He saw fires blaze through his neighborhood in the uprising after the Rodney King verdict. He basked in the glow of a new tribute album, 1991’s I’m Your Fan, which featured R.E.M., the Pixies, Nick Cave, and, fatefully, John Cale’s influential version of “Hallelujah.” He dated and was briefly engaged to Rebecca De Mornay, the Risky Business and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle actress, whom he accompanied to the Oscars.īut songwriting was an agonizing, nonstop process for Cohen, leaving him “wrecked” and darkening thousands of notebook pages with revisions. He swapped blasts of spiritual lyricism with Sonny Rollins on late-night TV. Instead he went to sunny Los Angeles to enlist longtime backup singer Jennifer Warnes, and basically didn’t leave. The Future showed he would continue to capture life, in all of its messy contradictions, prismatic with meaning.Īfter a sellout world tour behind I’m Your Man, Cohen initially planned to reunite with the crew behind that album in Montreal.
Heaven is in the gutter, and vice versa-hallelujah, what’s it to ya? Its nine-song, hour-long runtime juxtaposes some of Cohen’s finest originals with two unlikely covers and an instrumental. Cohen’s husky voice sits at the center, growling lyrics that don’t so much blur the sacred and profane as dispassionately report their coexistence. charts, the 58-year-old Cohen’s ninth studio album offered an equally extravagant but more ambiguous soundtrack to post-Cold War triumphalism: lacquered keyboard-rock with strings, a choir, several producers, and hordes of session musicians, recorded in a dozen studios. When Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” and Michael Bolton’s Timeless: The Classics stood atop the U.S. Released in late November 1992 as the follow-up to I’m Your Man, The Future was a quest for lasting truth in what he perceived as the schlocky, dehumanized ruins of late capitalism.
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