Ten New Songs

1	In My Secret Life / Sharon Robinson 4:55
2	A Thousand Kisses Deep / Sharon Robinson 6:29
3	That Don't Make It Junk / Sharon Robinson 4:28
4	Here It Is / Sharon Robinson 4:18
5	Love Itself / Sharon Robinson 5:26
6	By the Rivers Dark / Sharon Robinson 5:20
7	Alexandra Leaving / Sharon Robinson 5:25
8	You Have Loved Enough / Sharon Robinson 5:41
9	Boogie Street / Sharon Robinson 6:04
10	The Land of Plenty / Sharon Robinson 4:35

Barnes & Noble

Plenty of artists have gone on very public spiritual quests, only to apply them, ever so briefly, to their art before moving on to the next fleeting interest. Leonard Cohen, however, clearly found what he was looking for when he began training at a California Zen Buddhist monastery several years ago, and that's profoundly apparent on his first new album in nearly nine years. As its title indicates, Ten New Songs is pure, plainspoken Cohen, free of any frills that might distract from the prose poems within. It may well be the sexagenarian singer-songwriter's most spare, unadorned album to date, with minimal synthesizer daubings (from Sharon Robinson, who also co-wrote most of the songs here) forming virtually the only accompaniment. Such subtlety only heightens the impact of desolate songs like "A Thousand Kisses Deep," which looks askance at the pleasures of the flesh, and "That Don't Make It Junk," a song that praises the reclamation of spiritual debris. Through it all, Cohen's raspy voice, which has grown even more frayed with the passage of time, serves as the perfect vessel for carrying these burnished gems. There's much to unravel in pieces like "In My Secret Life," but the point is to join in the process of unraveling, whether or not you eventually reach the "answer" within. David Sprague

All Music Guide

"I'm back on Boogie Street," declares Leonard Cohen on two different songs in this collection, titled with characteristic understatement Ten New Songs. (Previous album titles have included Songs of Leonard Cohen, Songs From a Room, and Recent Songs.) More poet than musician, Cohen has, since his early albums, tended to rely on collaborations with musicians to put together his music: John Lissauer on 1974's New Skin for the Old Ceremony, Henry Lewy on 1979's Recent Songs, and, notoriously, Phil Spector on 1977's Death of a Ladies' Man. On Ten New Songs, his partner is former backup singer Sharon Robinson, who co-wrote "Everybody Knows" on 1988's I'm Your Man and earns co-writing credit on all the material here. She has also conjured the musical backgrounds ("All tracks arranged, programmed, and performed by Sharon Robinson," reads the credit), and she harmonizes with Cohen throughout. But all collaborators (even Spector) are in the service of Cohen's poetic vision, which remains the dominant element on this elegiac set. After a restatement of purpose on "In My Secret Life," he turns in a moody set of reflections on decline, even alluding to fellow poet Robert Frost's famous Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening in "A Thousand Kisses Deep": "And maybe I had miles to drive/And promises to keep/You ditch it all to stay alive/A thousand kisses deep." The songs are full of leave-taking, with titles like "Alexandra Leaving" and "You Have Loved Enough" accurately describing the tone, concluding with the prayer-like valedictory "The Land of Plenty," which gently remonstrates with the consumer society the poet has always engaged and rejected: "May the lights in the land of plenty/Shine on the truth some day." Even in the quietude of Cohen's catalog, the result seems like a coda. William Ruhlmann

Rolling Stone

Ten New Songs manages to sustain loss's fragile beauty like never before and might just be the Cohen's most exquisite ode yet to the midnight hour.

Village Voice

The first four tracks...[are] as powerful as any he's written.