• Source: Thanks for the Dance

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.
Described as a "continuation" of Cohen's previous studio album, You Want It Darker (2016), the album's vocal tracks were recorded during the same sessions, with Cohen's son and album producer Adam Cohen noting that the album should not be considered an album of "discarded songs or B sides".




Background


The songs on the album comprise "sketches" left over from the sessions for Cohen's final studio album You Want It Darker that were finished by Cohen's son Adam Cohen in a "garage near his father's old house". Regarding the tracks, Adam Cohen noted: "Had we had more time and had [Leonard] been more robust, we would have gotten to them. [We had] conversations about what instrumentation and what feelings he wanted the completed work to evoke – sadly, the fact that I would be completing them without him was given."
The title song, "Thanks for the Dance", was originally recorded by Anjani for her 2007 album Blue Alert, produced and written by Cohen, and composed by Anjani, while Cohen's own version of the song was recorded later.
Some songs were years in the making in Cohen's notebooks and home studio. "The Night of Santiago" is an adaptation of Federico Garcia Lorca's poem "The Unfaithful Housewife". Probably started at the same time as Cohen's 1986 single "Take This Waltz" and never finished, the lyrics were much later published in Book of Longing as "The Faithless Wife". Adam Cohen finally set it to music: "I'd heard it under construction for years, on the front lawn or while we were having coffee or dinner, and I'd always begged him to attempt to write music to it. In a weakened state, he said, 'Look, I'll just recite the poem to a certain tempo and you go ahead and you write the music and try to tell the story."
The only Cohen's original composition on the album, "The Hills" was previously broadcast as a demo track, titled "The Book of Longing" (based on the opening poem of Book of Longing), during Cohen's interview at the KCRW radio station in 2006, along with his own musical version of "Puppets", also originally published as the poem in the same book (here released to Adam Cohen's music).
Some tracks were composed around Leonard Cohen's recitations. "Listen to the Hummingbird" used Cohen's impromptu recitation of the partial poem at his last public appearance to promote You Want It Darker album on October 13, 2016. The full text of the poem was later published in the posthumous book The Flame, as well the poems "Moving On" and "Happens to the Heart".
"The Goal" is a 1998 poem published in Book of Longing, already set to music by Anjani and released on her 2014 album I Came to Love. Here Cohen's own recitation is set to Adam Cohen's music.
"It's Torn", originally another Cohen's collaboration with Sharon Robinson, here in the version produced and additionally composed by Adam Cohen, included guitar effects by Daniel Lanois, who in 2021 released his own version of the track, titled "Torn Again", using Leonard Cohen's original voice track.




Critical reception



Thanks for the Dance received critical acclaim. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 84, which indicates "universal acclaim", based on 25 reviews.
Rolling Stone gave the album 4 stars, praising the album and saying it is "a magnificent parting shot that's also that exceptionally rare thing — a posthumous work as alive, challenging, and essential as anything issued in the artist's lifetime".
The album was a Juno Award nominee for Adult Alternative Album of the Year at the Juno Awards of 2020.




Track listing






Personnel






Charts






Certifications






References

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