Music Arcades: Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man

Lucy tells me she used to play this album all the time when it first came out. I got it much, much later and know it less well. I've always heard it as a kind of rehearsal for the album that followed, The Future. I wondered if that might be just because I've had the latter for longer and know it better.

Lucy suggested taking I'm Your Man with us on the holiday we just returned from this afternoon, but I persuaded her we should take The Future instead. I still prefer that one. Both albums are based around three or four major songs, in between which are others you could call filler, but let's be charitable and call them breathing space.

The main area where The Future wins for me is that the big songs are so powerful — really quite scarily so — that you feel like you need breathing space to recover from them; on the other album there's less intensity, so the weaker songs, like Jazz Police, just sound weak. A secondary factor is that, on I'm Your Man, Cohen himself sounds a little more polished: maybe he was influenced by that Jennifer Warnes album, which came out a little before his own (and which I have now given away). I prefer the grainy sandpaper in his voice, which is more to the fore on The Future.