About “The Future”

The title track of the album The Future, released in 1992, this is one of Leonard Cohen’s darkest and most mysterious songs.

The ambiguous singer is describing a prophetic vision of a future — possibly a religious apocalypse based on the Judeo-Christian tradition and the Eastern concept of Moksha/Nirvana.

Realizing that the future is not to his liking, the singer asks for the world to be restored to its previous state, one of violence and separation.

This song is strongly related to other Leonard Cohen songs that touched on similar themes, most notably:

A detailed analysis of the song by Heidi Hochenedel can be found here.

From a 1993 interview on the “Bob Harriss Show”:

The Future is the song that the future cries, the future drew out of me. It’s not politics, it’s a kind of psycho-geo-politics that the future draws these exclamations out of me, out of my heart.

And in a 1992 interview:

It sounds like the situation that we have now and the attitudes that are taken there which are all extremist, which are all defensive in the extreme. Seem to be the mental landscape the people are strolling through today. There is no comfort at the center. In fact there is no center.

The song also features in the soundtrack to 1994 movie Natural Born Killers.