I surprised Maria by putting my phone next to her ear in bed and playing one of Leonard Cohen’s last great song. Is there any better way to wake up someone you love?

A few weeks before he died last year, Leonard Cohen was obsessed with writing and trying to perfect a song called “ Happens To The Heart.”

Encouraged by the very enthusiastic response to his 2016 release You Want It Dark, Cohen left instructions with his son Adam to finish the songs they’d started together, using vocal recordings he was leaving behind.

In an act of love and devotion, Adam Cohen wrote and recorded arrangements for each song, as he thought his father would have wanted them. The result is a new album called Thanks For The Dance, and I think Adam did his father proud.

It is a masterpiece of simplicity, warmth, and wisdom. I never met Leonard Cohen but I always loved his music and I can’t imagine that he would be anything but pleased and grateful for this album, truly his last.

How fortunate he was to have a child who understood him so well and loved him so much.

I played the song as soon as I heard it to Maria this morning as we both lay in bed waiting for the sun to come up and a big storm to hit this afternoon and Monday. Maria loved the music we’ve been listening to it all morning.

We both thought there was no sweeter or nicer way to wake up and begin another day together.

The arrangements are hypnotically beautiful and touching.

It’s a wonderful album, sweet and beautiful and profound, as Cohen’s work often was.  His years of living as a monk were good for his writing.

We especially loved “Happens to the art,” this is the first verse of this wonderful parting song:

“I was always working steady but I never called it art,

I got my shit together

Meeting Christ reading Marx

Sure it failed my little fire,

But it’s bright the dying spark

Go tell the young messiah

What happens to the heart…”

— Leonard Cohan, Thanks For the Dance