Leonard cohen: "The Future" (1992)

The Future is a studio album from 1992 by Leonard Cohen. It has come to be recognized as his "film-score" album as nearly every one of the songs on the album has appeared in some notable form in a Hollywood film.

Widely recognized as one of Cohen's more accessible albums, The Future contains everything from gospel-choir choruses (title track) to synthesizer ballads ("Waiting for the Miracle"), to pop-country ("Closing Time"), to marching band, staccato-like rhythms ("Democracy").

While not his most commercially successful album internationally, The Future is definitely one of his most musically diverse outings. The album was, however, one of Cohen's biggest chart successes in his native Canada, where "Closing Time" and "The Future" were both significant Top 40 hits. Cohen, whose singing voice is famously an acquired taste, won the 1992 Juno Award for Best Male Vocalist. In his acceptance speech, he quipped that "Only in Canada could somebody with a voice like mine win Vocalist of the Year".

The Future was the last Cohen album to be recorded and produced entirely in analog and then digitised after mixdown. Its working titles were Busted (after the line from "Closing Time") and Be for Real.

Cohen's then-girlfriend, actress Rebecca De Mornay, co-produced the song "Anthem".

"Tacoma Trailer" is one of two instrumentals in the Cohen catalogue. The other is "Improvisation" from Live Songs. The album is silver in the UK and double-platinum in Canada. The Future was Cohen's longest album to date, at nearly sixty minutes.


- Lyrics:

Give me back my broken night
My secret room, my secret life
It’s lonely here
There’s no one left to torture
Give me absolute control
Over every living soul
And lie beside me, baby
That’s an order!

Give me crack and anal sex
Take the only tree that’s left
And stuff it up the hole
In your culture
Give back the berlin wall
Give me stalin and st. paul
I’ve seen the future, brother
It is murder

Chorus
Things are going to slide in all directions
Won’t be nothing
Nothing you can measure anymore
The blizzard of the world
Has crossed the threshold
And it has overturned
The order of the soul
When they said repent
I wonder what they meant
When they said repent
I wonder what they meant
When they said repent
I wonder what they meant

You don’t know me from the wind
You never will, you never did
I’m the little jew
Who wrote the bible
I’ve seen nations rise and fall
I’ve heard their stories, heard them all
But love’s the only engine of survival
Your servant here, he has been told
To say it clear, to say it cold
It’s over, it ain’t going
Any further
And now the wheels of heaven stop
You feel the devil’s riding crop
Get ready for the future
It is murder

Chorus

There’ll be the breaking of the ancient
Western code
Your private life will suddenly explode
There’ll be phantoms
There’ll be fires in the road
And the white man dancing
You’ll see the woman
Hanging upside down
Her features covered by her fallen gown
And all the lousy little poets
Coming round
Trying to sound like charlie manson

Give me back the berlin wall
Give me stalin and st. paul
Give me christ
Or give me hiroshima
Destroy another fetus now
We don’t like children anyhow
I’ve seen the future, baby
It is murder

Chorus