MUMBAI: Billboard and The Guardian have released exclusive details on Leonard Cohen's new album ‘Popular Problems'. The Grammy Award winner has one again collaborated with Patrick Leonard, who is known for shaping Madonna's work in the 80s, on his new album. The two have co-written eight out of the nine tracks on the new album, as opposed to the last time where they wrote only three songs together.

Of the songs in the album, the 'Hallelujah' singer said that, some of the songs on the new record came together at "shockingly alarming speed". This is unusual, Cohen said, because most of the time, a song will only "yield itself if you stick with it long enough and you have got to stick with it for a very long time". For example, the song titled ‘A Street' had been in progress soon after 9/11. ‘Born in Chains', the one song he wrote solo had been in the works for about 40 years. By contrast, the songs ‘You Got Me Singing' and ‘Did I Ever Love You' were written "very quickly," he said. "I have rewritten it many times to accommodate a change in my theological position," said Cohen. "The chords kind of interest me and we came up with this pure gospel version. It is the one song on the album I am not 100 per cent behind. I did not nail it, but I have got a thumbtack in it."

Cohen attributed his usual lengthy breaks between albums to "an addiction to perfection and partly sheer laziness." "I have said it before - being a songwriter is like being a nun: you're married to a mystery," Cohen said. "My methods are obscure and not to be replicated. A song will yield itself if you stick with it long enough. But you have got to stick with it for a very long time."

"It was a very agreeable collaboration because of an absence of ego and an abundance of musical ideas on Patrick's part," Cohen previously said in an interview with Grammy Museum, Executive Director, Bob Santelli. "I would have a rhythm in mind and a position" on tempo and accompaniment, Cohen noted. "I had the function of the veto. Most of the musical ideas were Patrick's, with a bit of modifications. Whether there were horns or violin, all of those things were decided mutually."