cohen's highest-charting release in the United States, reaching number 3 on the Billboard 200, 44 years after the release of his first album. The album topped the charts in 11 countries, including Finland, where Cohen became, at the age of 77, the oldest chart-topper, during the album's debut week. The album was released on January 27, 2012, in some countries and on January 31, 2012, in the U.S. On January 22, before its release, the album was streamed online by NPR and on January 23 by The Guardian.
Popular Problems is the thirteenth studio album by Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, released on September 19, 2014 in Friday-release countries and on September 22, 2014 elsewhere.
You Want It Darker is the fourteenth studio album by Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, released on October 21, 2016, by Columbia Records, 17 days before Cohen's death. The album was created at the end of his life and focuses on death, God, and humor. It was released to critical acclaim. The title track was awarded a Grammy Award for Best Rock Performance in January 2018. It was Cohen's last album released during his lifetime and was followed by the posthumous album Thanks for the Dance in November 2019.
Thanks for the Dance is the fifteenth and final studio album by Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, released posthumously through Columbia Records and Legacy Recordings on November 22, 2019. It is the first release following Cohen's death in November 2016, and includes contributions from various musicians, such as Daniel Lanois, Beck, Jennifer Warnes, Damien Rice and Leslie Feist. The song "The Goal" was released with the announcement of the album, on September 20, 2019.