I was introduced to Leonard Cohen nearly a decade ago in my college freshman rhetoric class. The professor asked us to bring in samples of something that we considered poetry. Someone brought in Everybody Knows, and I have been a Cohen fan ever since.

Cohen's voice fits his dry, black, sense of humor and his grasp of the power of bitter irony like the right pair of sunglasses fit a Mafioso kingpin. They become one and the same.

My favorites on this album have changed over the years, a testament to the longevity of this work. Everybody Knows is one of the best songs ever written, and Tower of Song is pure brilliance. Feel free to skip Jazz Police, but have patience with Take This Waltz and I'm Your Man. You will be rewarded if you give them the chance to grow on you. They most assuredly will.

This album is my favorite of the Cohen releases. It may not have the classic sound of many of his earlier albums, but his ability to overlay lyrics like

"Now in Vienna there's ten pretty women
There's a shoulder where Death comes to cry
There's a lobby with nine hundred windows
There's a tree where the doves go to die
There's a piece that was torn from the morning
And it hangs in the Gallery of Frost"

with an underlying accompaniment that is at the same time electronic and string driven is genius, pure and simple. Cohen has the ability of the timeless masters to maintain his style and keep current gracefully.

Mr. Cohen says it best. "I was born like this, I had no choice
I was born with the gift of a golden voice"

Do yourself a favor. Spend an evening in the dark listening to this album over a glass of good wine. You won't regret it.

Five Stars only because they won't give me six.
-HawkeyeGK

The songs contained on this release are absolutley stunning. Cohen mixes a world weary point of view with a dry dark humor, and his verbage so economical that not a word is wasted. Cohen may not have the "golden voice" that he jokes about in TOWER OF SONG, but he nails the vocals on every song here with just the right emotion and inflection.

Then comes the backing tracks. This could be a primer on cliched 80's production values. Cheesy synthdrums, backing vocals worthy of Diane Warren songs and generic keyboards would destroy lesser artists or tunes. Only TOWER OF SONG and EVERYBODY KNOWS get treatments worthy of their fine lyrics and vocals.

I would love to see Cohen redo this album with a sympathetic producer, who would frame these dignified tunes with the backing they so richly deserve. It never hurts to dream.

As a fan who has every original Cohen album, this one is quite simply the best. "Songs Of" will always be a sentimental favorite but "I'm Your Man," from beginning to end is one the most enlightening musical voyages you will ever take. Lyrics have always been Cohen's strong point but now we have a maturity in the music itself, laced with just enough pop/rock licks and tricks that my Oldies-loving wife even likes some of these songs. How coincidental that his voice is at its masculine best to match the penetrating lyrical epeditions. No wonder a new generation of music fans and performers alike fell in love with this guy {re: the tribute albums that followed}. This album is the perfect cure for the unidentifiable musical phlegm that is spewing from too many radio speakers near and far as you read this. Leonard Cohen is quite simply too cool for the charts and too intense for the masses. Buy this, spend a quiet weekend listening, and find out why.

What is actually incredible is not that this is a great album from Leonard Cohen. No. What is trully unreal is that this album stands out so far out infront from all his rest.
Cohen is a poet and a great poet at that, but he is a poet before he is a songwriter and this might explain it all.
In "I'm your man" everything falls together. The lyrics have the capability to grab anyone no matter what his mood or musical predisposition. The music is a perfect match and not only for the time it was written. I heard this album just this week in year 2002 (it was written in 1988) and i thought "hmm, if this had come out this year it would still be a huge hit".
Which is why this album became a big commercial success. But you see, not all commercial music is cheap.
What to mention first concerning the songs on offer here? The memorable "First we take Manhattan"? You would have to avoid not knowing this song and if you somehow have you have missed a true classic!
But songs of great stature are in abundance in "I'm your man": the eponymous song of the album is a monument of Cohen's song writting ability, a very emotional song and a love song that manages to be great without being cheesy. The "Tower song" is a bitter recollection that a lot of people will relate to regardless of age and "Everybody knows" is a doomy one that will please the conspiracy freak in you (which you SHOULD have)...
But all in all there is no song that falls below par, there is no "filler". There is no song in this album that you would want to skip.
All that combined with Cohen's at times cold and at times emphatic delivery make the whole a classic album. In fact, if i were asked what in my opinion would qualify for a perfect album then "I'm your man" would be one of the first examples that would pop in my mind.
"Everybody knows that the dice are loaded...."

I heard all of the songs on this album when I stopped to listen to a rerun of Austin City Limits on PBS. I just happened across it when I was flipping through the channels last night but was immediately just blown away by the music, the lyrics, the arrangements, the musicians and singers and by Leonard Cohen himself. I just loved it. After the broadcast I looked up LC on the Internet and was amazed by the lyrics of the many songs he has written and by the breadth of his career. Today I have ordered this album and two others. I've probably been around as long as Mr Cohen but I'm now his newest and biggest fan.