The Future

The Future is Cohen's ninth studio album and, at almost an hour, his longest to that date. After touring I'm Your Man he took a year off to help his son Adam recover from a serious car accident, and he began a relationship with the actress Rebecca De Mornay, who is among the credited producers. The album was made in a dozen or so studios in Montreal and Los Angeles with a choir, an orchestra and nearly thirty female singers. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the 1992 Los Angeles riots happened while he was writing it.

Songwriting was slow. The title track was first called If You Could See What's Coming Next, Closing Time took two years, and Cohen said Anthem took a decade. He wrote 60 verses for Democracy. The album includes two covers, Irving Berlin's Always and Frederick Knight's Be for Real, and Tacoma Trailer, the first instrumental on one of his studio albums. Waiting for the Miracle was co-written with Sharon Robinson. Anthem, The Future and Waiting for the Miracle were used in the 1994 film Natural Born Killers.

It reached number 36 in Britain and went gold, platinum and double platinum in Canada, and sold a quarter of a million copies in the United States. Cohen won the Juno for Best Male Vocalist in 1993, and the video for Closing Time won the Juno for Best Music Video. Rolling Stone's Christian Wright called the album epic, and Pitchfork's Marc Hogan later called it the zaniest, the most overstuffed and the most clairvoyant of his records.