Send "Leonard Cohen " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Popmatters |
 When Leonard Cohen announced his first tour in fifteen years, it was only natural to view it for a split second as a cash grab. The tickets weren’t cheap, and the tour came on the heels of Cohen learning that an ex-business manager had embezzled the majority of Cohen’s fortune. It was pretty obvious that his dire financial straits were pushing him to tour, especially since he hadn’t felt compelled to hit the road in support of recent albums.Once the shows started, though, rapturous reports made every Cohen show sound like a giant lovefest. Adoring fans filled the seats as a grateful Cohen took the stage, and goodwill from both parties met and mingled into something resembling a religious experience for many. So even if Cohen was refilling his coffers, he was giving just as much as he took. That was only fitting. Throughout his career, one of Cohen’s enduring traits has been a feeling of reverence for his subjects, not to mention for the act of singing and writing and creation itself. Even at his most rakish, Cohen always gave an impression of being an equal partner in something sacred and rapturous. Maybe it’s his way with words. Maybe it’s that voice that sounds old and wise enough that it could have narrated the birth of the universe. Whatever the case, fans of Cohen’s work have always detected something strange and different in his work. The give-and-take of Cohen’s recent tour has already been preserved for posterity on the excellent Live in London, which captured a single night at London’s O2 Arena. Already a cornerstone of PBS pledge drives, Live in London felt like a perfect testament to Cohen’s strengths as a songwriter and performer, so why do we need another live disc? Well, for one thing, a catalog as deep as Cohen’s doesn’t get covered in a single show: Of Songs from the Road‘s twelve songs, only four appeared on Live in London. For another, it’s possible, just possible, that other nights held better performances. Songs from the Road (which comes with a matching DVD of its performances) sets out to collect some of the tour’s most magical moments....full text |
| Bbc |
| The nigh-universally rapturous acclaim that attended Leonard Cohen’s 84-date world tour of 2008-09 was motivated by two things. One was an entirely laudable desire to make some offering of thanks, in the twilight of Cohen’s career, for the work of one of the most intelligent and literate songwriters of any era. The other was a straightforward acknowledgement that Cohen, sauntering assuredly through his mid-70s, appeared to be in the form of his life. Songs From the Road, packaged as both a CD and a DVD, collects songs from shows on that tour (London’s instantly legendary O2 Arena show of November 13th, 2008, is the only one represented twice, with That Don’t Make It Junk and Famous Blue Raincoat). The DVD especially makes it clear what an astute decision this tour was, Cohen intoning his words from beneath a raffishly tilted trilby, resembling a character from an Edward Hopper painting. His songs have always been ones of experience, and on some of his earlier recordings especially he didn’t sound like he’d grown into them. But the performances here of Chelsea Hotel and Lover, Lover, Lover, delivered with an old man’s gravitas and Cohen’s luxuriantly weather-beaten voice, make it clear just how wise before their time they were. The only possible quibbles with this are the inevitable ones concerning the tracklisting – the total lack of any selections from his 1988 masterpiece I’m Your Man seems an especially perverse dereliction. In this case, however, to fuss about what isn’t here rather than celebrate what is would amount to ingratitude of almost heroic proportions. This amounts to a terrific testament to – and from – a man whose adroit negotiation of the fine line that separates tragedy from comedy where matters of the heart are concerned has bequeathed a peerless catalogue of warm, funny dispatches from love’s fraught frontiers. And they’ve rarely sounded better than this....full text |
| Independent |
| With this CD/DVD combo following swiftly on the heels of last year's Live in London and Live at the Isle of Wight 1970, Leonard Cohen has now released three live sets, and toured the world several times over, since his last studio album, Dear Heather, in 2004. So there's more than a faint whiff of suspicion that we're just being cajoled into replenishing Lenny's vanished pension fund – though with that warm baritone oozing its way into one's consciousness, who can resist? Songs from the Road draws on rapturously received 2008/9 performances from Europe, North America and Israel, with highlights including a darkly luminous "Avalanche" from Gothenburg, an unbearably poignant "Famous Blue Raincoat" from London, and of course the magisterial "Hallelujah" from the Coachella festival in California....full text |
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