You Want It Darker is the fourteenth and final studio album by Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, released on October 16, 2016, by Columbia Records, nineteen days before Cohen's death. The album was created towards the end of his life and focuses on death, God, and humor. It was released to critical acclaim. The title track was awarded a Grammy Award for Best Rock Performance in January 2018. After touring extensively between 2008 and 2013, Leonard Cohen began to suffer "multiple fractures of the spine" among other physical problems, according to his son Adam Cohen. Due to Leonard Cohen's mobility issues, You Want It Darker was recorded in the living room of his home in Mid-Wilshire, Los Angeles and then sent by e-mail to his musical collaborators.
4-time GRAMMY-winning producer Larry Klein, who produced Herbie Hancock’s GRAMMY Album of the Year winning release River: The Joni Letters, has assembled another extraordinary star-studded project with Here It Is: A Tribute to Leonard Cohen. This heartfelt tribute to Klein’s dear friend, the legendary singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, presents stunning renditions of his profound songs by an impressive and eclectic line-up of guest vocalists including James Taylor, Iggy Pop, Mavis Staples, Norah Jones, Gregory Porter, Peter Gabriel, Nathaniel Rateliff, David Gray, Sarah McLachlan, and Luciana Souza. The backing band is no less impressive featuring a remarkable quintet of modern jazz talent including guitarist Bill Frisell, saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins, pianist Kevin Hays, bassist Scott Colley, and drummer Nate Smith.
Moved by the warm response to 2016’s You Want It Darker, released three weeks before his death, Leonard Cohen left his son with instructions to finish those songs they’d started together, using vocal recordings he was leaving behind. In an act of devotion—to his father, to song—Adam wrote and recorded arrangements for each, as he thought Leonard would have wanted to hear them. The result is Thanks for the Dance, a posthumous album of unreleased material that’s as loving and respectful as they come. “This was not meant to be about me,” Adam tells Apple Music. “I didn’t make choices that were a reflection of my taste—the exercise was to try to make choices that were a reflection of his. It’s this advantage that I have over much greater and more accomplished producers: They don’t know what he hates. I do.” Here, he tells us the story behind each track and highlights some of his favorite lines.
Performed across two nights at the Royal Dramaten Theatre in Stockholm in March of 2017, Who By Fire is a theatrical staging of Leonard Cohen’s songs, poems and letters. Conceived and anchored by First Aid Kit, the band are joined by an array of guest artists, two actors, an 8 member band and strings and on two songs a 20 strong choir. An incredibly ambitious undertaking, they selected and sequenced all of the material performed and collaborated with the theatre and their music director to stage and orchestrate the show.