Sat. Dec. 15 & Sun. Dec. 16

     Leonard Cohen, 78,  is at the Citi Center's Wang Theatre Saurday Dec. 15 and Sunday Dec. 16. Let me take you back almost 20 years for a take on a concert, and an interview I did with him. Things change over the years, sure, but I've got a sneaking suspicion that what I heard and what he talked about will be still pertinent today.
      I was about to enter the inner sanctum of Leonard Cohen in concert at Berklee Performance center.
It's dark, it's cool, it's calm, it's cavernous. It is, truly, another world.

    With "Dance Me To the End of Love," Leonard Cohen has just begun to spin his magical web: intricate, soothing, stimulating, romantic "chamber rock," music rife with religious and historical references, tales of love gone awry, songs of a society where the deck is stacked against the good guys, or, maybe, songs where the protagonist has stacked the deck against himself. Most songs started with Cohen solemnly reciting a verse. Then, the band would ease in. Delicately. Gently. Artfully.

 Talk about a decompression chamber.

   Cohen's detractors would, no doubt, simply call it a depression chamber. The man knows doom, the man knows gloom -- no way around it. The tall, graceful Montreal native has been a vital source of inspiration to post-punk rockers like Nick Cave and Ian McCulloch who've found dark empty spaces in their lives and the lives of those they write about. But there can be a beauty in sadness and, believe me, Cohen and his octet -- who played a long set to a soldout house last night -- found it just about every time with their quiet storm. A narcotic with no down side.

 Not that everything Cohen touches is mournful -- redemption, it seems, is always lurking around the corner, Jesus' image is frequently raised. But the overall tone is somber, serious, the antithesis of let-the-good-times-roll rock. Cohen -- the Eeyore of pop? -- is very much aware of this.

     "So happy that you stayed," he intoned before kicking off his second set alone with "Avalanche." He referenced the '60s thus: "There was a brief period of time a thousand years ago, 11 or 12 minutes called the '60s. It was a heady time. It has become a black hole and a Bermuda triangle of the cosmos. . . . It was a seductive moment, but being the gloomy chap that you know I am, I was able to miss it." Cohen's major contribution to '60s folk-pop was "Suzanne," which was popularized by Judy Collins and jumpstarted Cohen's career. Yes, it's romantic, but -- especially in Cohen's voice -- it's dour, too. He did it solo last night.

 Cohen the writer expresses some rage, or even nihilism, in songs such as "The Future," "First, We Take Manhattan" and "Democracy," but Cohen, the singer, is more meditative. His deep, craggy voice articulates the depths of the conflict; his backing singers, Julie Christensen and Perla Batalla, give him the most celestial of harmonic support. Individual songs were gentle carresses; the set itself a cerebral massage.

    Musically, there's nothing disruptive or edgy about his work; those elements come in the lyrics. Cohen's set had a consistent, mid-tempo flow.

 Cohen's lyrics were, of course, sharply tuned -- metaphors such as "Like a bird on a wire, like a drunk in the choir I have tried in my way to be free" just seem to roll off his tongue. And drink in this from "Closing Time," the regular set's closer: "We're lonely, we're romantic/and the cider's laced with acid/and the Holy Spirit's crying `Where's the beef?'/And the moon is swimming naked/and the summer night is fragrant/with a mighty expectation of relief."

 Cohen's backing group was tasty, ever on the mark, with flautist Paul Ostermayer especially stirring on the swooping "Waiting For the Miracle." Violinist Bob Kurbo added bittersweet textures. There was no showboating at all -- just a musicianly respect shared among the players and a debt of gratitude evinced by the man in the spotlight. A night of challenging music that was, yet, easy on the ears: One of the toughest tricks.

And my interview .... Cohen does not mind taking extreme positions in his songs. In 1966, he kissed off the memory of a tryst with Janis Joplin in "Chelsea Hotel." In 1993, he gives the politically correct brigade a jolt in "The Future," the title song of his 11th and latest album.

 Consider the climactic verse: "Give me back the Berlin Wall/give me Stalin and St. Paul/Give me Christ/or give me Hiroshima/Destroy another fetus now/We don't like children anyhow/I've seen the future, baby/it is murder."

 One might wince at the graphic imagery, turn away from the apocalyptic vision, or be angered by the apparent equation of abortion and murder.

 That's OK. If he wrote it, he stands by it.

 "What I find in writing," says Cohen,  "is that at the beginning of the process you try to support your opinions -- about the environment, about politics, about where you stand -- and I find that even though that may make you a good citizen, it makes for a very bad songwriter. You may get positions you can applaud, but they're boring, they're alibis. . . . If you think by saving the forest you're going to redeem your soul, you've got another thing coming. There's something else at stake. " `The Future' is dark and funny. If I'd have nailed that to the church door like Martin Luther it'd be a very sinister document. But it's married to a hot little dance track so, in a sense, the words melt into the music and the music melts into the words and you're left with a kind of refreshment, a kind of oxygen."

 But the lyrics are so raw, so bare.

 "My only regret is that they're not bare enough," Cohen interjects. "I hope if they give me a few more years, and a few more songs, it's going to get rawer and barer and more naked."

 Over the years, Cohen has written numerous songs that have probed the darker areas of relationships and explored the tangled nature of conflicted politics. He's never been anyone's idea of a joyride. He is somber-sounding, relentlessly downbeat. Yet, Cohen will offer occasional glimmers of light, hints at redemption. He's long been torn between cynicism and hope. At this juncture -- with a new, critically acclaimed album and a hip cachet among young rockers -- where does he find himself?

 "I think as you get older that broad base, the range, gets very, very wide," says Cohen. "You become more tolerant and more crotchety at the same time. More open and more critical. I think the confessional nature contracts at one end and opens at the other. You're willing to confess to yourself that you really do hate mankind, and, at another point, you're really willing to confess to yourself that you do feel a deep sense of fraternity with the whole human manifestation."

 This is the kind of worldly wisdom that's not often voiced by rock 'n' rollers. But, of course, Cohen only fits into the margins of the rock world.

The Montreal-born songwriter first came of note in the folk community during the mid-'60s. In 1967, Judy Collins covered his "Suzanne" and took it to the top of the pop charts. Cohen's career path has been checkered ever since. Huge success in Europe; a cult following in the States. Waves of praise for his writing and frequent snipes at his craggy, deep monotonic vocals.

 "I've got a very, very limited voice," says Cohen, no doubt weary of the topic but polite enough to answer the query. "I mean, I never presented myself as a singer."

 Cohen won't ever attempt a sweep into an upper register. But that's why harmony singers Julie Christensen and Perla Batalla are there. They provide the angelic chorus, the bittersweet buoyancy. Says Cohen: "I've always felt that between the two or three of us, or whatever it is, between that male and female sound, something more than male and female arises; some completion is manifested, something that sounds like a human sound. It seems to be working, and a lot of the reviewers are commenting upon the happy mixture of my voice, which goes nowhere, and their voices, which go everywhere."

 Cohen's recent music has a lush, chamber-rock feel: mannered, intricate, stately and often synthesizer-based -- yet imbued with a subtle edge via the lyrics.

 Cohen says that writing songs for "The Future" was, as usual, "the dismal process of trying to blacken a page, or trying to find a rhyme for orange -- that impossible goal. You're very much like a bear having stumbled into a honeycomb: You know there's honey around, but there's a million bees biting you and you're trying to get them out of your eyes and your ears and trying to taste the honey at the same time, and the whole thing is a disaster.

 "I hasten to say that the fact that I had to break my gonads over it doesn't mean that it's good. The fact that it takes so long is no guarantee of excellence. It just happens to be the way I work. I'm not smirking about it. I don't feel reproachful toward people who have the very good luck and great genius to do it faster. Hank Williams could do it in 20 minutes and so can Bob Dylan. It just happens to take me a long time."

 Cohen's music, dark and detailed, has found an audience among younger rockers who first were fans of Echo & the Bunnymen, Sisters of Mercy, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, R.E.M. and Joy Division. The bands followed a thread back to Cohen. A tribute-cover album called "I'm Your Fan," featuring some of the aforementioned acts, was released two years ago. Jennifer Warnes' Cohen cover album, "Famous Blue Raincoat," came out in 1986.

 Cohen says he felt honored. "I think there is an unbroken chain from one generation to another. I got it from somewhere and if you're able to pass it on . . . I think you have to stick to your guns. The young are very sensitive to `the sellout,' to corruption in the artists they admire. . . . I think they can see in my own work that -- {although} I had to pay for it with a couple of decades of obscurity -- there's something there: that a guy worked, that he was straight. I think it's as simple as that."

 Also, it is suggested, there's the fact that the guy in question never got complacent, that he remained on a quest for something intangible that might turn out to be unattainable.

 "That's what one is looking for," says Cohen, "the thing that one is not sure {about}. Just to keep looking at your compass and see that you haven't gotten too far off course. You're not quite sure where you're sailing, but you know where the sun is, you know where the moon is, and, somehow, there are a few landmarks and a few signs in the sky and you can kind of steer a course. Yeah, you go off and you go under and you go around, but you have a sense of what a journey is.

 "I think the only way I can describe my spiritual odyssey is to say that your memory gets better and you realize that things don't last forever -- the good ones or the bad ones. . . . Sometimes you feel at home in your skin and sometimes you don't."

 It's not at all doom and gloom, Cohen stresses. "Thirty years {after I started} and the New York press are still dredging up this gloomy stuff," he says, with a chuckle. "I've been to quite a few concerts and, really, I don't see as many laughs as I get at mine. I guess it's just the computer: They put in my name and up comes `gloom' and `melancholy.' "

 How long can Cohen keep pursuing his particular journey?

 "The devil laughs when you make plans," Cohen answers, "but, God willing, I'd like to keep hammering away. This little resurrection I am very happily undergoing has been a great relief and very refreshing -- both spiritually and financially. I'm not in a position to retire quite yet."

Tickets: Costly. Neil Young costly. $253.75-$75. Starts at 8.
 
270 Tremont St., 617-482-9393 www.citicenter.org