Thanks for the Dance

The songs on the album comprise "sketches" left over from the sessions for Cohen's final studio album You Want It Darker that were finished by Cohen's son Adam Cohen in a "garage near his father's old house". Regarding the tracks, Adam Cohen noted: "Had we had more time and had [Leonard] been more robust, we would have gotten to them. [We had] conversations about what instrumentation and what feelings he wanted the completed work to evoke sadly, the fact that I would be completing them without him was given." The title song, "Thanks for the Dance", was originally recorded by Anjani for her 2007 album Blue Alert, produced and written by Cohen, and composed by Anjani, while Cohen's own version of the song was recorded later. Some songs were years in the making in Cohen's notebooks and home studio. "The Night of Santiago" is an adaptation of Federico Garcia Lorca's poem "The Unfaithful Housewife". Probably started at the same time as Cohen's 1986 single "Take This Waltz" and never finished, the lyrics were much later published in Book of Longing as "The Faithless Wife". Adam Cohen finally set it to music: "I'd heard it under construction for years, on the front lawn or while we were having coffee or dinner, and I'd always begged him to attempt to write music to it. In a weakened state, he said, 'Look, I'll just recite the poem to a certain tempo and you go ahead and you write the music and try to tell the story." The only Cohen's original composition on the album, "The Hills" was previously broadcast as a demo track, titled "The Book of Longing" (based on the opening poem of Book of Longing), during Cohen's interview at the KCRW radio station in 2006, along with his own musical version of "Puppets", also originally published as the poem in the same book (here released to Adam Cohen's music). Some tracks were composed around Leonard Cohen's recitations. "Listen to the Hummingbird" used Cohen's impromptu recitation of the partial poem at his last public appearance to promote You Want It Darker album on October 13, 2016. The full text of the poem was later published in the posthumous book The Flame, as well the poems "Moving On" and "Happens to the Heart". "The Goal" is a 1998 poem published in Book of Longing, already set to music by Anjani and released on her 2014 album I Came to Love. Here Cohen's own recitation is set to Adam Cohen's music. "It's Torn", originally another Cohen's collaboration with Sharon Robinson, here in the version produced and additionally composed by Adam Cohen, included guitar effects by Daniel Lanois, who in 2021 released his own version of the track, titled "Torn Again", using Leonard Cohen's original voice track. ==Critical reception==