Click here to go to the NPR story and then launch the media player, now streaming the entire album Old Ideas, which is being released on January 31.
Or scroll down if you want to listen to individual tracks.
A snippet from NPR about the album:
But this spiritual master is a sensualist, too: His artistry is grounded in the careful examination of how the body and the soul interact. Old Ideas, his 12th studio album, was recorded after a triumphant world tour that had Cohen performing three-hour shows night after night — no mean feat for a man in his late 70s. It throbs with that life, its verses rife with zingers and painful confessions, and its music sounds more richly varied than anything Cohen has done in years.
Its depth comes in the tenderness and refined passion Cohen brings to his thorough descriptions of being human — a state in which pain and failure dance with transcendence and bliss, as he growls in harmony with his angelic backup singers in the beautiful “Come Healing,” “The heart beneath is teaching to the broken heart above.” [. . .]
Old Ideas contemplates mortality in the bitter light of failed romance; it fearlessly broaches emotional extremes while still dropping the wisdom of an elder who should know better.
The songs are both a disturbance and a comfort. I love it.