I'm Your Man

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Even the production, laden with synthesized strings and cooing female choruses, is wry on I'm Your Man, a definitive Leonard Cohen album. Though still touched with the tragic ("Take This Waltz," based on a Garcia Lorca poem), the album often achieves its high points by combining Cohen's world-weariness with black-humoured evocations of social and romantic ills and artistic quandaries. "I was born like this, I had no choice," the gravelly Cohen intimates at disc's end. "I was born with the gift of a golden voice." ---Rickey Wright

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I'm Your Man appeared at a fortuitous moment for Cohen. The previous year, Jennifer Warnes had scored a major hit with Famous Blue Raincoat--an album of Cohen's songs. Possibly enthused by the idea of a large, primed and expectant audience, the 54-year-old Cohen delivered--in I'm Your Man--arguably the finest album of his illustrious career. The music here is never the baleful acoustic strumming Cohen is still popularly associated with: rather, he opted for a peculiarly sparse electronic style that often sounded as if it was being played on a variety of toys. This tack might have been disastrous--and indeed is, on "Jazz Police", the album's only clunker--but is redeemed by Cohen's gloomy, portentous voice, mixed well to the fore, and what might well be the finest collection of lyrics ever bestowed upon a rock & roll album. From the terrific opening line ("They sentenced me to 20 years of boredom/For trying to change the system from within", from "First We Take Manhattan") the words on I'm Your Man are relentlessly wise, rueful and hilarious, and capped splendidly by the climactic "Tower Of Song". This track, which has since been covered by James, the Jesus & Mary Chain, the Fatima Mansions and Nick Cave, among others, is the definitive statement of the magnificent absurdity of the rock & roll singer: "I said to Hank Williams... how lonely does it get?". Genius. --Andrew Mueller