Leonard Cohen’s eighth studio album trades his folk guitar for synthpop’s cold embrace, turning middle-aged cynicism into one of the sharpest, funniest records of the 1980s. It’s the sound of a poet learning to dance with drum machines and winning.
The opening salvo of I’m Your Man is a declaration of war. “First We Take Manhattan” begins with a sequencer pulse that sounds like a fax machine in distress, then Jennifer Warnes’ voice rises in harmony: “You loved me as a loser, but now you’re worried that I just might win.” Leonard Cohen, 53 years old and freshly dropped by his longtime label, had something to prove. He proved it by turning the apocalypse into a nightclub act.
The song came to him in a dream, or so he later told an interviewer. Peter Buck of R.E.M. played the guitar solo — a ragged, krautrock-tinged explosion that sounds nothing like the churchy jangle he was known for. Cohen had called Buck cold, asked if he’d come to a Los Angeles studio and play “something dangerous.” Buck obliged. The result is a track that feels like a coup d’état set to a four-on-the-floor beat.
But the title track is where Cohen redefined himself entirely. A cheesy Casio rhythm, a cheap-sounding synth brass patch, and Cohen reciting pickup lines that double as theology. “And I’ve been working on a cocktail called the ‘Let’s Get Nasty’ / I ain’t fooling, I ain’t talking turkey.” It’s the alpha and omega of late-career reinvention: a man who once wrote “Suzanne” and “Famous Blue Raincoat” now telling you he’s your man. The serious ones loved him for it. The unserious ones finally got the joke.
The album was recorded in Montreal, Paris, and Los Angeles, with a revolving cast of producers — Michel Robidoux, Jean-Philippe Rykiel, and Cohen himself — each bringing a different shade of 1980s polish. There’s an electro-drum sheen that dates the record beautifully, like the smell of a new car that’s now thirty-five years old. Listen to “Everybody Knows” on a good system: the kick drum is programmed, the snare sounds like a cardboard box, and Cohen’s voice sits in the middle like a convicted man reading his own obituary. It’s the sound of a poet who refused to be recorded in a church anymore.
The album’s centerpiece is “Tower of Song,” a tired, brilliant meditation on the misery of being a writer. Cohen’s voice is barely above a whisper, and the backing track — a lurching Casio waltz — sounds like it was recorded in an elevator. The line “I was born with the gift of a golden voice” is delivered with the flattest deadpan he could muster. He later said the song wrote itself when he realized he could ring the melodies out of a cheap synthesizer instead of a guitar. The cheapness became the point.
There is deep melancholy here, too. “Take This Waltz” translates Lorca into a torrent of surrealist imagery, set to a flamenco-influenced arrangement that sounds almost out of place among the drum machines. Cohen’s pronunciation of the Spanish phrases is deliberate, almost devotional. It’s the one track that reaches back to his older work, and it sits on the album like a bruise.
Leonard Cohen never made another album that sounded quite like I’m Your Man. He would later return to more organic arrangements, but something essential had been unlocked. The man who wrote “Bird on the Wire” had figured out that a cheap synth could carry as much weight as a nylon-string guitar. The dark humor, the self-laceration, the grin behind the growl — it was all there, waiting for the right machine.