I'm Your Man

I'm Your Man is the eighth studio album by Leonard Cohen, released in 1988. The album marked Cohen's further move to a more modern sound, with many songs having a synthpop production.   "First We Take Manhattan" had been released the previous year by Jennifer Warnes on her album of Cohen songs, Famous Blue Raincoat. The song "Everybody Knows" was one of Cohen's first writing collaborations with Sharon Robinson, who would become a frequent collaborator in the future. Most notably, Robinson co-wrote every song on Cohen's 2001 outing Ten New Songs. In "Tower of Song", Cohen discusses songwriting and acknowledges the influence of Hank Williams ("a hundred floors above me").   "I'm Your Man" was number 1 in Norway for 16 weeks. The album is silver in the UK and gold in Canada.   It was ranked 51 on Pitchfork Media's list of the 100 best albums of the 1980s. Tom Waits has named it one of his favourite albums. Slant Magazine listed the album at #29 on its list of "Best Albums of the 1980s".   The track "Take This Waltz" was already released in 1986 (as a single off the Federico García Lorca tribute album Poets in New York) and reached #1 in the Spanish charts. The words were translated by Cohen from García Lorca's poem "Pequeño vals vienés". (wiki)   ------------------------------------------------------------------------------   by Jason Ankeny   A stunningly sophisticated leap into modern musical textures, I'm Your Man re-establishes Leonard Cohen's mastery. Against a backdrop of keyboards and propulsive rhythms, Cohen surveys the global landscape with a precise, unflinching eye: the opening "First We Take Manhattan" is an ominous fantasy of commercial success bundled in crypto-fascist imagery, while the remarkable "Everybody Knows" is a cynical catalog of the land mines littering the surface of love in the age of AIDS.