Going Home (2012) – Leonard Cohen

44 years after the release of his first album, today’s track Going Home opens Leonard Cohen’s (at age 77) 12th studio album Old Ideas which has featured here prominently. This track is in polar contrast with the track which ends the record Different Sides where Leonard sings, ‘I want to get out of town‘. Here Leonard is resigned with nearing the finishing line, but all was worth it – I’m going home without the sorrow.

Going home
Without my sorrow
Going home
Sometime tomorrow
Going home
To where it’s better
Than before

Going home
Without my burden
Going home
Behind the curtain
Going home
Without this costume
That I wore

Going Home is another wonderful song from this masterful record. I wrote in a previous article, I have more favourite songs of Leonard in his senior years than I do when he was younger. He seems to write about “a manual for living with defeat” in this song. Leonard Cohen was asked by the New York Times where he was when he wrote this song. He replied: “In trouble.“

The following is from wikipedia:
Cohen’s international concert tours of the late 2000s were prompted by the fact that his former manager made off with his life’s savings. At their conclusion in 2009, Cohen decided to keep working and began making his twelfth studio album.

Biographer Sylvie Simmons observed in a 2012 Mojo cover story: “After his former manager helped herself to his savings, leaving him nothing to retire on, Leonard, in his seventies, having not been on the road in 15 years, embarked on one of the most remarkable, and remarkably successful, tours in music history, playing three-hour shows each night. And when it finished…instead of coming home and putting his feet up, he went straight to work on a new album and, even more extraordinary, in less than 12 months he finished it.”

Reference:
1. Old Ideas – Wikipedia

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