Blue Valentine

“There’s perfume burning in the air/Bits of beauty everywhere.” The origins of Blue Alert, the current album by Leonard Cohen companion, collaborator and muse Anjani Thomas, came about when she set lines from a Cohen poem-in-progress to a smoky jazz accompaniment.

Intrigued by the result, Leonard allowed her to rummage through his boxes of notebooks for similar stray fragments and orphan verses, and from these germs of ideas, Thomas grew entire song arrangements. Relatively quickly, the pair completed an album’s worth of material that married his legendarily wry lyrical skills to her sultry torch style.
“Someone described it as quietly devastating,” Anjani considers on a rainy afternoon off in Gent, Belgium. “I really like that description, because there are artists that crash through your heart by beating down the doors, and there are other artists that just unlock it so quietly that it surprises you, how still and how stealthy they can be. I think this record is like that. To its credit, it’s probably because we didn’t feel intruded on by any commercial restraints, we weren’t trying to make a pop record – or a popular record.”
That said, the circumstances of the album’s gestation were not entirely immune to financial concerns. A couple of years ago Cohen filed a lawsuit alleging that a former manager had defrauded him of millions of dollars. When the singer discovered he was liable for the tax bill on his pilfered savings, he had no choice but to take up cudgels in the courts. He subsequently won a $9.5 million judgment, but it’s unclear as to whether he will ever see any of the money.
Many a great book has been written in order to get the IRS off its author’s back – Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson and Unsung Heroes Of Rock ‘N’ Roll by Nick Tosches to name but two – but Blue Alert was conceived as a welcome asylum from the torments of litigation.
“We didn’t do the record for the taxman,” Anjani says, “we did it just because it was the only creative release at the time. We were simply lost in a deluge of forensic tax accountants and lawyers and IRS investigators and bankers, and it was just disastrous, the last place an artist wants to find himself. So, y’know, one by one these songs would come along, and it was just a delight to run into the studio and escape for a day. I think, all told, we must have done that record in two or three months, but it was spread out over about a year and a half because we didn’t have that many opportunities to leave the scene and get into a studio. Sometimes you have to be pushed into that really horrible space you don’t want to be in, and then a shaft of light comes down and you’re able to see bits of beauty.”
Blue Alert is an album that could’ve been recorded between the wars, Anjani’s classic jazz stylings contrasting with Leonard’s love-as-Cold-War-espionage metaphors, a lyrical approach that gives the songs a steely centre.
“And also a sensuality,” the singer observes. “It’s a very Leonard Cohen-esque kind of writing, there’s a lot of multi-layered meanings to it. It’s funny, on July 12th I think, in the Herald Tribune, the front page headline read, ‘Bush Declares Impact of An Ugly War’, and I thought of the first line of ‘There’s No One After You’: ‘I danced with a lot of men/Fought in an ugly war’.”
True to its content, Blue Alert has been marketed more like a covert operation than a full on military campaign, a secret artefact passed around Cohen cognoscenti.
“You know, it seems to be crawling its way right past the security gates of Sony, it’s really lovely to see that it has a life of its own,” Anjani says. “The only place to be is to not care about your career. Once that ambition rules you it draws you into a whole other kind of expression. One of the great things about Leonard is that he’s always played it low-key and very modestly, he’s never really lived an ostentatious lifestyle, ever since I’ve known him. It seems much easier than living in the glare of the spotlight.”
Anjani Thomas first met Leonard Cohen back in 1984, when she sang back-up vocals and played piano on one of his tours. She also sang on ‘Hallelujah’ from Various Positions, but in more recent years has assumed a central vocal role on albums such as Dear Heather. They are, she says, a comfortable match. Indeed, the singer spoke recently about her experiences with depression when she was younger, an affliction she admitted had lifted somewhat in recent years. It echoed something Cohen once said, that as one gets older, the brain cells associated with anxiety begin to die.
“Somebody asked me how did we ever end up together,” Anjani laughs, “and I think I answered along the lines of, ‘We might as well have been miserable together’!”
The blind leading the blind.
“Exactly! I don’t know if you’ve ever suffered from depression, but it’s very interesting, you want nothing more than to be pulled out of it, but you don’t want anyone to pull you out of it, ’cos they can’t. So we’re sort of like two clams. We’re happy to be able to spend time side by side, but it’s hard to let anyone else under the rock – we’re perfectly happy right there on the rock of doom! But it took a while to find somebody to understand.
“For me in my life it’s been rare moments of epiphany, the rest of the time I’m falling and tripping forward down the lane, just trying to sing the songs, trying to live a life that doesn’t hurt anyone. I don’t have grand dreams or big visions, I’m just trying to get through the day unscathed and share this music that allows people to get in touch with that soft inner core. It’s a sensitive place, not an easy place to be in, let alone live from, and it can be kind of painful, but I suppose that’s one of the reasons I ended up with Leonard. We’re solitary individuals that happen to be fine living side by side together. Somehow that works.”
For all Cohen’s humility and self-deprecating asides though, one imagines an artist can’t produce that amount of great work without being a demanding collaborator.
“Well, you know I wouldn’t stand for that, because there’s a lot of rocks I could be on,” Anjani laughs. “But actually he is quite gracious, and his participation as a producer came on the latter side of things, meaning I would take the lyrics and come up with the music and play it for him, and then he would give his input as to whether the lyrics needed refining or the music needed to go somewhere else. As he said, he merely had veto power!”

Blue Alert is out now on Sony. Anjani plays Tripod, Dublin on July 27 and the Midlands Festival on July 28.