The poet speaks in melody

Am I the only person who wonders aloud if, in the year 2036, Tom Waits will sound like Leonard Cohen, while lying prone with his ear up against a hardwood floor, breathing into an open microphone? I probably am not.

That’s not to compare the two, by the way. That’d be foolish, like comparing Miraz to Bourbon, but there are moments on Old Ways that’ll bring Waits to mind because he’s a fellow long-termer like Cohen (although Cohen has been singing despite not having a singing voice since (!!!) THE SIXTIES, which puts him a few years up on Waits) AND they are two of the last men standing on stage in black suits. “Crazy To Love You,” stripped down to acoustic guitar and Cohen’s velvety rasp, could easily be a Waits song, and if Waits were performing it in the same spare setting, it could be a Cohen song.

For the money in my pocket, the best track on this elpee is “Darkness,” which bears some similarity to a composition by yet another ancient, the fella who buys his cowboy clothes at Austin’s Lucy In Disguise, Mr. Bob Dylan. The faint musty scent of Southern Gothic hangs over “Darkness,” as it did in Dylan’s gospel-convincer “You Gotta Serve Somebody,” and both tracks share a similar cadence.

The strongest points of Old Ways are Leonard Cohen’s words and the sense of foreboding that permeates the entire work. Cohen knows what stage of life he’s at (he’s 77) and through much of Old Ways he’s chosen melodies that reflect Southern spirituals while ruminating aloud on his own mortality. The weakest points are the limits of his own voice (Cohen doesn’t sing, really… he speaks in melody) and the often-schmaltzy voices of his ever-present female backup singers. There are times when Old Ways sounds like the kind of music that would float out of the speakers at Marc’s Big Boy during dinner with my grandparents back in the early seventies, and Cohen’s lack of voice forces him to stay in first gear through the entire elpee. That can get just a little exhausting, but if you could use a soundtrack for a late afternoon-early evening of quite reflection near a warm fire, Old Ways is yer elpee and Leonard Cohen is (still) yer man.