Track Listing

1. First We Take Manhattan
2. Ain't No Cure for Love
3. Everybody Knows
4. I'm Your Man
5. Take This Waltz
6. Jazz Police
7. I Can't Forget
8. Tower of Song

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1894 in Music
• Released on: 2008-02-01
• Number of discs: 1

Amazon.com
Even the production, laden with synthesized strings and cooing female choruses, is wry on I'm Your Man, a definitive Leonard Cohen album. Though still touched with the tragic ("Take This Waltz," based on a Garcia Lorca poem), the album often achieves its high points by combining Cohen's world-weariness with black-humored evocations of social and romantic ills and artistic quandaries. "I was born like this, I had no choice," the gravelly Cohen intimates at disc's end. "I was born with the gift of a golden voice." --Rickey Wright

Customer Reviews

Genius
I was introduced to Leonard Cohen nearly a decade ago in my college freshman rhetoric class. The professor asked us to bring in samples of something that we considered poetry. Someone brought in Everybody Knows, and I have been a Cohen fan ever since.

Cohen's voice fits his dry, black, sense of humor and his grasp of the power of bitter irony like the right pair of sunglasses fit a Mafioso kingpin. They become one and the same.

My favorites on this album have changed over the years, a testament to the longevity of this work. Everybody Knows is one of the best songs ever written, and Tower of Song is pure brilliance. Feel free to skip Jazz Police, but have patience with Take This Waltz and I'm Your Man. You will be rewarded if you give them the chance to grow on you. They most assuredly will.

This album is my favorite of the Cohen releases. It may not have the classic sound of many of his earlier albums, but his ability to overlay lyrics like

"Now in Vienna there's ten pretty women
There's a shoulder where Death comes to cry
There's a lobby with nine hundred windows
There's a tree where the doves go to die
There's a piece that was torn from the morning
And it hangs in the Gallery of Frost"

with an underlying accompaniment that is at the same time electronic and string driven is genius, pure and simple. Cohen has the ability of the timeless masters to maintain his style and keep current gracefully.

Mr. Cohen says it best. "I was born like this, I had no choice
I was born with the gift of a golden voice"

Do yourself a favor. Spend an evening in the dark listening to this album over a glass of good wine. You won't regret it.

Five Stars only because they won't give me six.
-HawkeyeGK

Flawless Songs, Cheesy Arrangements
The songs contained on this release are absolutley stunning. Cohen mixes a world weary point of view with a dry dark humor, and his verbage so economical that not a word is wasted. Cohen may not have the "golden voice" that he jokes about in TOWER OF SONG, but he nails the vocals on every song here with just the right emotion and inflection.

Then comes the backing tracks. This could be a primer on cliched 80's production values. Cheesy synthdrums, backing vocals worthy of Diane Warren songs and generic keyboards would destroy lesser artists or tunes. Only TOWER OF SONG and EVERYBODY KNOWS get treatments worthy of their fine lyrics and vocals.

I would love to see Cohen redo this album with a sympathetic producer, who would frame these dignified tunes with the backing they so richly deserve. It never hurts to dream.

His very best; all things considered
As a fan who has every original Cohen album, this one is quite simply the best. "Songs Of" will always be a sentimental favorite but "I'm Your Man," from beginning to end is one the most enlightening musical voyages you will ever take. Lyrics have always been Cohen's strong point but now we have a maturity in the music itself, laced with just enough pop/rock licks and tricks that my Oldies-loving wife even likes some of these songs. How coincidental that his voice is at its masculine best to match the penetrating lyrical epeditions. No wonder a new generation of music fans and performers alike fell in love with this guy {re: the tribute albums that followed}. This album is the perfect cure for the unidentifiable musical phlegm that is spewing from too many radio speakers near and far as you read this. Leonard Cohen is quite simply too cool for the charts and too intense for the masses. Buy this, spend a quiet weekend listening, and find out why.