Thank you for buying this record. What follows is its documentation: the pressing identified, the matrix / runout transcribed by hand from the dead wax, and the condition as assessed before it was listed. It is yours to keep with the record.

— Paul, Vinyl Curator

Leonard Cohen

You Want It Darker

2016 · Columbia 88985365071 / C-176553 · Stereo · US · LP · 33 1/3 RPM

Pressing details

Label	Columbia
Catalogue number	88985365071 / C-176553
Year	2016
Mono / Stereo	Stereo
Country	US
Format	LP
Speed	33 1/3 RPM
Genre	Folk Rock / Singer-Songwriter
Producer	Adam Cohen; Leonard Cohen and Patrick Leonard (co-producers, uncredited on the back cover's "Produced By" line)
Conductor	Roï Azoulay (choir conductor, "You Want It Darker")
Performer / Orchestra	Congregation Shaar Hashomayim Synagogue Choir (uncredited on the jacket as a performing credit)
Musicians	Leonard Cohen (vocals), Patrick Leonard (keyboards, bass, guitars), Neil Larsen (B3 organ), Michael Chaves (keyboards, engineer), Rob Humphreys (drums); uncredited on the jacket: Cantor Gideon Y. Zelermyer (solo vocal, "You Want It Darker"), Congregation Shaar Hashomayim Synagogue Choir (choir, "You Want It Darker"), Roï Azoulay (choir conductor)

Matrix / Runout

Side A:  AL88985365071 26790.1(3) BG
Side B:  BL88985365071 26765.2(3) BG

Condition

Cover: NM
Vinyl: NM

Variant chronology

2016 - US Columbia black-vinyl LP, standard stereo issue, Sony-era box-eye labels  <- this copy
2016 - US Columbia limited-edition white vinyl LP (Barnes & Noble exclusive)
2016 onward - 180-gram audiophile/import reissue vinyl LP

This Pressing

2016 US Columbia stereo pressing, standard black-vinyl issue of the album's first LP run - box-eye Sony-era labels with 2016 copyright lines.

The Album

You Want It Darker is Leonard Cohen's fourteenth and final studio album, written and largely recorded at his home in Los Angeles while he was in failing health, and released just weeks before his death in November 2016. The record continues the spare, incantatory songwriting of his late-career trilogy with producer and co-writer Patrick Leonard, built around Cohen's deep spoken-sung baritone set against hushed keyboards, strings and choir rather than full-band arrangement. The title track folds in a cantor and a synagogue choir, turning Cohen's lifelong engagement with Jewish liturgy and prayer into an explicit farewell meditation on mortality and surrender. Elsewhere the album revisits recurring Cohen themes of love, faith, and reckoning with age and death, delivered with unusual directness for an artist long associated with elliptical imagery. Critics received the album as a stark, unflinching final statement, frequently ranking it among the strongest work of his career and a fitting capstone to a songwriting life devoted to confronting large questions in plain language. Its release amid his declining health and death shortly after cemented its status as a deliberate and clear-eyed artistic farewell, discussed ever since as one of the most moving closing statements in popular song.

Tracklist

Side 1

1. You Want It Darker
2. Treaty
3. On The Level
4. Leaving The Table
5. If I Didn't Have Your Love

Side 2

6. Traveling Light
7. It Seemed The Better Way
8. Steer Your Way
9. String Reprise / Treaty

The Label

The side labels show a grey/taupe photographic ground with cream and white print and the boxed Columbia "eye" logo set beside the spindle hole, the rim carrying the 2016 Sony Music Entertainment and Old Ideas, LLC copyright lines, the Columbia trademark notice, and the catalogue numbers 88985365071 and C-176553 with the speed and channel marking "33 1/3 RPM STEREO." This is the Sony Music Entertainment-era Columbia box-eye design used across the label's catalogue from 1991 onward, so the design itself only confirms a post-1991 pressing. The label's own 2016 copyright lines fix this copy to the album's release year window and place it among the first group of Columbia LP pressings of the title, with the audiophile 180-gram reissues and the limited colored-vinyl variants standing apart from it.

Fidelity

The album was mastered at Marcussen Mastering and plated at Record Technology Incorporated, a combination well regarded among collectors for its clean, well-balanced vinyl cuts of modern major-label releases. Collectors on the forums generally rate this standard black-vinyl pressing as a solid, quiet-sounding standard edition, with the limited colored-vinyl and 180-gram variants prized mainly for their rarity and packaging rather than for any meaningfully superior cut. There is no audiophile remaster of this title from a specialist reissue series, so this pressing and the contemporaneous 180-gram vinyl issues represent the full range of the album's fidelity options.

Notes

This is a 2016 Columbia LP of You Want It Darker in its standard US stereo configuration. The side labels carry 2016 Sony Music Entertainment and Old Ideas, LLC copyright lines, dating the pressing to 2016 or later. The catalogue number and matrix/mastering codes stamped in the runout are consistent with this US stereo LP pressing, with no club, promo, or colored-vinyl markings present on the labels.

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