Dear Heather

Dear Heather is Cohen's eleventh studio album, dedicated to the memory of Jack McClelland. He had wanted to call it Old Ideas but feared fans would take it for a compilation. It mixes his own songs with settings of poems by Lord Byron and F. R. Scott and with spoken pieces. Villanelle for Our Time was recorded on 6 May 1999, soon after his return from Mt. Baldy, and The Faith is an outtake from the Recent Songs sessions with new lyrics. The closing Tennessee Waltz was recorded live on 9 July 1985 at the Montreux Jazz Festival. On That Day is about the attacks of 11 September 2001. Sharon Robinson and Anjani Thomas worked with him on the record.

It reached number 131 on the Billboard 200, his best American showing since Songs from a Room in 1969, and number 5 in Canada and number 1 in Poland. Michaelangelo Matos of Rolling Stone called him Canada's hippest 70-year-old, while other critics found it dour.